Directed by Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley, ROOM TEMPERATURE is haunted-house cinema as poetic autopsy and one of John Waters' top 10 films of 2025!

Room Temperature transforms a family Halloween tradition into an unsettling examination of obsession, control, and the private fantasies people impose upon those closest to them. Every Halloween, a family living amid the barren sprawl of the California desert turns its home into an elaborate haunted-house attraction for the neighborhood. What once functioned as a shared family project, however, has gradually become the father's consuming personal vision, with the rest of the household increasingly expected to participate in a fantasy that belongs primarily to him.

Directors Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley approach this unusual domestic ritual with a mixture of deadpan humor, discomfort, and creeping unease. Rather than functioning as a conventional haunted-house horror film, Room Temperature uses the construction and performance of the attraction as the framework for a slow, strange meditation on family dynamics, creative obsession, longing, and control. The artificial horrors created inside the home begin to reflect more complicated tensions among the people responsible for bringing them to life, blurring the boundary between playful theatricality and something considerably more disturbing.

The film reunites novelist Dennis Cooper, author of The George Miles Cycle and The Sluts, with visual artist Zac Farley, continuing the filmmaking partnership behind Permanent Green Light and Like Cattle Towards Glow. Their distinctive approach turns the Southern California desert into an uncanny landscape while finding both humor and melancholy in the lives of outsiders. The result earned Room Temperature a place among John Waters' Top 10 Films of 2025; Waters called it 'weird, creepy, and maybe ... just maybe, great.' The film was also an official selection of Frameline, the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

This DVD edition includes deleted scenes and a particularly unusual companion piece: a walkthrough of a 'home haunt' video game created by Cooper, Farley, writer Sabrina Tarasoff, composer Puce Mary, and 3D design company partyTime.jpeg. The game was exhibited once, on Halloween 2021, at the Pinault Collection in Paris. Additional supplements include the U.S. trailer and other trailers, while the feature is presented with English 5.1 Dolby Digital audio, English SDH and Spanish subtitles, and region-free playback.

Bonus Materials

• Deleted Scenes
• Video Game Walkthrough - A ‘home haunt’ video game walkthrough created by Cooper, Farley, writer Sabrina Tarasoff, composer Puce Mary and 3D design company partyTime.jpeg. It was shown once on Halloween 2021 at the Pinault Collection in Paris
• U.S. Trailer
• Other Trailers
• English Language 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio
• English SDH & Spanish Subtitles
• Region-Free

 

Cast & Crew

Actors:

•       Charlie Nelson Jacobs
•       John Williams
•       Chris Olsen
•       Ange Dargent
•       Stanya Kahn
•       Virginia Adams

Director: Dennis Cooper

Director: Zac Farley

Additional Details

Label: Altered Innocence

Genre: Gay/Lesbian

Language: English

Run Time: 92 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 11/10/26

UPC: 792671059103