Room Temperature Arrives on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD November 24

Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley's Room Temperature reaches VOD, Blu-ray and DVD on November 24 through the distributor Altered Innocence, ending a run on the festival circuit that began with its premiere last year and included a New York premiere last fall. A trailer has now debuted ahead of the release, offering the widest look yet at a film that John Waters named among his favorites and called "weird, creepy, and maybe… just maybe, great."

The film is a family drama that turns into a ghost story. According to the official synopsis, every Halloween a family living in the barren sprawl of the California desert transforms their home into a DIY haunted house attraction for the neighborhood. What used to be a group effort has increasingly become the dad's obsessive fantasy, one that his family is expected to enact. The synopsis describes the result as "hilarious, uncomfortable, and deeply strange," calling Room Temperature "haunted-house cinema as poetic autopsy, a slow, disquieting meditation on control, longing, and the fantasies we force onto others."

Who made the film?

Room Temperature pairs novelist Dennis Cooper with visual artist Zac Farley. Cooper is the author of The George Miles Cycle and The Sluts; Farley directed Permanent Green Light. The two team up once more here, continuing a working relationship that has made their collaborations fixtures on the festival circuit since this film premiered last year.

What does Cooper say about the film's approach to fear?

Speaking ahead of the New York premiere last fall, Cooper explained that the filmmakers deliberately avoided conventional horror mechanics. "The whole idea was not to make things scary––it was to present the mechanics of what would be scary," he said.

He described the film's structure as a false start. "No one seems even remotely scared in the film. They're all kind of bemused at most. The film has this false start: at the beginning you see the house, and it's playing this crazy music, and the lights are going on and off, and it looks like it's going to be really scary. But then by the time he actually gets inside the house, it just turns out to be a really shitty haunted house."

That description matches the film's larger concern, laid out in its synopsis: not the fright itself but the control behind it, and the fantasies one person forces onto others.

What does this change for audiences?

Until now, Room Temperature has been visible mainly to festivalgoers and to readers of year-end lists, where Waters's endorsement placed it alongside his top films of 2025. The November 24 release changes that. Viewers can pre-order the Blu-ray, DVD and digital editions through Altered Innocence, and the trailer gives the first broad preview of a film that has spent more than a year circulating by reputation alone.

For a film built on a father's manufactured haunted house, the home-video format is a fitting destination. Audiences will finally decide whether Waters's hedged verdict — weird, creepy, maybe great — holds in their own living rooms.