Beneath

BENEATH
(2013, 90 mins, color, Red Epic, dir. Larry Fessenden)

“ONE OF THE TOP 13 MOVIES OF THE YEAR
Easily Fessenden’s best film in my opinion.”
Jerry Smith, ICONS OF FRIGHT

“ONE OF THE TOP 10 MOVIES OF THE YEAR
Fessenden's best, most commercially accessible movie to date.”
Rob G, ICONS OF FRIGHT

“ONE OF THE TOP 13 MOVIES OF THE YEAR
This film takes a hatchet to surface level friendships and has by far
my favorite death scene of the year, ripped from the Hitchcock playbook.”
Elrik Kanes, ICONS OF FRIGHT

“A BRIGHT SPOT IN 2013... Lovingly crafted”
Ed Martin, MEDIA POST

"a weirdly personal and thoughtful generic exercise...
you can see Fessenden's love for such horror classics as "Night of the Living Dead",
even though the arguments that his protags have aren't about race or class inequality, but who's screwed whom...
These kids are ugly, but they're believable... It might be Fessenden's most accessible film...
Fessenden is once again insisting that there's so much more to horror films than banal characterizations and programmatic jump-scares.
Ultimately, "Beneath" is better than your average Roger Corman clone because it is more serious than trivial."
Simon Abrams, ROGEREBERT.COM

"the lake itself takes on allegorical dimensions,
the survivors trapped in an amoral purgatory of their own making
in which virtually all allegiances fade in favor of cold, Darwinian logic...
lends a dreamlike quality to the narrative that elevates its plot to an abstract level...
With its reliance on ambiguity and mood, "Beneath" applies lo-fi aesthetics to an eerie, isolated chamber drama...
In "Beneath," the people are ultimately as depraved as their aquatic attacker... "
Eric Kohn,, INDIEWIRE

"a gleefully dire portrayal of human selfishness"
Sam Adams, TIME OUT NY

"Fessenden comes across as more of a budget auteur using horror traditions to tell a story
about the complete failure of the human race. The characters' only ambition is to "get outta here."
As far as I can tell, "here" is earth and they never do, never will."
Dylan Sharp, TWITCH

directed by Larry Fessenden, who never metaphor he didn’t like....
what makes BENEATH distinctive is the way Fessenden twists Tony Daniel and Brian D. Smith’s script into a kind of horrific morality play
Michael Gingold, FANGORIA

"works as an old school, "late night" or "regional" monster movie...
I was mostly just happy to watch a monster movie that was taken seriously."
HORROR-MOVIE-A-DAY

"This micro-budget horror film has some very interesting things to say about
how and when the characters die, but revealing them would spoil all of the fun."
SMELLS LIKE SCREEN SPIRIT

"breathtakingly beautiful at times, with compositions and color tones that resemble a high-class fashion-magazine layout circa 1965.
Fessenden and cinematographer Gordon Arkenberg make good use of their limited setting,
moving the camera smoothly around the lake and the boat, always emphasizing just how far these kids are from safety...
There are striking images scattered throughout Beneath: a strangled corpse, a sinking camera,
a bloody hand reflected on the surface of the water, and more.
What links those images is that they all involve the characters after they’re dead, when they can whine and preen no more."
Noel Murray, THE DISSOLVE

"every inch the work of a dedicated geek, a proudly lowbrow, low-budget monster movie
that sees nothing wrong with the cheap-and-dirty shortcuts of yesteryear...
a true believer in genre film traditions and in the creative modesty that piddling resources demand.
He plays his movie straight, but doesn't take it seriously—every glimpse of the sawtoothed über-bass,
which is fabulously, defiantly, hilariously analog, comes off as a salute to the Creature From the Black Lagoon.
Beneath may be an earnest goof, but any intended irony is so spiked with rainy-day-matinee movie love
that the result is an oddly guileless horror exercise, unscary but rather adorable."
Michael Atkinson VILLAGE VOICE

"among the most thoughtful genre films of the year and certainly among the best American horror films for quite awhile."
Scout Tafoya, PUNKEINFILM

When a group of young friends
commemorating their high school graduation take a trip to the remote Black Lake,
their celebration turns into a nightmare with the sudden appearance of a relentless menace from beneath.
Stuck in a leaking boat with no oars, the teens face the ultimate tests of
friendship and sacrifice during a terror-stricken fight for survival.

CHILLER FILMS presents a GLASS EYE PIX production ”BENEATH” in association with OFFHOLLYWOOD PICTURES
DANIEL ZOVATTO BONNIE DENNISON CHRIS CONROY JONNY ORSINI GRIFFIN NEWMAN with MACKENZIE ROSMAN and MARK MARGOLIS
casting director LOIS DRABKIN, CSA production design TANIA BIJLANI
costume design ELISABETH VASTOLA director of photography GORDON ARKENBERG
special makeup effects BRIAN SPEARS creature effects FRACTURED FX visual effects NEAL JONAS
original score WILL BATES sound design GRAHAM REZNICK sound mix TOM EFINGER
executive producers THOMAS P. VITALE SHANE O’BRIEN JUSTIN SMITH
writers TONY DANIEL BRIAN D. SMITH producers LARRY FESSENDEN PETER PHOK
director & editor LARRY FESSENDEN

WhatThe Zeke? | What's in Black Lake

BENEATH | cast | crew | notes | press | comic | score | trailer | press kit | BENEATHTHEWATER.COM