Room Temperature
Room Temperature
Room Temperature
A film by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley
(Duration: 1h33)
Screening followed by a discussion between the directors and Théo Casciani
As they do every year for Halloween, a family transforms their property into a haunted house. The father is determined to make the attraction as terrifying as possible, whatever the consequences.
In addition to his film collaborations with Zac Farley, Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is known for cult novels such as the five-part series The George Miles Cycle (1989–2000), The Sluts (2008), The Marbled Swarm (2014) and I Wished (2021). He has also written extensively on art, film, music and literature, and has been a Contributing Editor for Artforum since the late 1990s. After moving from Los Angeles to Paris in 2005, he wrote nine plays for the director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne.
Zac Farley (born 1988) is a Franco-American artist and filmmaker who studied at the California Institute of the Arts and Northwestern University. He co-directed Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015), Permanent Green Light (2018) and Room Temperature (2025), films that have been screened at numerous festivals. He has collaborated with Gisèle Vienne on the Kerstin Kraus project, as well as with Sabrina Tarasoff and Dennis Cooper on a virtual reality haunted house video game presented at the Collection Pinault in Paris in October 2022. He lives in Paris.
Théo Casciani (born in 1995) is a writer. He studied the humanities at Sciences Po and mathematics at the Sorbonne in Paris, before joining La Cambre in Brussels, where he now teaches. Rétine, his first novel, was published by Éditions P.O.L in 2019. His fiction, translated into several languages, has been presented in various forms in France and abroad, notably by the Centre Pompidou, Montez Press, the Fondation Beyeler, Sadie Coles, Spazio Maiocchi and the Louvre Museum. His second novel, Insula, published in January 2026, was awarded the Prix La Perle.
Presented by the Master’s programme in Texts and Literary Creation
Logline
One night every year a family transforms their home and yard into a haunted house and invite their neighbors to walk through it. What used to be a group effort has increasingly become the dad’s obsessive fantasy that his family is expected to enact.
Description
Set against the barren sprawl of the California desert, Room Temperature follows a family’s annual tradition of transforming their home into a DIY haunted house—an increasingly unhinged ritual now hijacked by the father’s obsessive vision.
Rejecting the tropes of traditional horror while steeped in its atmosphere, Room Temperature builds its haunted house from plywood, grief, and quiet despair. The cast, comprised of artists, non-actors, and one possibly spectral French teen known only as “Extra,” wanders through the film like costumed ghosts in a stage set they didn’t design. Shot in muted tones and marked by deadpan performances and disorienting emotional shifts, the film lingers in the liminal space between artifice and collapse.
Hilarious, uncomfortable, and deeply strange, this is haunted-house cinema as poetic autopsy, a slow, disquieting meditation on control, longing, and the fantasies we force onto others.
Cast
Andre: Charlie Nelson Jacobs
Dad: John Williams
Paul: Chris Olsen
Extra: Ange Dargent
Beatrice: Stanya Kahn
Marguerite: Virginia Adams
Crew
A Film By: Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley
Producers: Stefan Kalmár, Raoul Klooker, Nicolas Brevière, Luka Fisher, Charles De Meaux
Produced By: Marcus Chang, Cara Braglia
Director of Photography: Yaroslav Golovkin
Production Design: Kristen Dempsey
Wardrobe & Costumes: Edwin Mohney
Score: Puce Mary