Room Temperature

“We’ve both been fascinated by haunted houses for many years. As a young teenager, Dennis built and hosted a haunted house in the basement of his family home every year on Halloween. We’ve made annual trips at Halloween to Southern California, where haunted houses are most popular, visiting and studying hundreds of examples. With ROOM TEMPERATURE, we believe we have finally found a concept, form, and story to articulate the haunted house’s unique appeal within a film in a complex and original way. Our intention is to not only represent such a place physically but also to translate its physical limitations and strengths into our film’s forward motion. Just as a home’s simple layout and architecture necessitate that 'haunt' makers employ ingenuity, unpredictability, and creativity to build suspense and interest, the unfolding of our film’s narrative and trajectory has a similarly wandering but very focused and riveting maze-like construction.

Our film uses that quality and trajectory as the informing structure for its narrative and form. ROOM TEMPERATURE is both about its characters, the world in which they live, and about the fantasy personas and world they are trying to replace their lives and selves with.”