ALEX HURT, ADDISON TIMLIN, MOTELL GYN FOSTER, JOSEPH CASTILLO-MIDYETT, ELLA RAE PECK, RIGO GARAY, JOHN SPEREDAKOS, MICHAEL BUSCEMI, JEREMY HOLM, JOE SWANBERG, BARBARA CRAMPTON, JAMES LE GROS, MARSHALL BELL
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A Fine Arts painter is convinced that he is a werewolf wreaking havoc on a small American town under the full moon.
Larry Fessenden has a long and storied history with classic monsters. Habit (1995) – probably his masterpiece – is perhaps the finest film to use vampirism as a metaphor for addiction, as a hopeless alcoholic (played by Fessenden himself) falls under the thrall of an enigmatic bloodsucker amongst the neon and noise of ’90s New York. Just a few years ago, he put his inimitable spin on Frankenstein’s monster in Depraved (2019), which deftly mixes pathos with politics in a film simultaneously about losing one’s sense of self and the irrevocably broken American healthcare system. It’s no secret that the multi-hyphenate filmmaker has long wanted to complete a monster trilogy of sorts by turning his hand to a werewolf story – a lycanthropic dream he has finally realised with Blackout, an adaptation of his Tales from Beyond the Pale episode of the same name (2019). And it was worth the wait; Fessenden’s tale of a cursed man trying to make peace with a crumbling world stands as one of the finest werewolf movies of the twenty-first century. Our Culture reviews the film here as part of its selection from the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival.
It’s clear from the very beginning of Blackout that Larry Fessenden possesses a deep love for classic werewolf movies. This is, in many senses, a fairly traditional tale of lycanthropy in the vein of The Wolf Man (1941), a film for which the filmmaker evidently has great affection; the action takes place in Talbot Falls, a small town in Upstate New York named for Lon Chaney Jr’s tragic werewolf (and Chaney Jr himself is namechecked later in the movie). There, we find artist Charley Barrett (Alex Hunt), who has contracted the werewolf’s curse before the film even begins. Struggling with his newfound affliction, reeling from his father’s death and recently separated from his partner Sharon (Addison Timlin), he has picked up an old drinking habit and is spiralling out of control. Though he keeps talking of “leaving town,” he is driven to stay by the deep injustices he sees in Talbot Falls. He is particularly enraged by Sharon’s father, Hammond (Marshall Bell), a property developer who is causing untold environmental damage and exploiting migrant workers in the process of building a luxury tourist resort. Worse, Hammond is stirring up hatred against a group of his ex-employees by suggesting that one of their number, Miguel (Rigo Garay), is likely responsible for a spate of grisly murders that have been committed in the town – murders that Charley knows that he himself is probably responsible for.
In some respects, then, Blackout feels like the meeting of The Wolf Man and Habit. The Wolf Man is, essentially, the story of a man incapable of suppressing the monster inside himself – or the “beast within,” to use a phrase often associated with werewolf fiction – and here Fessenden uses that theme to comment on the self-loathing that often comes with alcoholism (hence the film’s title). Like Sam in Fessenden’s vampire film, Charley drinks because he can’t bare the weight of a lifetime of trauma, and the symptoms of werewolfism he experiences – memory loss, fits of unbridled rage, a total lack of self control once the monster takes hold – all function as metaphors for sinking ever deeper into the bottle. And, of course, when Charley isn’t under the influence of the wolf (or, in other words, when he sobers up), he simply can’t live with the terrible things he has done.
Charley has only one outlet for his anguish: his art. Not coincidentally, that is something he has in common with Fessenden, who has always been a political filmmaker. Much like Depraved, Blackout is a very personal, intimate story – but one that also has much bigger things to say. This is not just a werewolf tale about the “beast within” but the “beast without”; after all, Charley might be disgusted with himself, but he is also deeply disgusted by all of the ugliness he sees in his community, chiefly racism, ruthless individualism, unchecked greed and a total lack of care for nature. In this regard, Blackout shares themes with several other Fessenden movies from No Telling (1991) to The Last Winter (2006), but it also draws on a particularly political strand of werewolf horror in which insatiable beasts lurk in small-town America. See Silver Bullet (1985), for example, in which a werewolf priest feeds on his flock, or Late Phases (2014) – another film produced by Fessenden’s production company, Glass Eye Pix – in which a retired veteran finds a werewolf lurking in a retirement community.
However, both Silver Bullet and Late Phases are set in essentially conservative communities; Blackout, on the other hand, takes place in an ostensibly liberal town in Upstate New York. So this is a thoroughly contemporary werewolf movie that skewers the lycanthropic nature of modern America, in which partisan politics are basically meaningless and even the “good guys” are indistinguishable from the “bad guys” beneath their masks of civility. Just as Charley turns into a ferocious beast on the three nights surrounding a full moon, it doesn’t take much for the people of Talbot Falls to start tearing each other to pieces. And Blackout makes clear that, long before a werewolf entered their midst, the members of this seemingly idyllic, liberal community have been turning a blind eye to wanton corruption, environmental devastation and worker exploitation simply because it benefits them financially.
Driven by an excellent central performance by Alex Hurt (aided by frequent Fessenden collaborators such as Barbara Crampton, Joe Swanberg, John Speredakos and James Le Gros in scene-stealing supporting roles), Blackout thus emerges as one of the most intelligent and interesting werewolf movies of the twenty-first century. It’s also a pleasingly retro one; there’s a clear love here for the wolf men of pre-1980s cinema, with Brian Spears’s special make-up effects recalling the hirsute horrors of not just The Wolf Man but Werewolf of London (1935), The Werewolf (1956) and Moon of the Wolf (1972). Not since Rick Baker’s minimalist work on Wolf (1994) has there been such a satisfying return to the classic “wolf man” look pioneered by Jack Pierce; the special effects particularly shine during the film’s all-important transformation sequence (which does not disappoint despite the film’s low budget). All in all, Fessenden’s werewolf movie was more than worth waiting for.
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Writer-director Larry Fessenden is one of the brightest and best minds in the indie horror scene, and he proves it once again with this werewolf feature about a down-on-his-luck painter (Alex Hurt) who regularly transforms into a murderous beast that roams the night. As with so much of Fessenden’s work, what makes Blackout great is his ability to play gleefully with horror tropes while also inserting plenty of indie drama character work into the mix. When that mix is working, Blackout becomes a compelling and haunting drama about a man trying to atone for his own beastly nature in a monstrous world, and the inventive werewolf kills are just gravy.
Review: ‘Blackout,’ a new take on one of horror’s oldest myths, is claws for celebration
Hard-drinking artist and itinerant contractor Charley (Alex Hurt) hasn’t been much of a morning person of late. Recalling the previous night’s events is a problem for him. But since Charley is the protagonist of a Larry Fessenden horror film, “Blackout,” he’s also been waking up half-naked in the woods and some of the splotches on his torn clothes are clearly blood.
Already a sensitive sort, bitterly consumed with the economic, environmental and societal direction of his small town, Charley is also processing the death of his father — this in addition to grappling with the fact that he may be a hairy creature with an after-hours body count. It’s the kind of dilemma that doesn’t exactly help one’s sense of helplessness.
Fessenden has long been a cult-horror mainstay as producer, director, writer and actor. He’s no stranger to the alchemy of woolly terror and human anguish, on budgets that favor ragged immediacy over slick, empty shocks. The appealingly scrappy and thoughtful “Blackout” continues an ongoing project to put a modern spin on the legendary figures of horror cinema, from using vampires to explore urban love addiction (“Habit”), to reworking the Frankenstein myth as a PTSD saga (2019’s “Depraved”).
With his new film, set in sleepy upstate New York, Fessenden is in werewolf territory first prowled by Lon Chaney Jr. in 1941’s “The Wolf Man” and expressed here as a beastly torment affecting both its lead character and a divided America. Charley may be the only character enduring a physical conversion every night when the moon is full, but in a town like the winkingly named Talbot Falls (the old Chaney character’s surname), triggering a depressed community’s dangerously nasty id isn’t difficult, especially when everyone’s freaked out about a sudden rash of mysterious killings (one of which opens the film as a monster-POV shot approaches a couple in a field having sex).
A rapacious real estate developer named Hammond (Marshall Bell), his valuable resort project suddenly in jeopardy, channels local suspicions toward a migrant contractor named Miguel (Rigo Garay), despite there being no evidence tying him to the murders. Charley, whose caring ex-girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) is Hammond’s daughter, would love nothing more than to expose him and save his beloved liberal hamlet’s imperiled soul. But there’s the inconvenient hypocrisy of his own nocturnal havoc to deal with, which is where Fessenden’s update — more talky than bloody, and still plenty bloody — carves out its own moral seriousness about the monsters inside all of us.
Externally, Fessenden delivers some old-fashioned verve to Charley’s handful of transformations: punchy editing, harsh sound, freaky practical effects and Hurt’s physical, raging-drunk abandon under garish mask work. In all his other scenes, the actor is a sympathetically doomed presence, as if on a goodbye tour of his normal self as he toggles between righteousness and guilt. In an eerily sad close-to-home touch, Charley’s deceased lawyer dad — spotted in photos among his effects — is the actor’s own late father, William Hurt. In Fessenden’s handling, it almost counts as a ghostly cameo.
Not everything about the DIY aura of “Blackout” is effective and the pace can slow to a heavy lope as Fessenden’s screenplay takes on too much meat (Charley’s anguished painting doesn’t work) and too many characters, even if some of them are career colleagues of indie renown: James Le Gros, Barbara Crampton, Kevin Corrigan, John Speredakos and Joe Swanberg. Yet the idiosyncratic earnestness of an experienced horrormeister playing with the classics still makes for a substantial midnight snack.
Fantasia Film Festival 2023: Larry Fessenden’s BLACKOUT is a Treat for Werewolf Fans Everywhere
Werewolf fans rejoice! Fantasia 2023 hosted the premiere of the new film from horror legend Larry Fessenden and it is not to be missed. Blackout brings all of the blood, fangs and carnage that you want out of a werewolf film, while also incorporating the thoughtful contemplation and real-world connection that Fessenden is known for. Much like his early film Habit, Blackout fixes its eye on a mainstay of horror cinema and finds a way to remix the genre staples while at the same time adding his own fingerprints to the narrative.
As the film opens, Charley (Alex Hurt) is checking out of the small motel that has been his temporary home for several weeks. He is in the middle of a separation from his wife Sharon (Addison Timlin) and everything else in his life seems to be at a point of change. We follow along as Charley meets up with several friends and seems to be putting things to bed. He is wrapping up loose ends, setting a few things into motion, and trying to make a clean break “before he goes.” Where, is a mystery. Charley has the air of a man putting his affairs in order, but is cryptic about his motivations and master plan.
As Charley goes about his day, we begin to meet the fellow residents of the small, upstate New York town they all call home. Talbot Falls (clever wink there) is very much every small American town, complete with its darker side. A number of vicious murders have terrorized the community in recent months. Local businessman and self-proclaimed leader of the town, Hammond (played masterfully by Marshall Bell), has singled out Latino resident Miguel (Rigo Garay) as the culprit (partially due to his proximity to one of the attacks, but also due to blatant racism). Eventually, Charley’s errands take him to meet his good friend Earl (Motell Gyn Foster) and the whole story comes out. Charley is a werewolf and is responsible for the attacks across town. He has no memory of what he has done or how he came to be this monster, but he knows that he cannot continue to roam free. He has a plan to put everything to rest, once and for all, and hopefully leave the town in a better place in the process.
Talbot Falls really is the quintessential American town. People there have known one another for years, they enjoy the tranquility of their small community, and that community is being corrupted right under their noses. Hammond is a developer who was recently granted permits to build a resort. The project has divided the residents of Talbot Falls, but ultimately, money won and Hammond got his way. And now he is fighting to preserve everything that he has. He is the kind of man who is only out for his own gain and will run over everyone else who stands in his way, all while declaring that everything that he is doing is being done for the good of the community.
He mentions more than once that he wants the town to “get back on track.” He is frustrated with recent changes and events – particularly the arrival of the Latinx population into the little hamlet that he lords over. He wants to see his town returned to the perfect place that exists only in his memory. Because again, like every American small town, that perfect version never existed. But people still remember it fondly and will fight to see it “returned,” no matter who gets hurt in the process.
Fessenden uses this cultural friction as a solid framework over which to build his monster movie. It gives the story a relatable and somewhat sad backdrop for the events that will transpire, and integrates them perfectly into the things that Charley gets up to when the moon is full. Like most of Fessenden’s films, Blackout utilizes a minimalistic approach to its supernatural elements, grounding them in reality and really giving us something that looks and feels unique.
The effects are fantastic. The look of the werewolf takes a lot from Universal’s monster cycle and is more of a wolfman than an actual wolf. It’s incredible and something that isn’t often embraced in modern genre films. And the way Fessenden reveals the creature to the audience is extremely effective. He takes his time, giving us some fangs, some claws, and plenty of POV shots before finally revealing the full scope of the creature. Wolfman Charley is something to behold, and Hurt does an amazing job in bringing him to life in a way that separates him from the fully human Charley that we get to know over the first chunk of the film. He brings in a lot of differences in posture and movement that make it clear that when this side of Charley takes over, it is fully in control. The Charley that we have gotten to know is gone for the time being.
There is a sadness at the heart of this film that I love, and that really spoke to me. Some of the best werewolf movies have a sense of tragedy at their core. Because in these films, Lycanthropy is something that is inflicted upon innocents. Characters like Charley have no control and are at the mercy of the beast that now resides within them. They didn’t ask for this and they don’t want it. They hurt other people and ultimately, must make a personal sacrifice in order to set things right. That melancholy is something that is present throughout here, as Charley makes his preparations and tries to close this chapter on the best terms possible.
Blackout is a fantastic film. The story is solid, the characters are well-realized and believable and the werewolf moments are positively brutal. Corruption in a small town and the story of a man trying to set things right before he is taken by the full moon. If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will.
Larry Fessenden’s Blackout is a testament to the director’s unrivalled ability to breathe new life into classic horror themes, while weaving them into a larger theme of societal reflection. Premiering at the Fantasia 2023 International Film Festival, which our media covered virtually this year, this nuanced werewolf tale transcends genre conventions, offering a stimulating and emotional experience that unfolds over the course of a deeply captivating narrative.
The film introduces us to Talbot Falls, a small town steeped in history and haunted by the shadows of its past. Larry Fessenden carefully establishes the town as a microcosm, a reflection of the larger social and political landscape. In this context, the werewolf myth occupies a central place, but instead of succumbing to cliché, Larry Fessenden uses it as a vessel to explore the complex interplay between personal demons and societal challenges.
At the heart of Blackout is Charley Barrett, played with remarkable depth by Alex Hurt. Charley is not the archetypal werewolf; he’s a tortured artist struggling with alcoholism, grief and the consequences of his own actions. Larry Fessenden’s decision to focus on Charley’s internal struggles rather than sensational werewolf terror adds layers of complexity to the narrative. The film becomes a character study, an exploration of the moral responsibility that comes with recognizing one’s monstrous nature.
As Charley navigates the complexities of her own life, the town becomes a character in itself, representing a microcosm of the larger societal issues that plague contemporary America. The cinematography captures the essence of the city, each frame serving as a visual metaphor for the underlying tensions and struggles. The gradual unveiling of the town’s response to werewolf attacks exposes deep-seated issues of racism, environmental exploitation and economic corruption.
Larry Fessenden masterfully integrates socio-political commentary into the narrative, using the werewolf myth as a means of addressing pertinent issues. The unjustified blaming of a Latino construction worker, played by Rigo Garay, becomes a poignant commentary on racial prejudice and scapegoating. The dynamics of the city, reflecting broader societal trends, show that Larry Fessenden is acutely aware of the wider implications of his story.
The entire cast, including seasoned actors such as Barbara Crampton and Jeremy Holm, delivers performances that bring richly developed characters to life. Alex Hurt’s portrayal of Charley Barrett is remarkable, capturing the nuances of a man torn between his artistic spirit and the monstrous transformations that haunt him. Hurt’s ability to convey the internal struggle adds authenticity to Charley’s character, making him sympathetic and relatable despite the supernatural elements.
The film’s pace, though slow at times, is intended to allow the audience to immerse itself in the complexities of the characters and the town. Larry Fessenden’s deliberate approach pays off as the emotional weight increases, leading to a crescendo that leaves a lasting impact. Werewolf attacks, when they do occur, are handled with a deft balance of gore and emotional resonance, ensuring that they serve the narrative rather than drifting into gratuitous violence.
Blackout also stands out for its visual aesthetic, with cinematographer Collin Brazie capturing the essence of Larry Fessenden’s vision. The transformation scenes, inspired by Charley’s artwork, are a visual feast that blurs the boundaries between reality and the supernatural. The werewolf design, which pays homage to classic representations, adds a touch of nostalgia while remaining fresh and relevant.
The film’s soundtrack, composed by Will Bates, is an outstanding feature. The haunting melodies and atmospheric sounds enhance the overall visual experience, creating an immersive soundscape that complements the film’s eerie atmosphere. The music becomes a character in its own right, reinforcing the emotional impact of key scenes.
Larry Fessenden’s return to directing marks a turning point in his career. Building on the foundations laid by previous works such as Habit and Depraved, Larry Fessenden proves once again that he is a maestro of psychological monster movies. While Blackout doesn’t adhere to the typical werewolf movie formula, its unique approach distinguishes it as a compelling and thought-provoking addition to the horror genre.
Blackout is a modern masterpiece that explores the intersection of personal demons and societal challenges through the werewolf myth. Larry Fessenden’s fine storytelling, combined with outstanding performances and atmospheric imagery, elevates the film beyond the limits of genre expectations. It’s a testament to the enduring power of classic monsters in contemporary cinema, and to Larry Fessenden’s ability to infuse them with relevance and depth. Blackout is not just a werewolf story; it’s a haunting exploration of humanity’s struggle against its own monsters, both internal and external.
Like Depraved, a modern retelling of Frankenstein, Blackout finds writer-director Larry Fessenden once again toying with classic monster tropes. The new film focuses on a tortured artist, Charley (Alex Hurt), whose name is just a few letters removed from “Chaney.” Charley is dealing with a nasty case of werewolfism, which is the same affliction that plagued Lon Chaney Jr.’s character, Larry Talbot, in 1941’s The Wolf Man.
Where Depraved was a commentary on modern warfare, PTSD, and the pharmaceutical industrial complex, Blackout narrows its focus to the business of being a modern white liberal in a small town. Charley is concerned about the environment, and he’s disturbed at the racist groupthink stoked by a local real estate magnate, Hammond (Marshall Bell), who happens to be his former boss and the father of his ex-girlfriend, Sharon (Addison Timlin). At one point, Charley asks a former co-worker what Hammond has to do that’s bad enough to make everyone finally stop working for him. We all make moral compromises to survive, though Charley is making perhaps the biggest one of all, what with people’s blood literally being on his hands.
The film is unambiguous in that regard. Prior to our first catching sight of Charley, Blackout opens with a roving wolf’s-eye view of a presence slowly charging upon a man and woman having sex in a field, before a hairy, clawed hand slashes the innocent man’s throat. Fessenden then cuts to the motel room where Charley awakens, carefully showing not only the art that he’s drawn, but also the newspaper clippings of various grisly murders that he’s obviously committed. Right away the film distinguishes itself from so many other werewolf stories before it for not being about its protagonist’s discovery of and disbelief over his condition.
Across the film, Fessenden foregrounds Charley’s hypocrisies and how they inform his behavior while still cannily drawing our sympathies to him. Charley, who’s certainly not wrong about Hammond, is fully aware of what he does by the light of the full moon, and Fessenden paints a compassionate yet clear-eyed portrait of him. And contributing to that nuanced portrait is Hurt’s wounded charisma, which is evident even when he’s under mounds of makeup.
But as the scope of Charley’s violence expands, it’s clear how he’s made his guilt into everybody else’s problem. As Charley tries to get at Hammond through legal channels, a migrant worker, Miguel (Rigo Garay), is blamed for the killings, and that there’s no concrete evidence to send Miguel to jail can’t dissuade Hammond and his supporters of his guilt. Later, when Charley shows up at Sharon’s door while she has another man over, he may be in werewolf form, but it’s impossible not to view his arrival like that of a jealous ex, throwing doubt on his assertion that he has no control over his transformation. And when he quickly sketches out a drawing of a victim, it raises the question of whether he’s using the suffering of others as fuel for his art.
Blackout’s do-it-yourself, low-budget approach is unmistakable, but its compositions are painstaking and its editing choices are purposeful. Some of the film’s talkier scenes cleanly transition to voiceover, while its latter half thrillingly inches toward something resembling the psychedelic. Throughout, Charley runs across landscapes in lengthy, sidelong shots that give the film an ethereal charge of adrenaline, his movements so effortless that he seems like an extension of the natural world rather than a supernatural interloper.
Blackout’s sheer craftsmanship by and large papers over some of its stumbles. One depiction of a crime scene investigation is stiffly written but captured in a single take that doesn’t call attention to itself as the camera follows officers from an overturned car all the way back up a hill and to the road from which the vehicle descended. Elsewhere, Fessenden overstates a few of his themes, as when a crack about “white guilt” is dropped late in the film, long after it’s been made clear that Charley suffers from that particular curse. And though the story departs from Charley’s viewpoint on occasion, the other characters feel half-realized by comparison.
If the reach of Blackout sometimes exceeds its grasp, that same shortcoming is emblematic of just how many ideas Fessenden is juggling here. That richness is what allows the film to stand apart from so many other horror efforts that play out as prolonged trauma therapy sessions against flimsily arty backdrops. Charley’s struggles with alcohol inform Blackout’s title, though they’re almost incidental to the story given how much ground it covers, especially once the man implodes on his self-righteousness. As in his prior work, the far-reaching curiosity and fascinatingly conflicted nature of Fessenden’s perspective is still his greatest strength.
(Mild spoilers for the as-yet-unreleased Blackout follow.)
This week at Brooklyn Horror Fest I watched Blackout, the new film from indie genre legend Larry Fessenden (Habit, Depraved). I loved it; it’s a haunting, haunted, old-school werewolf tragedy with equal parts horror, hair, and heart. It continues Fessenden’s career-long conversation about addiction issues while delving into timely sociopolitical topics and the unsolvable tangle of father-son relationships. It’s also hilarious and frequently gory, with great practical FX from Brian Spears and Peter Gerner. It’s a singular, handmade work from one of our great American storytellers. I can’t wait for Fango readers to see it.
This is not a review of the film. But in watching it, I was very taken with one particular aspect of it, and I’ve been chewing on it for days. (Here’s where the mild spoilers come.) The film has no opening credits, so actors are not called out by name until the end of the movie. Charley, the lead character, is played wonderfully by an actor of great depth and an unmistakable air of familiarity. Before I could put my finger on it, the film is discussing Charley’s late father, and Fessenden cuts to pictures of… William Hurt.
That’s because Charley is played by the late actor’s son Alex Hurt, and in retrospect the family resemblance is obvious. But without explicitly knowing ahead of time that this actor is the son of William Hurt, I was yanked out of the movie for a moment as my brain put the pieces together.
And the amazing thing is: Fessenden is fine with this, because he trusts his audience.
And this is exciting, because for the most part we haven’t seen filmmakers trusting their audience like this in a minute. Sometime between Christopher Nolan explaining in 2005 exactly where in Asia Bruce Wayne ordered his Batman cowls and the advent of social media platforms that accelerated media illiteracy, filmmakers and audiences have all shifted toward this priority of making things line up perfectly; bulletproofing plot points and creative choices so that an increasingly unsophisticated audience will continue to suspend its increasingly stubborn disbelief. Movies — especially and tragically, genre movies — now have to be grounded and believable, and asking your audience to stfu and take the ride has become a heavier lift on both sides of the transaction.
And here is Larry Fessenden, who’s been making movies for 45 years, reminding us that movies are dreams, and that we can all choose to be grownups about it and go on a journey whose layers transcend the current cultural need to be completely, thuddingly literal.
So, sure, pics of the late William Hurt might have your mind wandering for a second as you ponder the deeply meta layers of Alex Hurt’s casting — Fessenden says he saw in Alex the wounded weight of legacy that Lon Chaney Jr. brought to 1941’s The Wolf Man — but that’s okay. Fessenden trusts you to come back to the plot after you’ve processed this info, and he’s not worried that he’s lost you with this bold, honestly great choice.
Similarly, Fessenden’s werewolf story is more concerned with lycanthropy as a character exploration device than as some showcase for animatronics or cgi, so when you see the aesthetic route that particular aspect of the film takes, Fessenden trusts you to be on board. If you are, you’re gonna open yourself up to a very special film indeed.
Again, this is not a review, but every aspect of Blackout — its pacing, its beautiful character work, its very specific structure — seems to gleefully abandon expectation and convention, and trusts that audiences will take this sad/funny trip crafted by a wholly original cinematic voice. Certainly this is not the only film doing just that right now, but it feels increasingly important to call it out and celebrate it when it happens.
So many films spend precious time in the weeds trying to sell you their reality, making their verisimilitude airtight and critic-proof, and in 20 years all it’s really done for film is made audiences lazier and dumber while penning in storytellers. Blackout and its director have different priorities, and the film is all the better for it. Ultimately the film presents something that’s more authentic than realistic, and that’s an important and exciting distinction to learn — or, maybe, to re-learn.
Fantasia kicked off its 2023 edition with “Blackout,” the latest from revered horror veteran Larry Fessenden, who brings the horror genre another distinct take on a creature feature (after the likes of “Wendigo” and the Frankenstein-inspired “Depraved”). Here, he has a wolfman played with grit and shame by a heartbreaking Alex Hurt, son of the late William. Hurt’s Charley is a painter whose life is reflected in his work. But it’s not just the pastoral brook for a painting he gave his estranged and then deceased father; it’s also the screaming faces of his victims, the subjects of his carnage when he goes out at the full moon and becomes a tried-and-true werewolf. As a vagabond painter with a drinking problem, he says he blacks out in these circumstances and wakes up confused, in the middle of nowhere, with blood on his clothes.
The film’s tone is mournful and moody, folded into a story of coming home and not knowing who you are. When Charley becomes aware of what he has done, he has a great deal of shame and terror about it; he wants to be put down. This inner sadness piles on his lost relationship with his lover Sharon (Addison Timlin), his fractured bond with his father, and a corrupt plot from a big wig named Hammond (Marshall Bell) to open a gaudy resort called Hilltop. “Blackout” swirls with these emotional problems along with the whole werewolf thing, which has riled the town in conspiracy and hate (some of the locals assume with no evidence that it’s the work of a man named Miguel [Rigo Garay]). The film’s first half is filled with scenes where dialogue-heavy conversation between two characters lazily takes us back to the past. These visually staid scenes usually consist of two people bantering, and their weak rhythm is broken up by werewolf carnage.“Blackout” is artful and compelling where it counts most, including a tremendous transformation scene that depicts Charley’s changes as if they were his paintings. The film has appealing big heart even when its violence comes off as more comical or cheesy, with characters sometimes falling into deadly slapstick or clumsily letting the wolf get away. But Fessenden is not precious about these details. As much as some of the movie’s wolf-iest scenes (attacking people, scaring them) might invite a viewer to scoff, they aren’t the main point and can nearly be taken as good gory fun. Even when the movie is little more than Fessenden riffing on the human side of a werewolf story, “Blackout” has a compelling, truly disarming earnestness for its deeply wounded soul to be recognized under its shaggy dog cover.
If actors often make for compelling directors, then why not character actors? Larry Fessenden (“Depraved”) is a great That Guy character actor, and his work stands out in a range of genre movies, mostly horror. Fessenden’s also the producer and sometimes writer/director behind Glass Eye Pix’s rich catalog of American indie horror movies. Fessenden’s “Blackout,” a werewolf psychodrama, showcases his usual attention to performance and character-driven details. That compliment may seem surprising given that we’re talking about a low-budget monster movie where the lead and a few supporting cast members deliver amateurish performances.
Everybody’s a character in a Larry Fessenden movie, with their own quirks, limitations, and entanglements. We only get to see so much of that in “Blackout,” an imperfect, but often worthwhile adaptation of Fessenden’s own audio drama, one of Glass Eye’s “Tales from Beyond the Pale” radio drama-style horror stories.The audio play version of “Blackout” was a B-movie-sized sketch about Charley (Fessenden), a desperate loner who tries to get his affairs in order before he reluctantly transforms into a werewolf again. This movie adaptation has more plot, some of which is too generic to be necessary. The new “Blackout” also features several standout moments and a Poe-like air of melancholy dread that Fessenden fans are probably already familiar with. “Blackout” is nothing new, or even essential, but it mostly works anyway thanks to Fessenden and his cast’s impressive collaboration.
“Blackout” trails after doomed Charley Barrett (Alex Hurt), a well-liked drunk who also happens to be a werewolf. Charley knows he’s a lycanthrope and wants to kill himself before he can kill more innocent bystanders. Charley wanders around the exurban town of Talbot Falls in a cold sweat, touching base with a number of people that he wants to square up with. Mostly people he either wants to avoid or doesn’t want to get into a deep conversation with. Like nosey, but well-meaning Pastor Francis (John Speredakos), from whom Charley bums a ride. Or the crotchety real estate developer Jack Hammond (Marshall Bell), with whom Charley keeps butting heads. There’s also Sharon Hammond (Addison Timlin), Charley’s worried ex and Jack’s estranged daughter; she sees other people (an expertly cast Joe Swanberg).
Meanwhile, the police search for whoever’s responsible for a series of random murders. Civic-minded cop Alice (Ella Rae Peck) and her skeptical partner Luis (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) spot some animal fur at one of the crime scenes. Then they chat about the German concept of “umwelt,” or a “self-centered world,” where everybody is limited by their own individual perspectives. This standout conversation explains some things about the plot of “Blackout” as well as Fessenden’s priorities as a filmmaker. I wish there was a lot more of this sort of dorm room philosophizing in “Blackout.”
Charley’s meandering trajectory is sometimes frustrating, though not because of his aimlessness. If anything, “Blackout” doesn’t ramble far enough into the lo-fi psychedelia and macabre lyricism that Fessenden excels at, because Charley does have productive conversations, sometimes even with people whose company he enjoys, like Miguel (Rigo Garay), a family man who’s also falsely accused (by Jack) of Charley’s crimes, or Earl (Motell Gyn Foster), a chatty loner who makes silver bullets for Charley (and at his request). Fessenden’s pointed dialogue doesn’t always sound right coming out of his actors’ mouths, but it provides a welcome pretext for the movie’s best, largely conversation-driven scenes.If anything, “Blackout” is weakest when it’s most conventional, dutifully trailing after Charley as the body count increases and the cops get even closer. You can see Fessenden’s obvious affection for bit players like platitude-slinging Pastor Francis or even tough-talking barfly Bob (Kevin Corrigan), the latter who wants to fight underpaid Mexican migrant workers, and paraphrases Winston Churchill when he’s three sheets to the wind. These guys also represent Talbot Falls, an American everytown named after Lon Chaney Jr.’s beloved Universal monster.If there’s anything essential missing from “Blackout,” it’s more umwelt. The movie’s atmospheric opening scene provides a perfect example. A young couple, played by real-life partners Clay von Carlowitz and Asta Paredes, strip and try to get down in an open field. She laughs at him, and repeatedly asks if this is what he daydreams about. By the time that they’re attacked, we know enough about these characters to wish that we could know them better. That’s obviously impossible given their limited involvement in Charley’s story.You can still see why Fessenden likes these and other supporting characters, even if his reasons don’t always translate smoothly into a creature feature. His monster looks and sounds good, but it’s not really special as Fessenden’s movies often are. If anything, “Blackout” is cursed by its director’s well-earned reputation for going farther afield and with more poetic whimsy than most. Fessenden’s latest has a lot to recommend it, but not enough to fully satisfy.
The werewolf is one of the longest-established monsters in human history, dating back more than 4,000 years and making its first recorded appearance in The Epic Of Gilgamesh, but it’s only over the last two centuries that storytellers have really begun to reflect on the internal experience of a man undergoing such a transformation, rather than on the terror created externally by the wolf. Such treatments are still fairly rare, especially when one strays beyond the bounds of lightweight mainstream movies or pulp novellas. Larry Fessenden’s latest work, which screened as part of the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival, shows us the impact of wolf-like predation on the denizens of a small town, but is essentially a human story.
That town is Talbot Falls, to which fortysomething fine art painter Charley (Alex Hurt) is returning after a lengthy leave of absence. He has been rethinking the way he lives his life, something which may or may not be related to the bloody deaths of tourists in the woods surrounding the town, or to the strange bruises which he finds on his body when he wakes up. Parts of the woods are being cut down to make way for a new estate. It’s a project which Charley’s father worked on before his death, and Charley has a bone to pick with the deceased man’s business partner, Hammond (Marshall Bell), after finding information which points to dodgy dealings.
Small towns being what they are, all of this is complicated. Charley used to live with Hammond’s daughter, Sharon (Addison Tiimlin), and there is still a degree of romantic tension between them despite a mysterious and messy break-up and her having found a new relationship. Charley takes the papers to local lawyer Kate (a sultry Barbara Crampton), one of a series of actions in which he seems to consign his own future to fate, but there are things he can’t do, and Sharon might be the reason for that. Meanwhile, local police officers Luis (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) and Alice (Ella Rae Peck) investigate further brutal killings and try to protect local construction worker Miguel (Rigo Garay) from angry locals after Hammond accuses him of being behind the crimes.
Violence is everywhere in this town, simmering just beneath the surface, preoccupying the minds of even those least likely to commit it; but there is also a sweetness. It’s most palpable in the interactions of the two cops, whose affectionate banter provides a welcome thread of humour and points up the absurdities surrounding them. Like some of Fessenden’s earlier work, the film is deceptively unstructured, unspooling like a yarn shared with strangers at a country inn, like a recollection of events which actually took place. There is talk of Umwelt, which highlights the experiential duality of the werewolf but also calls attention to the separateness of all the townspeople, the impossibility of them ever fully understanding one another in spite on the close interweaving of their lives.
Woven into all this, often so smoothly that you will need to be actively paying attention to spot them, are a number of werewolf myths. They invite us to try to figure out the rules of what’s happening even as Fessenden suggests that these are unimportant – that what really matters is something much simpler. Though a couple of graphic scenes present us with the classic imagery of the werewolf movie, there are also suggestions that what’s happening might hinge on delusion. The possibility that there could be a serial killer at work is treated with an expression of horror which the werewolf does not merit, suggesting that the latter, for all its unlikely nature, is seen as more natural – nature itself acting according to its own rules.
Despite the violent actions of the beast, this is a gently paced film which builds up emotional capital so subtly that you won’t realise it until characters you have come to care about start to die, or until its quietly devastating end. We see only as much of the visceral horror as we absolutely need to. Fessenden is more concerned with its psychological and sociological impacts. What emerges is thoughtful and deeply humane, whilst retaining that sense of otherness essential to folkloric tales. It’s a film which will haunt you.
Indie horror icon Larry Fessenden is back in the director’s chair with Blackout, a film about the pain of addition and becoming something you don’t want to be. Having tackled vampires in 1995’s Habit and Frankenstein’s monster in 2019’s Depraved, Fessenden finally has his werewolf movie in the solid creature feature Blackout.
Opening with a classic stalking sequence following a pair of adventurous lovers in a field, Blackout introduces us to the werewolf terror immediately as the monster tears the canoodlers to shreds before the opening credits roll. We quickly move on to meet Charley Bartlett (Alex Hurt), the above-mentioned monster, only he’s currently in human form and obviously in search of absolution for his many sins. He’s determined to not only set things right with an old flame (Addison Timlin as Sharon), but also to expose the dirty business dealings of local developer Hammond, who just happens to be Sharon’s father.
When the beast within Bartlett begins its reign of terror the police are dumbfounded, but Hammond insists he has knowledge that the killings are the work of a local Latino laborer named Luis. Though he has no real evidence, he’s riled the town folk enough that they are gathering a posse to bring him to justice. The local sheriff wants nothing to do with it, but that train may leave the station whether he likes it or not.
Meanwhile, Bartlett’s attempts to made nice with Sharon, who has wisely moved on, seem to be falling on deaf ears. But this is just one of many tasks that Charley’s aims to accomplish before he takes care of the werewolf problem himself. A bucket list of sorts, though there will definitely be a lot of civilians kicking the proverbial bucket before Charley’s massacre is over.
Like a lot of Fessenden’s work, Blackout uses the werewolf mythology to tell a very human story. Charley is a flawed man, but one who has mostly overcome a serious drinking problem to acknowledge those flaws and who wants to make amends. The werewolf thing puts a ticking clock on his atonement schedule, pushing him to leave this world having done some good before he does too much more bad.
Hurt lives this role to his core, and with a solid supporting cast behind him, Blackout works incredibly well in fleshing out the character and making this into more than a simple monster movie. Being a Fessenden film, there is a lot of talking, it’s not a bad thing, but it does cause the film to stretch out perhaps a bit longer than necessary. Most of the dialogue in helpful in building a very lived in world, though there are a few scattered moments where Fessenden throws in references to the classics of lycanthrope cinema that are just for funsies, but it’s not too distracting.
Balancing out the drama are some very gruesome kills scattered throughout the film. Blackoutisn’t afraid of doling out the red stuff, and even more fun for monster movie fans is that we get plenty of good looks at FX artist Brian Spears’ wolf man. There isn’t a transformation scene flashy enough to rival An American Werewolf in London or The Howling, instead, Fessenden stays with the Lon Chaney, Jr. method of revealing the monster in phases, which aligns with the film’s obvious love of the original 1941 classic.
Fessenden fans (Fan-ssendens? Fessen-fans?) will delight in the filmmaker’s gory take on yet another of the classic monster tales. Blackout, as they say, does exactly what it says on the tin. It takes a story horror fans know well and puts it through a modern lens with a writer who as concerned with the human elements of monstrosity than the mythological ones, but who has immense respect for both. There aren’t a lot of filmmakers out there who’ve been making horror as smart and emotionally gripping as Larry Fessenden over the last several decades, and Blackoutshows us that he has no intention of slowing down.
In 2019, indie horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden reimagined Frankenstein with a contemporary lens in Depraved. His follow-up, Blackout, takes his exploration of classic movie monsters further with a unique take on the Wolf Man. Alcoholism and lycanthropy afflict an artist in Blackout, the title’s dual meaning apparent, but Fessenden takes it a step further by exploring the volatile nature of a community and the catastrophic yet absurdly funny toll a monster’s destruction wreaks on a small town.
Talbot Falls artist Charley (Alex Hurt) is at a significant crossroads. His binge drinking has made a mess of his life and relationships, including former love Sharon (Addison Timlin) and her ruthlessly power-crazed dad Hammond (Marshall Bell). His drinking has left him prone to blackouts, complicating matters when he begins to suspect he may be the werewolf savagely ripping people apart during the Full Moon. Never mind that he has deep-seated father issues to work through well before he’s introduced. This leaves Charley retreating from society while desperate for closure, especially as the body count rises.
Multi-hyphenate writer/director/producer/editor Fessenden captures Talbot Falls’ predicament with an almost documentary style that captures the town’s interiority. Charley may be the central Wolf Man, but his story is told as much through his perspective as his neighbors’. Fessenden unspools an unhurried hangout movie as the camera drifts through the town, capturing the varying direct and indirect conflicts of Charley’s nightly hunts. Charley is the throughline that connects the characters that come and go through his story, reflecting the current social climate with authentic poignancy and, often, a dry absurdist sense of humor.
In that way, Blackout plays almost like a series of vignettes as Charley’s morning walks of shame or errands see him pass by or encounter friends, former lovers, town police, a pair of town racists, or eclectic passersby that impart vital narrative details through casual conversation. That unconventional approach to storytelling gives thematic and emotional weight to the Wolf Man’s destruction, but it also means that Blackout leans more into drama than horror.
That’s not to say Blackout is devoid of horror, though; Fessenden opens with a retro horror scene featuring a copulating couple getting gory just desserts under the full moon. The filmmaker also demonstrates how night shots should look. Fessenden may approach Talbot Falls with documentary-like authenticity but he also injects stunning cinematic moments that underscore the filmmaker’s tenured experience. Charley joyously running through a field under the full moon doesn’t just harken back to The Wolf Man; it lends an infectious cinematic quality.
It’s authenticity that sums up Blackout well. Hurt ensures Charley isn’t a one-note despairing Wolf Man. Charley comes with hefty emotional baggage from the outset, and photos of young Hurt with real-life father William Hurt used in the film suggest perhaps Hurt is familiar with his character on a personal level. Whether that’s the case or not, Hurt does a tremendous job ensuring Charley remains emotionally honest, complicated, and profoundly conflicted about his lycanthropy, let alone how to address it.
Blackout draws obvious inspiration from a classic monster but couldn’t be further removed in execution. Fessenden captures the mundanity of small-town life while demonstrating just how precarious society can be as one rampaging Wolf Man plunges its residents into chaos. Those expecting a more straightforward, conventional werewolf movie won’t find it here. Charley is the catalyst in a broad picture tale, removing an easy throughline for audiences to grab hold of that’s further compounded by a laid-back pace. Instead, Fessenden offers a veritable, funny, sometimes sluggish yet poignant slice of life with a violent and bloody horror twist.
Fantasia 2023: ‘Blackout’ – An Intimate Look at the Monsters in Our Towns
While Larry Fessenden has caught acclaim for his performances in recent years, he has built an excellent independent career in the director’s chair. The multi-tooled creative fuses grindhouse sensibilities with high-level commentary. His latest horror feature, Blackout does the same. Following a semi-traditional horror plotline, Blackout features a deep examination at prejudice and hate in local communities. Fessenden’s werewolf spectacle delivers on most grounds, even if some of the performances cannot rise to his ambition as a storyteller.
Late one night, a couple dies in the woods. Their bodies appear mutilated. The only witness – a Latino named Miguel (Rigo Garay) – tells the police about a monster. The established members of the town, including local developer Hammond (Marshall Bell), do not believe Luis and accuse him of the killings. Charley (Alex Hurt), the son of a local legend, comes to Luis’ defense. However, Charley has more skin in the game than anyone realizes.
Small-town dynamics fall away to larger comments on political discourse. Blaming the other, the creation of disinformation, and corruption come crashing into the township. The importance of allyship and belief comes out, allowing those with more privilege to navigate the complicated world more effectively. This ultimately pays dividends for Fessenden. In fact, he proves concepts of toxic masculinity, racism, and socioeconomic strife present in 1941’s The Wolf Man still echo in our current climate.
Fessenden crafts a beautiful story over the runtime, and his night photography gives us a perfect throwback feel. With DP Collin Brazie, they are able to craft a unique 1970s vibe, despite setting the film in the present. The opening of Blackout pulls heavy influence from grindhouse pictures, complete with a humorous sex sequence ending in a kill. As Blackout evolves, Brazie captures the beauty of the gore effects while also allowing the camera to function as a subjective view of the events. At its best, we feel horror history flowing through the blocking.
For the third time in his career, Fessenden delivers a unique take on a classic monster. While The Habit brought back vampires and Depraved included elements of Frankenstein creatures, this feels like his most accessible. For much of Blackout, the werewolf effects are hidden or obscured. Yet when they take center stage, they shine. The angles from the camera elevate these practical effects, allowing the transformation and hunting sequences to truly scare the audience. The creature of Blackout feels every bit as real as any we’ve seen in years. Additionally, the performance from Hurt as a wolf-man creates electricity that’s rare to duplicate.
However, Hurt and others do not quite bring enough realism to their performances to sell Fessenden’s material. Some horror takes itself too seriously, and as a result, self-importance hurts the story. However, Blackoutfeatures an integral story about race and undue anger in a post-Covid world. The material and metaphor work, but not all the actors can sell the dialogue as essential. Hurt struggles at times, as do a few other members of the cast. It puts a cap on how good Blackout can be, even with the ideas in place for it to contend for top-tier status.
Ultimately, a few missed emotional opportunities stop Blackout from being one of the best horror films of the year. Yet few will be filled with more ideas than Blackout. The power in the visuals and pure storytelling is undeniable. In the context of Fessenden’s career and his talent as a filmmaker, Blackoutshould still draw attention for years to come. It’s got too many good ideas and gore effects that are too good to ignore.
Larry Fessenden’s Werewolf Feature Blackout Brings Impressive Effects and Narrative Loose Ends
As with Depraved, writer-director Larry Fessenden returns to the world of classic, Universal-inspired monsters in Blackout. Whereas that title brought the mythos of Frankenstein’s monster (and its ample room for social commentary) into the present-day, this latest update shifts focus towards the so-called “wolfman.”
How does knowing he potentially killed innocent people affect Charley (Alex Hurt)? How can he keep pretending his life is simple and his love (with Addison Timlin’s Sharon) pure when a cloud of uncertain violence looms above the three-day nightly windows he cannot remember each month? Because while his actually being a werewolf is presented with enough ambiguity to make the truth part of the intrigue, Fessenden pulls no punches insofar as making certain we know Charley is at fault. He sees glimpses of his victims’ faces and, as an artist, paints them to try severing their hold. So while he might not be a “monster” in the literal sense, he is a haunted soul guilty of unspeakable horror.
That’s why he runs. He cannot risk harming Sharon or the town of people who all know him by name. It’s also why he’s resigned himself to putting an end to the bloodshed: it’s not just about the lives he’s already destroyed, but also those being targeted as perpetrators of the carnage in his absence. So while Charley’s ordeal carries a good helping of emotional drama as he attempts reconciling the complexities of his father’s (seen in photos as Alex’s real-life dad, William Hurt) complicity in empowering Sharon’s father, a power-hungry millionaire (Marshall Bell’s Hammond), and his own conflicted nature as a man who has thus far avoided confronting the consequences of his own actions, Blackout is strongest when it turns towards those external reverberations.
When a man like Hammond starts passing out goodwill and money to one section of the populace while sowing seeds of hatred for the other, his sway with public opinion can’t help creating monsters in his image. Because the citizens of this town want answers. They want whoever is brutally maiming folks to rot behind bars. And who better to target than the leader of the community’s Mexican contingent––a group that put down roots at Hammond’s behest so he could exploit their labor before inevitably tossing them aside? Miguel (Rigo Garay) was at the scene of the crime, after all. He’s the one who called the police to report a gruesome murder at the hands of an “hombre lobo.”
Thus it’s easy for the white population to interpret that implausible declaration as evidence of guilt. Werewolves don’t exist. Miguel was there. So Hammond riles up his faithful into a witch hunt that serves his own purposes. It becomes the final straw for Charley, who will not hurt anyone else––whether literally or as a product of his actions. Unfortunately, stopping himself won’t be easy. And turning himself in without knowing his full strength might even make matters worse.
Give Fessenden credit for really jam-packing this low-budget affair with as much political and social commentary as possible––even if a lot of it might come across somewhat half-baked and reductive. (See Motell Gyn Foster’s Earl as a means to messily relay how cops will always shoot a Black man with a gun first and never ask any questions later.) The topics are broad: Mexicans as “killers” hot on the heels of Trump’s presidency; quick reaction shots involuntarily othering a gay couple rather than simply including them; and an untouchable tyrant of wealth acting as though his “charity” entitles him to demagogic rule over those benefiting. But they’re also relevant and keep to the theme of mirroring Charley’s inner struggle with that of the town itself.
Fessenden talks about how he wanted to keep the production fast and loose while letting spontaneity rule the day. Doing so might create some really interesting tonal shifts––I loved the hard-boiled nature of Officers Luis and Alice’s dialogue delivery, played by Joseph Castillo-Midyett and Ella Rae Peck, that’s fully incongruous yet welcoming just the same)––but it also leaves some narrative loose ends. The experience is worth those hiccups, though.
Hurt delivers an effectively introspective performance that does at times remind us of his father’s soulful depth. The creature effects are top-notch too (Fessenden also states that his desire to keep costs down by hiring friends and offering “relationships” never meant skimping on what the film needed to be a success) with both the transformation scenes and murders leaving no question that the eyes we’re watching through wholeheartedly believe Charley to be that monster.
If some things could perhaps be narratively tightened, you always get the gist of what Fessenden is going for while knowing those moments which might be lacking aren’t a product of intent. And if you somehow find yourself unable to get past them, it’s impossible not to enjoy the stellar cast of supporting players: Barbara Crampton, Joe Swanberg, James Le Gros, Kevin Corrigan, Jeremy Holm, and others all make appearances to lend their one or two scenes the weight they deserve while leaving the whole better for it.
Blackout Balances Its Werewolf Side with Its College Philosophy Side
Being a werewolf sounds fun, until it happens to you: The late nights, the insatiable hunger, the undying rage, the ballooning of your clothing budget as every outfit you own inexorably falls apart with each moonlit transformation. The cuisine isn’t great, either, unless you’re the over-adventurous type to whom eating animals alive sounds like a test of intestinal and gustatory mettle. It’s enough to make an afflicted person lose their zest for life, which might in turn be enough to make shuffling oneself off one’s own mortal coil an appealing alternative. That’s the space Larry Fessenden occupies in his new movie, Blackout, an existential and depressive character study of Charley (Alex Hurt).
Charley is a man once bitten and, as the story begins, twice a killer: In a slowly creeping POV shot, Charley stalks and savages a young couple screwing in an open field, claws slashing flesh to the tune of their helpless screams. Blackout cuts to the morning after, as Charley, an artist, wakes up in his hotel room, where he has apparently enjoyed an extended stay while plotting liberation from his supernatural burden. Putting down a dog just takes a tranquilizer and pentobarbital. Putting down a werewolf demands much more effort. Firearm stores don’t typically line their shelves with silver bullets.
Charley is determined and, while he’s short on time—the longer he waits, the higher the body count—he makes up for the deficit with hangdog patience. Fessenden’s ambling direction is simpatico with Charley’s easygoing composure; Blackout is structured around a series of farewells as our doomed hero wanders the setting, Talbot Falls (named, of course, for Chaney Jr.’s furry fiend in The Wolf Man), puts his affairs in order, and readies for his death. Charley tries reconciling with his ex-fiancé Sharon (Addison Timlin). He nearly lives out a PornHub scene with his lawyer Kate (Barbara Crampton). He catches a ride from the town’s pastor (John Speredakos), and another from Miguel (Rigo Garay), a construction worker accused of Charley’s crimes. He butts heads with shady developer Hammond (Marshall Bell), Miguel’s ex-boss as well as his accuser, who fudged the findings of land use studies to get an “okay” on a project promising jobs at the cost of environmental destruction.
Charley can no more live with the knowledge of Hammond’s corruption than he can with the knowledge that he’s a wild beast wrapped up in a man-suit. But the “beast” conundrum remains front of mind for Blackout even at its talkiest. Fessenden holds were-Charley in reserve so that when he doessuccumb to his condition, the impact of his transformation is better felt. For one, the creature work here is sterling, hewing closer to an even blend of man and beast than is the norm; fully transformed, Charley looks like, well, Charley, but as a bipedal canine. The choice effectively reinforces his humanity while expressing primal instinct at the same time. Hurt plays that dichotomy with two parts melancholy to one part physicality: He cuts a wild, grotesque figure in his monstrous state, and he capitalizes on the freedom to emote that his prosthetics afford him—he strikes an empathetic chord as he’s horking up guttural snarls.
Blackout’s emphasis on Charley’s identity rallies our compassion, though of course one of the main reasons for watching a werewolf film is carnage. Fessenden’s team loves a good old-fashioned throat rip, with severed appendages thrown in every now and again for balance. But what makes Fessenden’s movies stand out from their kin in whichever niche he chooses to explore is his prioritization of character—every character, from the primary actors to the supporting cast. To Fessenden, the bit parts are as important as the leads. They’re the mortar that holds a story together: Macho drunkard Bob (Kevin Corrigan), for instance, or officers Alice (Ella Rae Peck) and Luis (Joseph Castillo-Midyett), who philosophize over “umwelt,” a semiotic phrase that refers to the way environment can shape a person or animal’s behavior.
Heady whimsy is foundational for Fessenden’s cinema, too, and Blackoutcould have used more of that quality. Understandably, Charley’s plan to end his own life takes up the most legroom here. A suicidal werewolf is a welcome novelty, especially since more often than not it’s vampires who have all the fun feeling conflicted about their predatory nature. Alice and Luis gabbing about German psychological theory facilitates Blackout’s somber preoccupation with Charley’s right to die, and happens to be a hoot at the same time. For Fessenden’s purposes, that’s enough, though Blackoutmight have benefitted from a few more galaxy brain analyses of human nature. As is, the film balances its talkative side with its gory side nicely. Wanting more isn’t the worst feeling a film can leave you with.
Horror Meets Socio-Political Drama in Unique Twist
Our adventure begins in the deceptive calm of Talbot Falls, an idyllic locale nestled in upstate New York. Here, we find Charley (Alex Hurt,) a local artist who transforms a motel room into his creative refuge. But this tranquility doesn’t last long, as a chain of frightful killings, driven by Charley’s “curse,” begins to unravel the peaceful facade.
We’re soon introduced to the nemesis in our plot: the morally bankrupt mogul, Hammond. Marshall Bell’s portrayal carries a devilish charisma, making his character a worthy adversary. Our hero, Charley, finds himself embroiled in a bitter fight against Hammond’s unethical ventures, even as he seeks reconciliation with his ex-love, Sharon (Addison Timlin), who has more in common with his enemy than anyone would expect. An escalating tide of prejudice emerges as an innocent worker is wrongfully implicated in the brutal murders.
One full moon becomes the ultimate turning point when Miguel (Rigo Garay) is painted as the monster responsible. Despite Miguel’s claims about a ‘man-wolf’ and all of the evidence in the world pointing elsewhere, Hammond’s character still focuses his investigation on him. Charley causes a storm of events to be unleashed in the quiet town. He works to clear Miguel’s name and sought assistance from his trusted confidante, Earl (Motell Gyn Foster), even hiring the legal expertise of attorney Kate (Barbara Crampton).
Larry Fessenden interlaces time-honored horror motifs and contemporary socio-political issues in BLACKOUT to spotlight the evils of avarice, corruption, and violence. The narrative surges beyond the parameters of a standard horror movie, delving into the depths of ecological concerns and societal fears. Shrouded in desolation and guilt, Charley bears the weight of his impending self-destruction throughout his sorrow-laden journey. With traits echoing divisive political figures… Hammond exploits racial tensions for his gain. Meanwhile, Talbot Falls serves as a symbolic microcosm of the divisive strife seen in modern America.
As the film hurtles towards its climax, Charley embarks on a path to self-redemption and acceptance and seeks solace in setting right his past sins. BLACKOUT melds horror and social commentary into a layered, introspective narrative that echoes Fessenden’s direction. This isn’t merely a horror flick; it’s a mirror held up to society, revealing the beasts lurking within our collective conscience.
Blackout
Directed by Larry Fessenden, U.S., Dark Sky Films
In the parlance of our times: if Larry Fessenden has no more fans, then I am no longer on this Earth. As film lovers, we all have convictions that we will take to—and maybe beyond—the grave, including certain directors whose work we adore unconditionally, more spurred on than deterred by the overall lack of consensus. Playing favorites is a dangerous game; the line between ardency and apologia can be perilously thin. Such is the tightrope of auteurism, which requires a certain combination of agility and death drive to walk unafraid, for critics and filmmakers both. Besides: love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Not that anybody is necessarily fixing to file Fessenden’s brand of independently produced, politically engaged genre cinema under guilty pleasure: elegiac chillers like Wendigo (2001) or The Last Winter (2006) are too solemn for camp appreciation, just as they’re too low-to-the-ground—industrially and stylistically speaking—for the “elevated horror” crowd. That Fessenden’s output over four decades has been taken for granted is one thing, but it’s more like his being taken for granted has itself been taken for granted, as grimly self-fulfilling as any dark prophecy about pentagrams and the need to stay off the moors. Hence the conspicuously marginal rollout of Blackout, the director’s most striking feature in decades, and which, as a play on 1941’s The Wolf Man, very nearly gives him a career bingo with Universal monster riffs. Nothing epochal perhaps, but also nothing to scoff at: a nicely atmospheric, sturdily crafted creature feature with any number of intriguing entry points—not least of all that its story of an isolated, multicultural community with predators in its midst exists in indirect but loquacious conversation with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Can you find the (were)wolves in these pictures?
The resonances are modest but real: back when Killers premiered at Cannes, eagle-eyed viewers noted Fessenden’s presence in the film’s fourth-wall breaking coda, playing the star of a radio-show acting troupe dramatizing the Osage Indian murders. Fessenden acted for Scorsese before in Bringing Out the Dead, but his casting in the newer film carries a special metatextual tingle given his long-running gig hosting the audio-only horror anthology “Tales from Beyond the Pale.” In fact, Blackout began its life in 2019 as an episode of “Tales”—a lineage that not only accounts for its overall talkiness and quasi-epistolary structure but also its poignant and nagging sense of anticlimax. In more ways than one, Fessenden’s seventh feature is a shaggy-dog story; what binds it to Scorsese’s masterpiece is the way it interrogates certain all-American narratives to expose their ameliorating artifice.
Charley (the excellent Alex Hurt) is a painter of anguished, abstract canvases living alone in a cabin in scenic Talbot Falls; he’s also recently become a werewolf and, driven by some mix of white-knuckle guilt and aesthetic conviction, he’s taken to depicting the victims he’s killed during his monthly transformations. Like the protagonist of Fessenden’s 1996 breakthrough Habit, Charley offers a ragged, sympathetic portrait of the artist as monster, but where the earlier film developed as a conjoined satire of bohemian narcissism and vampire lore, Blackout is angled, more rousingly, as a tale of radicalization. Once bitten, a slumped shut-in transforms into a (wolf)-man of action; the urgency of Charley’s situation—and his desperate need to confess before his crimes are pinned on a conveniently racialized patsy—has turned him into a kind of woke avenger, targeting the racist eco-rapists who’ve turned his small town into a hotbed of xenophobic stupidity and, in one of several loaded sight gags, literally biting the hand that feeds—clean off the bone, as a matter of fact.
Fessenden, whose first student movie was a homemade remake of Jaws, has always worn his bleeding heart on his sleeve (in the best Romero tradition). Blackout’s political commentary isn’t subtle, but it’s so deeply woven into the fabric of the material that it feels like an artistic starting point instead of a market-savvy flourish. The theme—endemic to both werewolf stories and activist allegories—is transformation, and while Charley’s efforts to control and channel his condition don’t quite work out as planned, there’s something endearing about the image of a hairy, snarling small-town vigilante staring down the forces of late capitalism—shades, maybe, of Tom Laughlin as Billy Jack, filtered through a noble cinematic lineage of suffering, self-divided lycanthropes. That Charley’s dearly departed dad happened to be a benevolent patriarch type not only complicates his crusade against Talbot Falls’ profit-motivated ruling class—one of whom, Hammond (Marshall Bell), happens to be the pater of Charley’s ex Sharon (Addison Timlin)—but also suggests Fessenden has rewatched John Sayles’ Lone Star, with its carefully diagrammed socioeconomic and ethnic tensions infusing (rather than overwhelming) its central mystery plot.
There’s more common ground between Fessenden and Sayles—another filmmaker long since taken for granted—than one might think. After all, the latter made his name (and shored up his Hollywood collateral) scripting Joe Dante’s marvelous (and again, politically astute) werewolf shocker The Howling, which similarly limned the relationship between involuntary physical mutation and cathartic personal expression—outstripping the jocular culture-shock comedy and mechanical jolts of John Landis’s contemporaneous An American Werewolf in London. Like Sayles, Fessenden is a regionalist interested in the relationship between the individual and the community, and he’s attuned to the specifics—from commercial signage to gift-store trinkets—that keep his B-movie archetypes honest. More broadly speaking, what Fessenden shares with Sayles—and while we’re at it, his frequent collaborator and one-time protege Kelly Reichardt and fellow indie eminence grise Jim Jarmusch (who cast him as a sheriff in The Dead Don’t Die)—is a bruised-and-blistered metaphysics of failure, the secret handshake of lefty directors who’ve been around long enough to not place too much stock in the future.
Fessenden’s melancholy reached its apocalyptic apotheosis in The Last Winter, which leveraged some pretty ropey CGI against a plangent, devastating visual metaphor suggesting that, in the face of widespread climate change, the ideological middle ground between right and left was finally no safer than anywhere else. Reviewing that film for Reverse Shot, Andrew Tracy wrote that its ultimate failure as spectacle belied the deeper and more inexorable sense of terror that is Fessenden’s sweet spot: “hoots and jeers might accompany the finale of The Last Winter, but they’re only a coping mechanism for the terrible truth it uncovers.” Like its predecessor, Blackout isn’t all that frightening even as it delivers the gory goods (including a piece of slapstick sadism worthy of Brian De Palma), and the flipside to its overall earnestness is clunkiness (the expository scenes sputter like a car whose engine has turned over). Still, the fatalism of its final sequences has its own spectral intensity—and integrity. In the final moments, a mortally wounded Charley flashes back to the night he was first attacked, and Fessenden gives us the film’s most shiver-inducing image—a carefully prepared shot-reverse-shot with the architecture of a jump scare but a very different feeling underneath. Instead of shock—or surprise—the money shot conjures up a tender, heartbreaking mix of existential resignation and recognition: the only possible response for when we all find the wolf has suddenly and inevitably come to our door.
Blackout is a werewolf film in which the werewolf, Charley (Alex Hurt), “loses control” now and again, as he calls it, blacking out for a bit only to wake up bruised, bloody, and naked, covered in bits and pieces that are not his own. He has dreams of flight, and of violence, and rather than deal with his malady in a substantive way, he drifts from place to place, avoiding attachments–though because he’s charming and good-looking, attachments tend to find him anyway. I like the in-jokiness of the film’s pivotal location, “Talbot Falls” (Larry Talbot being the name of Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man), and I love how Fessenden structures his movie as a series of doomed-feeling conversations between friends, family, and old lovers helpless to save one another from the demons afflicting them. It’s the best film about mourning a person you love before they’re dead since Rob Zombie’s extraordinary Lords of Salem.
Hurt has a bit of father William Hurt’s eccentricity. He’s gangly, unconventional-looking, a little off in his delivery; watch him in a conversation with spooked local Miguel (Rigo Garay), who tells him that he’s seen a wolf man running around, murdering naked women in gorgeous Bernie Wrightson tableaux-by-headlight, and been reassured it’s just “Mexican superstition.” But, Miguel protests, the wolf man is a white man’s myth, not a Mexican one. Charley knows he’s talking about him, so he smiles a bit too wide and, in an unnerving editorial flourish, holds it for a beat too long. Charley is a complex, ambivalent antihero, horrified by what he becomes–an alter ego he tries to suppress with alcohol–but also amused by the fear he causes and more than a little drunk on his power over the small community that has rejected him and is now falling into insolvency before the economic catastrophes ravaging the connective tissues of the United States. Blackout is a laconic nightmare fuelled by the madness of our social unknitting. It’s Fessenden’s best, most freighted work since Wendigo. We’re all wolves, we’re all Little Red Riding Hoods, and there aren’t any more trails through the woods. It’s all woods–and it’s dark as fuck out there.
DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SOME SPOILERS!!!
Turn thine eyes away,
lest ye be spoiled.
Larry Fessenden has been making monster movies for the past 30 years, bringing his love of the Universal Monsters into the present, from the Frankenstein-like No Telling (1991), to the vampire film Habit(1997), to a more direct take on Frankenstein with 2019’s Depraved. And now, premiering at Fantasia 2023, Blackout is Fessenden’s own vision of a modern-day Wolf Man. In Talbot Falls—named in homage to Larry Talbot, the main character of 1941’s The Wolf Man(played by Lon Chaney Jr.)—there have recently been brutal murders at the hands of some kind of creature, but one of the town’s developers keeps trying to pin it on an immigrant who works for him. An artist called Charley (Alex Hurt) knows more than he lets on because it seems that every full moon he goes through extraordinary changes that he doesn’t quite remember the next day when he wakes covered in blood.
Fessenden has always recognised the allegorical potential of monsters, just like many of the original and classic Gothic authors. Blackout works perfectly as a werewolf movie without having to read any deeper, yet if you do go deeper there’s a lot happening centred on the conscious, and unconscious, damage straight white men cause in the lives of women, people of colour, and queer people. Charley, even being a well-meaning person, doesn’t understand how much destruction he’s caused until it’s too late, and by then he’s damaged nearly every single person who still cares about him. In reality, straight white men, on a global scale, have caused untold damage, and, in Western society, we’ve only just started to seriously address it over the past handful of years. The problem is, it’s hard for a beast to see the error of its ways because it’s blinded by the instincts that were bred into it, and there is no doubt about it: like in Blackout, men are beasts.
On an individual level, Blackout parallels the werewolf curse to alcoholism, as the first time we witness Charley’s transformation it comes as a result of drinking. On a societal level, Fessenden’s werewolf represents many traumatised men, too ingrained with toxic masculine values to go to therapy and blindly obsessed with the issues they have with their fathers/the legacies of their fathers. Charley’s so wrapped up in trying to figure out if his father was a good or a bad man, or worrying that he doesn’t have his “father‘s balls,” he winds up forgetting to worry about what sort of man he is, and the issues with his father, as well as his mother who left when he was young, become repressed emotions that he takes out on the rest of the world.
The werewolf curse in Blackout symbolises those bottled up male emotions that toxic masculinity doesn’t allow out, so they transform into a beast and explode from beneath Charley’s skin. In one scene, Charley talks to a priest who’s known him all his life and was friends with his father. The priest can see Charley’s pain barely contained beneath the surface: “It‘s okay to acknowledge trauma.” But Charley, like the typical macho male, brushes this off, believing his emotional pain is merely caused by the regular circumstances of life, unwilling to admit he’s been wounded. Everyone can see how tortured Charley is, to the point Miguel remarks: “You got the haunt in you.” No matter how many people try to help Charley, he continues to lock his emotions away, and they never fail to boil over, affecting those around him in shocking ways.
There’s no coincidence that Fessenden depicts Charley as a werewolf killing a couple the police reveal were gay and eventually attacking his ex-wife. Women and gay men have suffered at the hands/values of straight white men and the hegemonies of masculinity and heteronormativity. Charley’s werewolf killings reflect the damage of real men in the world, which often affects those most vulnerable or marginalised in society. The bloody icing on the terrible cake is when Earl (Motell Gyn Foster), a friend of Charley’s genuinely trying to help with his werewolf issues, winds up getting shot by a local cop. This is one of the most significant, devastating pieces of collateral damage in Charley’s werewolf wake: the mistakes and violence of a white man comes violently to bear on a Black man, and the fact it’s at the hands of police is even more relevant in America today than ever. Yet another bit of sad collateral damage in Charley’s life is Miguel (Rigo Garay), the Mexican immigrant whom the local developer is trying to have arrested for the murders. Charley, though trying to look after Miguel in some shape or form, is the reason Miguel is nearly torn to shreds by the locals. Because of Charley’s actions, a Mexican man is falsely accused of a horrific crime, and a Black man is shot to death by police. This might be a werewolf movie, but it’s awful close to real life.
Blackout is ultimately about the price others pay when straight white men refuse to deal with their traumas and daddy issues; or any emotional issues at all. In Fessenden’s film, men will literally become a werewolf and murder people instead of going to therapy. The werewolf has long been a metaphorical vessel for beastly urges inside because the transformation and the violence fit so well with the idea of repression. The beast inside Fessenden’s werewolf is that of toxic masculinity and its refusal to deal seriously with trauma.
Like the men who point outward at the world with rage, those who blame others (and often an Other, whether racial, sexual, gendered, etc) for the dissatisfaction in their lives, Charley is so eager to find a scapegoat for everything that’s wrong in his life that he leaves a trail of shattered life behind him wherever he goes. The saddest part of it all is that we can see Charley wants to do good: he tries to help his town, and tries to mitigate the damage he’s deflected accidentally onto Miguel. But, just as it is in real life, wanting to do good doesn’t matter if you, even inadvertently, still harm others. Charley’s the fictional reflection of many straight white men who consider themselves good men yet continue to do harm and make things worse in their communities. And there are simply too many of them; we’ll never have enough silver bullets.
When, in an open field under a blood moon, a couple making the beast with two backs is murdered by someone – or something – with animalistic brutality, suspicion falls on the sole eyewitness to the killing, the migrant worker Miguel (Rigo Garay), who claims the perpetrator was an hombre lobo, or ‘man wolf’. A much more obvious candidate for the killer is local painter Charley Barrett (Alex Hurt), who, immediately after the incident, disappeared from Talbot Falls for an entire month, leaving his restaurateur girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) behind without word – but Charley has the advantage of being white, at a time when Sharon’s father, the land developer Hammond (Marshall Bell), is cynically stirring up racial divisions in the populace to create a powerbase for himself, and is all too happy to make a scapegoat of an outsider like Miguel.
Now Charley is back in Talbot Falls, with a list of tasks that he wishes to complete during the day before finally meeting with his good friend Earl (Motell Gyn Foster), to whom he says over the phone ominously: “This is it, man, I hope you’re ready.” First he visits Hammond at a resort’s construction site, trying to convince his former boss to stop writing op-eds in the local paper that falsely accuse Miguel; then he asks the lawyer Kate (Barbara Crampton) to look into some filed papers from his deceased father that might incriminate Hammond in corrupt dealings and business malpractice; and he visits Sharon for one last time, knowing and accepting that she is now with someone else (Joe Swanberg). Like someone with a terminal illness, or like the suicidal protagonists in Louis Malle’s The Fire Within (Le Feu Follet, 1963), Sono Sion’s The Room (Heya, 1992) or Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st (2011), Charley has the air of someone on a farewell tour. Everyone notices. “You seem a little wounded,” Karen observes. “I know you’re hurting,” says Sharon. Even Talbot Falls’ pastor (John Speredakos) is worried about Charley.
In fact Charley does have a condition, and euthanasia is very much on his mind. For having brought us vampirism in Habit (1995) and updated the Frankenstein myth in Depraved(2019), now writer/director/producer (and all-round godfather of indie horror) stalwart Larry Fessenden turns to a different Universal monster, the werewolf, for his own special treatment. Blackout is so-called for the empty or at best impressionistic gaps in Charley’s memory on nights when the moon is full. These might be regarded as an ambiguous space where alternative explanations become possible to supplement the narrative lacunae. As Earl puts it: “I hope you are a werewolf, and not a serial killer, because that stuff is nasty.” Really, though, Charley’s unconscious rampages unequivocally involve a monstrous metamorphosis, seen not just through his own but others’ eyes.
In fact, the subtext of Blackout is less psychological than political. Talbot Falls is a microcosm of the United (yet increasingly polarised) States. At its centre is Hammond, a corrupt, divisive property mogul who, in his readiness to demonise Mexicans, to dismiss environmental concerns, to override rules and regulations, and to co-opt armed gangs of local vigilantes, is a clear Trumpian figure, described by Charley as the “self-appointed mayor of this liberal-leaning hamlet trying to rile up the locals, turning everyone against each other.” Hammond has an open antipathy towards the town’s Hispanic sheriff Luis Sanchez (Joseph Castillo-Midyett), and intends for his own gun-toting white henchman Tom Granick (James LeGros) to replace the official lawman. And if Charley, despite having a number of personal enemies, lashes out indiscriminately in his nocturnal attacks, targeting complete strangers, ‘good Samaritans’ and even a young boy, then guns here too – a real human technology rather than a mere creation of myth – similarly have a funny way of hitting the wrong targets, be they bystanders shot accidentally, or Black people shot more on purpose. This is America.
Amid road-lining campaign banners for and against ‘Proposition 7’ (concerning the construction of Hammond’s Hilltop resort), Charley is himself, like his community, split between being a champion of the local ecosystem and a danger to the social fabric. Whether his lycanthropy is an id-like expression of his shifting artistic spirit (the beginnings of his physical transformations coincided with the moment when he abandoned landscapes and “started painting these big gestural canvases, really letting loose”), or an embodiment of wild nature getting its own back on human encroachments and savagely restoring an imbalance (in a film where hunting and logging are highlighted), or just the result of another werewolf’s bite, Charley is a tragic figure, weighed down with horror and guilt for the atrocities that, however unwittingly, he has carried out, and still trying to find a way to draw something salutary from an impossible, involuntary predicament. Still, Charley is, as Earl says, “a man that got radicalised”, lured by the injustices around him to violent, destructive action. This is an ugly picture of America at odds with itself, although as Miguel, arguably the film’s true hero, says of the place that he has made his home (and that currently is seeking to imprison or even lynch him with extreme prejudice): “It’s a tough country, but we all love it.”
So once again, Fessenden takes very traditional horror materials, and weaves from them an utterly modern sociopolitical and ecological allegory. Here Lon Chaney Jr, who played Universal’s original Wolfman (in five films), may be duly name-checked, but this is as much for contrast as comparison. For Fessenden, as ever, takes an entirely independent route through these well-worn tropes, throwing up questions about our modern species’ connection to – and disconnection from – nature in a modern age of venality, chicanery and patriarchal greed, where senseless “combat and carnage” are in the ascendant, and a liberal, artistic outlook easily leads to despair.
Blackout comes with a strong sense of an ending. Decent, haunted Charley seems driven to carry out a plan involving apologies, amends and even corrections for past wrongs – not all his own – before facing up to an end that is very much his own. Yet the end need not be the end, as is suggested by an enigmatic, oneiric roadside coda, slightly defocussed to resemble one of Charley’s landscapes, and featuring an encounter between Charley and a second, mysterious figure played by Alex Breaux (resurrected from Fessenden’s Depraved1), at a limbic intersection between two very different tragedies in what is now Fessenden’s own loose MonsterVerse. Meanwhile Charley’s late estranged father, a locally celebrated lawyer but “not exactly the man his reputation made him out to be”, is ‘played’ in Charley’s old family photos by William Hurt, actor Alex Hurt’s real late father – in a film full of characters with daddy issues, and dedicated to Fessenden’s own dad. Here art eerily preserves, and the d(e)ad can live on.
strap: Larry Fessenden’s werewolf allegory uses a small town to stage the polarisations dividing America from its own humanity
Larry Fessenden’s “Blackout” seeks to eviscerate more than tender flesh.
Monster stories, creature features, if you will, generally are tales of outsiders. Dracula is but a lone survivor of a people trying to rekindle his species, Frankenstein’s creation is but a homemade newborn trying to find a place in a world not built for him, and there are ways in which to interpret the Mummy, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and many others as allegories for other issues of social exclusion or biological concern. It’s perhaps why the ending of Transylvania 6-5000 (1985) amused and touched me so much as a child as each of the so-called monsters were revealed to be people with various medical conditions, the misunderstanding of which or ignorance of created fear rather than compassion.
In his latest project, writer/director Larry Fessenden (Habit/Depraved) uses the wolfman as a vehicle to explore interpersonal relationships, social exclusion, ecological fallout, and the pursuit of capitalistic gains over human compassion. In just a few months, Charley’s (Alex Hunt) life has managed to spiral out of control. Beginning with the death of his father, then he and his longtime girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) started having trouble, and now there are murders taking place across the last three months that have placed his friend, Miguel (Rigo Garay), in the cross-hairs. Some are coincidence and some are the result of xenophobia, but Charley holds a strong belief that much of what’s happened isn’t just the result of corruption left to rot his town, but the work of a werewolf and it is he.
Fear is at the heart of Blackout. As a creature feature, there’s slashing and tearing with plenty of red crimson splashing the screen, something which will delight midnight movie fans. Each scene is executed via practical applications and makeup that harken back to the days before CG, where the illusion between reality and fantasy blurred, each gushing pump seemingly bringing with it the ending of a life. From the opening of the film to its challenging climax, horror fans desiring that most precious life blood will get their fill. However, the killings, disquieting as they may be to the viewer in presentation, are not what pump through the film, nor are they the main feature. They are merely a blood offering to amplify the terror and anchor the film within the horror genre. The werewolf isn’t the thing, in ideation or physical construct, which drives Blackout. It’s fear — fear of being a killer, fear of the unknown, fear of clear communication, fear of taking responsibility. Some of this fear is manufactured, purposefully and specifically, by characters in order to take advantage of it. Some of this fear is coopted in order to give characters permission to be their worst selves. Some of it is fear of shedding their public self in private, sharing of themselves with another in order to become the being they’re meant to be. My favorite fear being whether or not Charley really is a werewolf or has he experienced a psychotic break wherein even we see him as a beast and no longer a man. That’s a fear that truly chills and the execution of the confirmation holds nothing back. In this way, Fessenden’s writing seeks to eviscerate more than tender flesh, but also the ideas that make man the worst villain to himself and others.
Well into the film a character brings up the German word “umwelt,” explaining it as a perception bubble that all living things live within. In their words, animals can’t exist in a world of morals because animals only have their perception to drive them, a notion that separates humankind as our umwelt employs a social contract where right and wrong, good and evil, are defined and enforced (one way or another). In a way, this conversation brings a little philosophical weight to the narrative, itself lean and focused on keeping us mostly confined to Charley’s fairly isolated existence. Are the people of the town acting out of their own umwelt, therefore free of the social constraints that bind humanity, or is their fear permeating their perception, thereby weakening their moral constitution and making them susceptible to the will of terrible people?
If you’re unaware, this isn’t Fessenden’s first foray into horror-as-metaphor as his 1995 project Habitexplored addiction through a vampiric lens and his 2019 project Depravedexamined untreated trauma through a reworking of Frankenstein. Additionally, Blackout has its roots in an audio story from the audio podcast series Tales from Beyond the Pale that Fessenden co-created/produced with Glenn McQuaid until December 2020. Currently, the audio version of Blackout is listed as “coming soon” on the site and it’s unclear when or if it will release, based on the posted information. (Fans of the audio series will be delighted that there’s a near-exact callback image in the film to the audio story’s poster.) That stated, Blackout does include several Fessenden past-collaborators such as Timlin (Depraved), Barbara Crampton (Jakob’s Wife), James Le Gros (Stray Bullets), and Alex Breaux (Depraved). This translates to a film that’s already small in its execution feeling even more intimate. There’s comfort among the cast, coming across as familiarity in the performances — a necessity when trying to tell a small-town horror story in which everyone knows everyone and just about all of their secrets.
In keeping things as spoiler-free as possible, allow me to compliment Fessenden in marrying the expected with the modern in telling a werewolf story that’s more than just transformation, murder, and regret. He uses all of this to shift Blackout so that it’s also a story of the ways in which we allow ourselves to be manipulated by fear. How it doesn’t matter if you come from a liberal state like New York, in which the film is set, or a conservative one, if someone can tap that primal part of yourself, to work you into a frenzy, it matters not if one is man, beast, or something in between. Blood can flow. Though the film can be viewed as an ensemble piece, Hurt (Foxhole) as Charley is the anchor and it’s a performance that deserves being incorporated with other tortured protagonists whose choices don’t always go as planned and can’t be saved by good intentions. It’s a soulful performance that makes the project as a whole worth experiencing. So even when there are small, persistent items that stand out as, perhaps, too rushed to be considered realistic or so far into the supernatural as to detract from the stalwart anchors set, one lets them go as Charley’s pain and fear push us onward.
In 1995 Larry Fessenden gave the world his spin on the vampire movie with Habit. Later in 2019 came his version of the Frankenstein story, Depraved. Now comes his take on the werewolf mythos, Blackout. Set in a small American town, Blackout joins Charley (Alex Hurt), a man who believes himself capable of transforming into a werewolf.
As with any good monster movie, Blackout opens with murder. Filmed from the perspective of the hunter, the camera hones in on an amorous couple. Their frivolities are quickly interrupted and before you can blink there is carnage on the screen. The next day, as the police are investigating the scene, comes the information that this is yet another in a string of killings. Coincidentally, all the killings are spaced around a month apart. For well versed horror fans this information screams werewolf, but the town’s police are looking for a more grounded explanation.
The townspeople themselves are also looking for a scapegoat and have targeted one of the local Hispanic men, Miguel (Rigo Garay). Their reasons for this deduction are many, but they are mainly driven by racism and classism. Miguel himself is one of the first to recognise the threat to be that of an ‘hombre lobo’ – werewolf. He has reached this conclusion after a near miss with the beast, but he is of course accused of lying. Charley, though, knows Miguel’s words to be true and is on a one man mission to save himself and the town around him. As he tours the rural setting one final time he intersects with a variety of residents which shed further light on the equilibrium of the place.
Slow and steady, Fessenden takes time in setting the status quo of Charley’s community. The camera flits from citizen to citizen, offering glimpses into the lives and beliefs of those who inhabit the world. It is an expansive and eclectic array of both actors and characters, but the collection perfectly builds an ideal ecosystem for this story. Far more time is spent with these strangers than with Charlie, but it is all for a clever reason. The pitchfork wielding townsfolk were a recurring motif in the old Universal monster days, and these snapshots present Fessenden’s interpretation of them. By spending time with these people you start to understand their fears, though Fessenden is sure to never indulge their attitudes.
In Charley, Fessenden presents a sympathetic ‘monster.’ He is not the traditional archetype for the wolf-man. Yes, he feels remorse for his actions, but he is not as hysterical as some others throughout history have been. Instead, he is rational with the truth about himself and has a plan to ‘fix’ the problem. More focus is placed on Charley trying to mend bridges, especially with his ex, Sharon (Addison Timlin).
Whereas Depraved was an intricate reworking of the Mary Shelley classic, Blackout is far looser with its kinship to werewolf films. The bulk of Blackout is set during the daytime. There is less onus on the importance of the moon, and far fewer night time scenes. This is because Fessenden is more interested in the man behind the monster. When the beast is unleashed however, it is brutal and bloody. The design itself is kept classic, a clear homage to Lon Chaney Jr. A low-fi and low key approach grounds the fantastical
Whilst Universal tried, and failed, to rejuvenate their classic monster movies with the ill-fated 2017 movie The Mummy, Fessenden has been successfully recreating them right under their noses. His reading of the vampire, creature and werewolf are vastly different to the classic icons of yesteryear, but it is their difference that makes them excel. Fessenden’s cinematic universe (pay attention during the film’s coda for how they connect) highlights that audience’s do still care about these monsters, they just require a more stripped-back and human approach.
Opening with a bang, quite literally, horror auteur Larry Fessenden gives Fantasia 2023 audiences the premiere of his latest film, BLACKOUT. With previous titles like Depraved and Habit under his belt, it’s clear he is a classic monster movie fan. His complex modern-day versions give you the shivers and make you think. BLACKOUT is yet another perfect chapter in what I suspect to be a long line of Fessenden cult classics.
The ensemble cast is enormous. Joe Swanberg, Jeremy Holms, and Motell Gyn Foster add to the validity of Fessenden’s horror community building. Barbara Crampton, horror legend extraordinaire and a woman who appears in more movies than I thought humanly possible, plays Charley’s family lawyer with a touch of cougar for extra hotness. Rigo Garay brings relaxed authenticity to Miguel. His chemistry with Alex Hurt is electric.
Joseph Castillo-Midyett and Ella Rae Peck are a great team as the local cops. Their scenes together are a welcome break. Marshall Bell plays Hammond as the wealthy town villain with the precise amount of elitist disdain we need. Alex Hurt plays Charley with a passion and relentless do-gooder attitude despite his surmounting inner turmoil. His physical work is magnificent. He has a strangely calming presence, even through his sullen outlook. I could watch him all day.
The second half takes several tonal shifts, but you’re already into the narrative. Fessenden injects family legacy, environmental and racial politics into the narrative organically. Small town and small-mindedness read universal, never forced. We even get a subtle glimpse of MAGA idiocy. One of the most intriguing aspects is the film’s overall look. It could have been made in the same year as An American Werewolf in London, down to the ominous era soundtrack. The special FX makeup progression also possesses a timeless monster movie feel. Beautifully painted animation illustrates Charley’s physical and innermost turmoil.
Part nostalgia and part modern-day commentary, Fantasia 2023 gets Fessenden at his best with BLACKOUT.
Since long before the irksome term “elevated horror” was first coined, writer/director Larry Fessenden has been making the sort of movies that would likely be lumped under that label if released today. He’s previously taken fictional monsters like vampires (Habit) and Frankenstein (Depraved), along with a mythical creature from Native American lore (Wendigo) and applied a gritty and grounded approach far from traditional Hollywood conventions. With Blackout however he maintains his distinctive lo-fi style while also paying tribute to classic horror, in particular Universal’s 1941 production of The Wolf Man.
That movie famously starred Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot. Here, the fictional setting is a small American town named Talbot Falls. In The Wolf Man, Chaney’s Talbot had an estranged relationship with his father, the lord of a small Welsh village, which was ultimately reconciled. Charley (Alex Hurt, who looks like a cross between Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman but is actually the son of the late William Hurt), the protagonist of Blackout, has similarly lived in his father’s shadow, but there can be no reconciliation as his old man (portrayed in photos by William Hurt) recently passed away. Charley’s life is a mess. He lives in a motel room, has lost his painting job after being fired by local corrupt landowner Hammond (Marshall Bell), and has ended his relationship with Hammond’s daughter Sharon (Addison Timlin). He’s also dogged by alcoholism.
Those are the least of Charley’s issues however. On top of everything else, whenever there’s a full moon he sprouts fangs and turns into a werewolf. Having already claimed the lives of a couple of lovers enjoying a late night outdoors shagging session, Charley decides it’s best for everyone if he offs himself. With the aid of a friend, Earl (Motell Gyn Foster), he has concocted a plan to have his transformation captured on video before Earl shoots him with a gun loaded with custom made silver bullets. Before his act of assisted suicide he has a few things to clear up. Going through some of his father’s old documents, he’s found what he believes is evidence of corruption concerning Hammond’s real estate plans, which would have a detrimental effect on the local environment. He drops them off with lawyer Kate (Barbara Crampton), with whom he appears to share a sexual if not romantic history. He also hopes he can prove the innocence of Miguel (Rigo Garay), a Mexican immigrant whom Hammond is attempting to frame for the recent killings. Miguel and his entourage of Mexican labourers take the role usually occupied by gypsies in Universal horrors, that of the interlopers on the edge of town viewed with suspicion by the locals. Latinos in American films are often portrayed as a superstitious lot, but Fessenden is keen to have Miguel point out that the werewolf is a white man’s myth.
Fessenden’s blending of a schlocky monster movie with a drama based around political corruption on a local level is reminiscent of the early monster movie scripts of John Sayles (Piranha; Alligator; The Howling), and Fessenden blends the two as seamlessly as Sayles did before him. Like Sayles’ films, Blackout is something of an ensemble piece. While there’s a definitive protagonist in Charley, we get to spend time in the company of several supporting characters including the town sheriff (Joseph Castillo-Midyett), who has also made an enemy of Hammond by refusing to act as his hired gun, a role filled by Tom Granick (James Le Gros). There’s an entire scene devoted to Sharon and her new boyfriend (Joe Swanberg, channelling Tim Robbins in High Fidelity) preparing dinner before a werewolf attack. The various victims are given enough depth in their scant screen time to make us feel the weight of Charley’s guilt when he tears them apart with his fangs and claws. Talbot Falls resembles a real inhabited place by the casting of what appears to be amateur performers in some minor roles. The quality of the performances may vary, but we feel like we’ve gotten to know a lot of characters over the course of the film. Talbot Falls is as richly detailed as Stephen King’s Castle Rock, and a brief epilogue suggests werewolves may not be its only resident monsters.
Like Sayles, Fessenden imbues his film with political and human drama, but never loses sight of the fact that he’s making a monster movie. And it’s very much a monster movie in the old school sense. There’s no hiding the monster in the shadows nor any attempts to cloud the viewer’s mind with ambiguity. We’re shown straight up that Charley is turning into a werewolf! Lacking the budget or resources to pull off transformations on the scale of An American Werewolf in London or The Howling, and wisely shunning CG, Fessenden opts for good old-fashioned fake fangs and fur stuck on his leading man’s face. The effects here are pretty much as they were in 1941’s Wolf Man, with Fessenden portraying the transformation through dissolves, though at one point it’s detailed via an animated sequence that draws on Charley’s work as an artist.
If you’re one of those boring people who think Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon is ruined by the reveal of the rubbery monster in its climax, Blackout may not be for you, and some cynical and jaded modern viewers may well laugh at the image of the lupine Charley prancing through the moonlit woods in his shirt and jeans. But Fessenden hasn’t made a movie for those folks. This is a monster movie for people who actually like monster movies, made by a filmmaker who, unlike some of his peers, doesn’t feel embarrassed about working in the horror genre. Arriving soon after the release of an Omen movie that doesn’t feature Damien, Blackout is a refreshingly traditional approach to horror, one that proudly brings its monster out of the shadows.
Larry Fessenden has made a career out of demonstrating that genre movies have the same capacity to confront social issues as serious dramas. The defiantly independent filmmaker behind the New York-based production company Glass Eye Pix, Fessenden uses horror in allegorical terms, applying his scrappy, low-budget approach to sometimes traditional motifs. He created a modern Dr. Frankenstein in No Telling (1991), an early career feature that involves a mad scientist experimenting on animals, thereby addressing issues from the unethical treatment of animals to environmentalism. His breakout, Habit (1997), explored the alienation and self-destructiveness of an alcoholic loner within a vampire story. Years later, he returned to Mary Shelley territory with Depraved (2019) and took on the physical and psychological toll of combat and PTSD on US soldiers. Fessenden’s latest, Blackout, continues his tendency to reframe classic monsters with contemporary concerns, using a werewolf movie in the style of The Wolf Man(1941) in a story about matters of land development, the exploitation of migrant workers, and, of course, personal demons.
Blackout boasts a refreshingly classical werewolf look that counters recent offerings, most of which involve humans transforming into bipedal wolf creatures. The trend was popularized by a series of movies in the early 1980s that tried to outperform each other with their elaborate practical transformations—see 1981’s An American Werewolf in London and The Howling, and 1984’s The Company of Wolves. Effects wizards have been paying homage ever since. Cases where the main character transforms into a monster resembling the original Wolf Man from Universal Pictures, a clothed man-beast played by Lon Chaney Jr., remain far less frequent. Although exceptions include Jack Nicholson in Wolf (1994) and Benicio del Toro in The Wolfman(2010), most contemporary werewolf movies opt for a full lycanthropic transformation into a creature resembling an animal (see the Twilight and Underworld franchises), adding an element of spectacle into the presentation. So Fessenden’s adoption of a classical wolf-man design in Blackout gives the film a certain throwback appeal.
Following an old B-movie trope that suggests horror needs a death or nudity in the first few minutes to hook the viewer, Blackout features both. With that out of the way, the story takes place in a sleepy Pacific Northwestern town called Talbot Falls, a winking reference to Larry Talbot, the name of the original Wolf Man character from George Waggner’s film. The local cops even have badges that resemble pentagrams, “The mark of the werewolf,” according to the original movie. The story centers on Charley, played by Alex Hurt, son of the late actor William Hurt. The young Hurt emotes in a way similar to his father, including his uncanny intensity and a weariness behind his eyes, suggesting a deep-seated pain he’s masking, albeit unsuccessfully. The truth about Charley: he’s a werewolf. Hurt plays this artist and struggling alcoholic with the gravity befitting someone teeming with guilt and uncertainty over transforming into a monster and slaying innocents, only to wake up bloodied and with no memory of what happened.
Charley has spent the last month holed up in a motel, frantically painting and mourning the end of his relationship with Sharon (Addison Timlin). A series of killings has made the townsfolk jumpy, their fears stoked by Hammond (Marshall Bell), a local land developer and community leader. Hammond slings unfounded suspicions about an immigrant worker, Miguel (Rigo Garay), who witnessed the attack on two of the victims. But Hammond has his own troubles concerning a new resort project that may have falsified environmental contamination records. Most in Talbot Falls have no idea about the developer’s shady dealings, except Charley, whose late father (seen in candid photos of William Hurt) worked with Hammond. The few who know about Hammond don’t care because his contracts in Talbot Falls mean steady work, and that kind of apathy frustrates Charley. While he enlists an attorney (Barbara Crampton) to find evidence against Hammond, Charley makes the rounds about town, apologizing for the emotional damage he’s caused and planning to end his life with a silver bullet.
Viewers expecting a straightforward werewolf movie with sensationalized killings and horror-centric thrills may be disappointed. Although Blackout boasts a few jarring monster images and a shock or two, achieved mostly with inexpensive practical effects, Fessenden isn’t interested in delivering a horror programmer. Instead, the movie is a portrait of America seen through the perspective of an outsider, who is so ruined by his disenchantment that he’s given to drinking and lashing out at those close to him. Exploitative land deals, racist cops, militia groups taking the law into their own hands, and discriminatory leaders have caused Charley to retreat into his artist’s life. His inability to function as a productive member of Talbot Falls is symptomatic of people who feel powerless in the face of injustice. “You got the haunt in you,” Miguel tells Charley. But he doesn’t connect that Charley’s demon is the “hombre lobo” suspected of terrorizing the town.
Serving as the writer, director, producer, and editor, Fessenden finds a clever form-follows-function excuse to avoid showing elaborate werewolf transformations in his film. After the two local cops (Ella Rae Peck and Joseph Castillo-Midyett) discuss the German concept of “umwelt,” a word for how one’s environment shapes one’s perspective and how one sees the world, the director has an excuse to take us into Charley’s mind for his transformations. Rather than showing an elaborate change with rubbery effects or CGI, both of which would strain Fessenden’s usual budgetary limitations, the director opts for inspired animated sequences that look like paintings come to life. They show how Charley, the painter, sees himself through his art of choice. Elsewhere, Collin Brazie’s handheld cinematography adds a naturalistic style, while werewolf-cam visual effects recalling the wolf sequences in Bram Stoker’s Dracula(1992) give the attack scenes some frenetic energy.
While Blackout’s production values may look negligible even by the standards of today’s booming indie horror market, Fessenden draws excellent performances out of his cast of familiar faces. Genre veterans Bell and Crampton join Joe Swanberg, James Le Gros, Kevin Corrigan, and Michael Buscemi for a feature that might be laughable in another filmmaker’s hands. Fortunately, Fessenden brings narrative gravitas to a story that, not unlike Habit or many of his other features, is less about monster thrills than the complex central performance. Hurt sells every moment of the film, even if his facial prostheses don’t belong in a conversation about the best-looking screen werewolves. Hurt’s wounded persona and Fessenden’s portrait of Talbot Falls as a stand-in for America make for a compelling watch in a rare, worthy werewolf movie about a familiar condition of existential despair.
My notes on Blackout (2023), which opens today in US cinemas and on digital platforms.
Writer-director Larry Fessenden has been ticking off distinctive takes on major horror themes since The Frankenstein Complex, but previously tended to dwell on the wendigo as a way of doing a werewolf story (notably, in Wendigo). But he’s been working up to something more traditional for a while, doing a first draft of this as an episode of his audio series Tales From Beyond the Pale (in which he played the werewolf) and now expanding the situation in a film that’s a) a small-town state of the nation summary, b) a character study of an alcoholic artist, c) a quirky crime investigation and d) an old-fashioned man-beast on the prowl picture.
The setting is Talbot Falls, and troubled Charley Barrett (Alex Hurt) turns into a bipedal, torn-shirt, mouthful-of-fangs hairy prowler very much on the model of Universal Pictures’ Wolf Man (and not the one with Benicio del Toro, either) with none of your CGI big dogs. The son of a late lawyer (played in photos by the actor’s real father, William Hurt) who was in league with local big shot Jack Hammond (Marshall Bell), Charley is an amiable, obviously talented decent guy – but even before he got turned, he had issues. He’s found out his father and Hammond were involved in shady deals which have affected the community, which has wrecked his relationship with Hammond’s daughter Sharon (Addison Timlin). While Charley has a lawyer (Barbara Crampton) sorting through the files, Hammond uses the mutilation murders to stir up ill-will against a hispanic workforce he has imported to undercut locals in the building of a posh estate, Hilltop Heights, which might well be literally poisoning the town. Miguel (Rigo Garay), spokesman for the incomers, is also the only witness who says he saw a monster attack a young couple in the woods – and Hammond keeps nagging the cops (Ella Rae Peck, Joseph Castillo-Midyett) to arrest Miguel on no evidence, while local barflies (repped by Kevin Corrigan) are perpetually on the point of turning into a version of the old Universal torch-bearing mob.
Fessenden loves old horror movies and is unashamed of their tropes, but always finds ways of melding the material with the way America is going right now … the angry mobs stirred up by self-serving town blowhards have been a part of the monster movie since Frankenstein (1931) but the sense of manufactured division and frustration is all too contemporary (though there’s also sometimes a feel of the ‘social issues’ dramas Rod Serling wrote before he got to the Twilight Zine and discovered allegory). Like Larry Cohen, Fessenden seems incapable of writing a fill-in character. Everyone in his films feels real, has screen weight and seems like someone you could hang a whole movie on (which gives the death toll impact – you always have a moment of shock that someone you were warming up to or wanted to see more of is just suddenly gone). Tiny moments like the Sheriff realising why one dead guy has a picture of the other dead guy on his phone or Sharon’s slight irritation with the guy (Joe Swanberg) she’s got together with as a replacement for Charley are telling, sweet and sad. Fessenden is as well-known now as an actor in other people’s films – honestly, if you can get through any genre film festival without seeing him more than once you’re picking the wrong screens – and always makes space in his own films for niceties of performance, often bringing back players to elevate virtual bit roles (here, we get welcome returns from James le Gros and John Speredakos, who were leads in earlier Fessenflicks).
Also like Larry Cohen, Fessenden has the skills to make suspenseful, shocking horror cinema but often finds that isn’t what most engages him about the material. In the (crowded) canon of modern werewolf films, Blackout jostles with Late Phases, Wolves, Werewolves Within, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, I am Lisa, WolfCop, Wer, Howl, Eight for Silver and Kommunion – it’s among the most traditional of these in terms of the rules of monsterdom (and even the look of the monster, designed by Brian Spears) but least conventional in its storytelling, with necessities like the monster’s origin (which is shown) less important than the odd moments as human connections are made or missed and the portrait of a backwoods town in trouble. In the end, it’s haunting rather than horrific. NB: though the title is apt, it’s been used so often before that this particular Blackout might get shuffled down the algorithm, so be sure to seek it out.
The premise, like the ambient air of fatalism, owes as much to film noir as it does horror. A man wakes in a place he can’t remember arriving at, his body bearing the ravages of some misadventure, his memories a dense fog yielding no clues save a lingering sense of grave culpability. His waking life is likewise rife with a sense of closure and entropy: he’s started to abuse alcohol, he’s lost the woman he loves, he’s quit his job, and he’s struggling with unhappy truths about his recently deceased father. The man is a painter, and his works are slowly becoming sites of revelation. Despite bouts of amnesia, he knows in his gut that for the past three months, he’s wreaked some terrible violence upon innocent people. And he’s resolving himself to the understanding that there is only one way to bring all this chaos to an end.
Writer/director/editor/producer Larry Fessenden is a special filmmaker, rare in his commitment to forging independent, modestly budgeted genre films, steeped in tradition, that also explore possibilities of style, engage with the world in the present tense, and maintain a dogged sense of empathy for his characters, even if the majority of them are absolutely doomed. Blackout is a paragon of this approach, renovating the werewolf story by, ironically, going back to its roots, making several overt gestures of homage to 1941’s The Wolf Man, such as naming the town where the story unfolds Talbot Falls, Talbot being the name of Lon Chaney Jr.’s protagonist, who indeed falls perilously after being afflicted with a disease that renders him a subhuman killer. Charley (Alex Hurt), Blackout’s protagonist, seems like a nicer guy than Chaney’s creepy attempted cuckolder. Convinced that he’s responsible for a series of grisly murders, Charley devises a plan for his own extermination that will double as a public exposé of a local developer’s corrupt business practices and xenophobic scapegoating—despite the fact that this exposé will also tarnish Charley’s father’s legacy.
Fessenden fills the margins of this existential monster movie with vestiges of contemporary working-class disenfranchisement and rising tensions around race and migration, labor exploitation, and environmental decay. At its best, Blackout addresses these issues not through preachiness but rather through character development and attention to the everyday: the way the camera will linger on a worker going about his job as a scene draws to a close, the cheerfully cynical comments made by a motel proprietor, or the delicate manner in which a Latin police officer addresses an angry white mob. All such moments are elevated by an excellent supporting cast, which includes such familiar players as Marshall Bell, Kevin Corrigan, and the great James Le Gros. The film’s foreground, meanwhile, closely monitors Charley’s subjective experience, with Fessenden drawing primarily upon two rich resources: a series of unobtrusive, hauntingly beautiful, rhythmically alluring animated sequences, and Hurt’s wounded eyes, physical expressiveness, and almost palpable interiority. Regarding the latter of these elements, the film also benefits from a third, meta element: Blackout, like The Wolf Man, is in part a father-son story, and Hurt is the son of William Hurt, whose image becomes a key to the film’s backstory. The younger Hurt’s performance plays as a palimpsest of, on one level, his own ample craft, charisma, and life experience and, on the other, numerous echoes of his father’s unmistakable screen presence. (There’s also the fact that the film’s first depiction of Charley’s transformation, a very cool sequence in which we get to watch a werewolf crash a car, can’t help but remind us of scenes of Hurt Sr.’s simian regression in Altered States.)
Blackout is also enriched by echoes of its immediate predecessor and companion piece, Fessenden’s 2019 film Depraved, which explores core components of the Frankenstein story in a context riddled with 21st-century anxieties. Both films literally dovetail in a manner that’s clever and poetic, and they share several themes, as well as plots that hinge on the protagonists’ gradual emergence of memory. It has to be said that they also share a narrative structure that feels one act longer than you expect, at least one dopey death scene, and a fair bit of corny, hard-boiled, exposition-heavy dialogue that’s somewhat redeemed by a sense of knowingness on Fessenden’s part—a kind of curational approach to cliché, along with, again, Fessenden’s deep empathy and affection for his characters. These are horror films with heart. Genre maniacs can rest assured that these are also horror films with plenty of merciless savagery: tremendous care is invested in selecting and staging arresting moments of action, spookiness, and gore. Blackout is a tale of heartbreak, justice, responsibility, and the potential terror of true self-knowledge—and whoever makes it to the end in one piece is largely the product of sheer, incomprehensible providence.
LARRY FESSENDEN’S “BLACKOUT” PRESENTS A SIMPLE AND INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF GRIEF, REMINDING US HOW THOSE WE LOSE CAN HAUNT US IN VIOLENT WAYS.
“It is often noted that Frankenstein’s creature is the most tragic of the Universal Monsters; however, [Larry] Fessenden understands that the Wolf Man is the loneliest of all.”
Oh, Nadine Whitney, I couldn’t agree more with this quote from your take on Larry Fessenden’s latest, Blackout, which I amplify here in solidarity.
Before we begin, I must offer a confession. This is where my imposter syndrome takes over, my full moon equivalent, and I admit I have not seen another Fessenden film. Sifting through his writing and directorial credits, I fully appreciate there are some titles on my long-standing to-watch list. I debated popping our editor a note and recusing myself for this one. I decided not to, however, because I really enjoyed it. And sometimes, it’s nice to get a perspective from someone coming to a piece without the familiarity of an artist.
So here’s me, taking my first tumble with Fessenden and sharing my reflections with you.
Charley (Alex Hurt) is our main character. He is a broody artist, full of self-loathing and navigating grief after recently losing his father, with whom he had a complicated relationship. He is just the kind of messy, emotional individual that makes a good werewolf protagonist.
Charley splits his non-lycanthrope hours between trying to take down Jack Hammond (Marshall Bell) — Talbot Falls’ development-hungry baddie who threatens the integrity and future of the town and its residents — and protecting those he loves and respects. This includes Sharon (Addison Timlin), his ex-fiance and Hammond’s daughter; Earl, his sassy, guitar-playing best friend willing to cast Charley a paw full of silver bullets; and Miguel (Rigo Garay), a local Latino leader being unfairly accused of Charley’s crimes.
THESE NOBLE EFFORTS COUNTERBALANCE THE ABSOLUTELY HEARTLESS AND BLOODY RAMPAGES HE EMBARKS ON FOR THREE DAYS PER MONTH DURING THE FULL MOON CYCLE.
As I have mentioned in other reviews, I adore (ADORE) mythology and folklore. Stories that are centered around familiar characters and creatures are my jam. Wolves are particularly alluring to me as harbingers and/or agents of calculated and powerful violence.
Werewolves are particularly intriguing monsters in this category, as they are human with a shape-shifting ability.
Depending on who is telling the story, some individuals remember their actions while in creature form… some do not. Charley cannot recall his actions. However, the context clues (e.g., ripped and blood-spattered clothes, wounds that heal quickly) cause enough concern to prompt the actions described above.
What I enjoyed most about Blackout was the nature of the violence. While yes, there is plenty of claw- and canine-caused carnage to appease those seeking the splatter, the most damaging moments were the ones that slashed at my emotional underbelly.
You can feel Charley wrestling with the grief of his lost father and having to leave his fiance unexpectedly when they were actually deep in a cycle of closeness and connection.
“I felt I had to deal with it alone. I know I should have asked for help. I should have trusted what we had. But, I was never wired that way.”
While Blackout might not satisfy those hoping it would tread new ground and expand our view of a beloved Universal Monster, it effectively presents the humanity of one werewolf’s journey.
My attention was held easily by the likable nature of the leading and most periphery characters (even the fringe folks like Pastor Francis and Bob Kraus), moving visual elements (like the inclusion of the family photos and animated artwork), gentle nods to its source material (Talbot Falls, an overt Lon Chaney Jr. call-out), and the simple-yet-effective choices around make-up and effects (stand-outs were the flashbacks to the kill Miguel witnessed of the couple in the field and Charley’s hands and claws post-transformation).
If you are craving a monster flick, specifically a new Wolf Man entry, Blackout offers plenty to sink your teeth into.
Rest assured, my first foray into Fessenden’s work won’t be my last.
I am excited to report that Larry Fessenden has wrapped production on his seventh feature, “Blackout,” which stars Alex Hurt as a painter in a rural community who’s convinced he’s a werewolf. If you don’t know Fessenden’s work, you may as well remit your horror buff credentials now — or keep reading, because the persistence of this filmmaker’s lo-fi approach to horror over 40 years is a case study in its own right.
On the subject of horror movies with something to say, well, that’s what the 59-year-old Fessenden has done for generations. At 22, he launched his New York production company Glass Eye Pix and he’s built a remarkable filmography out of spooky horror movies doused in social commentary. (You can also thank him for serving as a producer and general advocate of fellow New York filmmaker Kelly Reichardt.). With the very recent exception of Jordan Peele, nobody has mined more for substance in modern monster movies than Fessenden, but the industry has yet to embrace his work to the extent it deserves.
“I’ve been living in this world of low-budget impatience for years,” Fessenden told me over Zoom this week. After spending nearly a decade scraping together the budget for his last movie, the stellar 2019 “Frankenstein” adaptation “Depraved,” Fessenden decided not to wait. He took a communal approach to the production, shot in New York’s Hudson Valley with local merchants donating props. He self-financed the production with a handful of investors in part using residuals from previous Glass Eye productions. “I just wanted to skip all the angst on this project,” he said. “There’s a rock ’n’ roll aspect to just going out and making movies quickly.” Fessenden laughed as he declined to comment on the precise budget. “Let’s just say it’ll be eligible for the John Cassavetes Award,” he said. (The Spirit Awards category highlights projects made for under $500,000.)
With his missing tooth and tousled hair, Fessenden looks like a genuine creature of the underworld. His movies feel that way, too. Their themes range from global to intimate, starting with the alcoholism at the center of his masterful vampire thriller “Habit” (1995) and continuing through the climate-change allegories of the “Frankenstein”-inspired “No Telling” (1991) and “The Last Winter” (2006). During that time, Glass Eye became a kind of mini-factory for substantial horror stories produced on a small scale, with Fessenden helping launch the careers of directors like Ti West (“Pearl”) and Jim Mickle (“Sweet Tooth”).
The typical Fessenden movie is made for a few hundred grand and looks like it, but not in a raggedy way. The smallness of his movies enhance their intimacy and give the eerie impression of a world coming apart at the seams. When I profiled Fessenden for the New York Times in 2011, I compared his collective and its support of no-frills genre filmmaking to Roger Corman, but Corman ultimately wormed his way into a Hollywood system that Fessenden keeps at arm’s length. “I was never good at the parties,” he said with a chuckle.
After acclaim for “Habit,” Fessenden navigated a number of studio offers that didn’t gel, for obvious reasons: He wanted to bring substance to the genre, and studios wanted market-ready products. They batted away his pitches for “Mimic 2” and a reboot of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Perhaps the greatest irony from this period is that Fessenden once pitched Miramax genre label Dimension Films an adaptation of Marvel Comics’ “Werewolf By Night,” decades before the MCU took off.
The recent black-and-white “Werewolf By Night” adaptation on Disney+ certainly provides an innovative riff on Universal monster-movie tropes, but it’s more of a superficial homage than an attempt to grasp the fundamental horrors at the root of the originals. “We’ve seen all kinds of werewolf movies,” Fessenden said. “To me, it’s a Jekyll-and-Hyde story, a form of madness, and a lot of my concerns are there. As the political system unravels, do you keep fighting for democracy or just keep leaning into the hysteria?”
Notions like that don’t translate into a tidy pitch deck. “In the end, maybe this is the zone I belong in,” Fessenden said. “I don’t mind. It’s a more organic approach to filmmaking. I have my hands in every department.”
Fessenden wasn’t wowed by the original “Halloween” in 1978, arguing that much of the discourse around that franchise was less about the movie than the life it took on later. “I thought it was just horror for horror’s sake,” he said. “I really liked the metaphorical grit of movies like ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ whereas ‘Halloween’ was just scary music for the sake of the next kill. It just felt like a spookfest.”
After “The Last Winter,” there was a period when WME represented Fessenden. For a few years, he was attached to direct an English-language adaptation of the Spanish horror film “The Orphanage” for New Line, with Guillermo del Toro as the producer. That project fell apart due to budgetary constraints while the rapid-fire pace of Hollywood’s IP hunger annoyed Fessenden again and again.
“My favorite agent email read, ‘Stephen King’s ‘It.’ Any int?’ He just wrote ‘int,’” Fessenden said. “I wrote back saying, ‘Sure, what about it?’ He’d never respond.” After the “Orphanage” project fell apart, Fessenden found out that his agent had dropped him. “If you haven’t had a hit by now, I don’t think they’re really looking for your cooperation,” he said.
Fessenden isn’t the biggest fan of Blumhouse, which resurrected the “Halloween” franchise among other commercial horror coups. While the company has managed to produce complex horror successes like “Get Out,” there’s a reason why Peele went on to start his own production company.
The Blumhouse model prioritizes low-budgets with the potential upside for key creative forces, but it’s still a factory and that can lead to a lot of rush jobs, like “Halloween Ends.” For all the talk of its box office being hurt by a day-and-date release on Peacock, I suspect this second sequel to a quasi-reboot might have found legs if audiences weren’t already exhausted by yet another “Halloween” movie. “Let’s be honest,” said Fessenden, who has yet to see the film. “We’re talking about the commodification of something that is supposed to be pointed and say something real about society.”
He cited the original “Night of the Living Dead” as the template that all modern-day horror filmmakers should consider. “It’s about society breaking down during Vietnam and the racial struggles of the time,” he said. “At their root, horror movies have to discuss things that are horrific. So I think it’s a problem to commercialize this genre.”
BLACKOUT: A New Film From Larry Fessenden Wraps Photography
It’s always a pleasure to talk about a new film from Larry Fessenden, one of the true bastions of independent genre filmmaking out there. Fessenden has just finished photography on his new film, a werewolf movie called Blackout, this month and now heads into post.
Fessenden has stuck to his roots, shooting around New York’s Hudson Valley and hired Brooklyn-based artist John Mitchell to create the paintings for the main character’s artwork in the film.
“My approach was to blend a naturalistic docu-style with the mythological tropes of the werewolf story, an ongoing interest to blend realism with stylization, and to fuse themes of contemporary society with classic monster movie clichés.”
His cast is also pretty great too: Addison Timlin (Little Sister, Like Me, Depraved), Motell Gyn Foster (Marriage Story, Foxhole), Joseph Castillo-Midyett (Equalizer, Death Saved My Life), Ella Rae Peck (upcoming Crumb Catcher), Rigo Garay (upcoming Crumb Catcher), John Speredakos (Wendigo, I Sell The Dead), Michael Buscemi (Habit, BlacKkKlansman), Jeremy Holm (The Ranger, Brooklyn 45), Joe Swanberg (You’re Next, Offseason), Barbara Crampton (You’re Next, Jakob’s Wife), James Le Gros (Foxhole, The Last Winter), and Marshall Bell (Total Recall, Stand By Me).
I mean, come on, a who’s who of Glass Eye Pix alumni back again for another Fessenden film?
Director Larry Fessenden is not done finding new truths in the classic monster tropes of his youth. He explored the story of Frankenstein with Depraved, vampires with Habit,and is now onto werewolves in his latest film, Blackout. In Blackout, Charley’s secret is he thinks he’s a werewolf. He can’t remember the things he’s done but the papers report random acts of violence taking place at night in this small upstate hamlet. Now the whole town must rally to find out what is tearing it apart: mistrust, fear, or a monster that comes out at night.
Coinciding with nighttime falling, the full moon rising, and an animalistic beast being released, a common reoccurring element found in werewolf movies is unique cinematography. For Blackout, Fessenden brought on director of photography Collin Brazie to map out the look of the film, which he describes as both natural and stylized. Getting inspiration from films like Fargo and Chinatown, Brazie approached the film with a somewhat understated 70s aesthetic. He explains, “It’s a bit loose and gritty at times. Sometimes the best approach to good material can be quite simple”. The end result is a modern take on the monster film. In the below interview, Brazie goes more in-depth about his work on Blackout.
DC: How did you become involved with Blackout?
Collin Brazie: I became involved with Blackout because I had worked on a previous project with the writer/director Larry Fessenden. I shot the film Foxhole that he produced via his production company Glass Eye Pix. We got along really well during the shoot and I suppose he liked my work so he sent me the script for Blackout. I was very excited to read it and of course was very interested in the approach to a werewolf story.
DC: How did you work with Blackout director, Larry Fessenden, to find the right look of the film?
CB: Larry and I had a nice amount of prep time before the film commenced, which is crucial when you’re shooting a low-budget film. I always try to be as prepared as possible so that you’re making the most of your time and not wasting precious minutes on set discussing a plan for a scene. I feel that being overly prepared allows you to loosen up a bit on set and try new ideas in a scene that may have popped up that morning.
Larry and I discussed the overall look of the film and each individual scene at length. We knew we wanted certain parts of the film to be handheld and certain parts of the film to be more controlled and fluid. Our main character, Charley, who is a struggling alcoholic, is erratic at times and we wanted the photography of the film to reflect that. Between the addiction issues and the fact that there is a werewolf on the loose – we wanted the camera to reflect the tension that Charley and the other characters were feeling. Of course, this is juxtaposed with a calmer and more controlled camera when Charley and the other characters are more at ease.
I approached the overall look of the film from a very natural starting point – attempting to give a grounded sense of realism to the supernatural story. Especially in the beginning of the film and through the second act I wanted to use the lighting to help ground the story. As the film continues, we let loose and become a bit more stylized. I think this offers a nice contrast between the two approaches: naturalism vs heightened reality. It’s interesting shooting a horror film where the film takes place about half during the day and half at night. I think it makes the night scenes feel darker and a bit scarier when they are contrasted against the daytime scenes.
I think the overall look of the film has a bit of a 70’s aesthetic and is somewhat understated. It’s a bit loose and gritty at times. Sometimes the best approach to good material can be quite simple. We definitely took some cues from films like Fargo and Chinatown and let naturalism lead the way.
DC: The early Universal horror films provided inspiration for Blackout. Can you elaborate on this?
CB: Larry and I are both fans of the Universal horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, notably Frankenstein (1931) and The Wolf Man(1941). What is wonderful about these films is that yes, they are about monsters, but they’re really more about society and humanity (or lack thereof). I know Larry’s films also deal with this idea of what is going on in society and what might be plaguing it at the time. The Wolf Man was a big inspiration in not only the design of the werewolf itself (less snout and doglike – more human characteristics) but also a bit of the structure of the screenplay. It has nice little nods to the tropes of small-town villages, preachers, and the villains within.
From a visual standpoint, we did reference a bit of fog, nature, and night exterior shots from the 1941 film, but it has all been updated for a modern take on the monster film.
DC: Barbara Crampton is somewhat of a horror icon, starring in everything from You’re Next to Pulse Pounders (1998). Can you talk about working with her on Blackout?
CB: Barbara is an icon and an absolute delight to work with. Very laid back and a pleasure on set. She and Larry have worked together a few times, most recently in the horror flick Jakob’s Wife. Since they are friends, she was happy to come shoot with us for a day on our film.
DC: In your opinion, what’s the best way to shoot a werewolf to make them look as menacing as possible?
CB: Haha, good question. I think shadows are key to making any monster or villain menacing. It’s all about where you put the light.
DC: You have no shortage of experience in the horror world. What sets this genre apart from others in how you approach your work?
CB: What is great about the horror genre is that you are able to bring so much creativity to the storytelling. Because it is supernatural you can get away with trying different ideas in lighting, composition, shot design, etc. No idea is too crazy; in fact sometimes the more nuts it is, the better. Even on a film like Blackoutthat takes a lot of its photographical cues from realism, you still get to take some creative license when stuff starts hitting the fan; how shadowy locations look or how much contrast you have on an actor’s face. When you’re approaching material, it all starts with the script and the characters—and in great horror films, those still come first.
DC: You used a lot of red and blue hues in the film. Can you talk about your thought process behind this?
CB: One other large aspect Larry and I discussed a lot in pre-production was what we wanted moonlight to look like in the world we were creating. Both Larry and I have a big aversion to the idea of this deep blue or steel blue moonlight that was very prevalent in the late 80s and early 90s. It feels a bit hyper-real to me and even though we were making a werewolf movie, a lot of our approach lighting and camera-wise we wanted to come from a place of realism. We wanted more of a silvery moonlight, with just a hint of blue to it. We both felt that held a sense of realism of what a full moon actually feels like.
Obviously, a film about a werewolf always has a bit of a ticking clock to it. The sun is setting, the moon will soon rise. But ironically, we wanted to use as little moonlight as possible. Whenever we were shooting night exteriors, we chose to use practical motivation from whatever sources may be in the scene, such as headlights, streetlights, etc. Only in situations where the moon was the only practical source in the story did we elect to use moonlight to motivate the scene.
We were able to play around with color a fair amount in this film. A lot of the red throughout the film was motivated by practical sources in the scenes.
DC: A lot of Blackout takes place outside at night, under moonlight. What would you say is the hardest part of filming under these circumstances?
CB: The hardest part of shooting night exteriors where only moonlight exists is exactly that – trying to make the moonlight look realistic, so that the audience will buy into it. Obviously, all moonlight is unrealistic to an extent, you’re taking artistic license with the idea of moonlight motivating a scene. But in a werewolf film, it is very important that the moon feels full and big. I think you have to decide where the moon is to introduce a nice edge light. Then the difficult part is how much or how little fill light to bring in.
For our purposes of lighting moonlit night exteriors, you’re attempting to make the world feel larger than it might be, and on an indie budget that is always tough to execute. But I am happy with the way it turned out.
DC: What are you most proud of in relation to Blackout?
Blackout was a very ambitious project. We shot on a pretty modest budget and when shooting indie films they always say “limit your locations, limit the cast size, don’t work with kids.” Well, we did the opposite. We had like 20+ locations and 20+ speaking parts. So for the first half of the shoot we were doing multiple company moves each day. It means you don’t have time to burn. You have to move fast and trust your instincts.
Canon C500 Cooke Panchro Lenses
COLOR 144 minutes
1.85 Aspect Ratio
SYNOPSIS
Charley’s secret is he thinks he’s a werewolf. He can’t remember the things he’s done but the papers report random acts of violence taking place at night in this small upstate hamlet. Now the whole town must rally to find out what is tearing it apart: mistrust, fear, or a monster that comes out at night.
LONG SYNOPSIS Charley wakes in a well lived in motel where he appears to have been living for some time. He packs and leaves for good. He spends the remainder of the day connecting to various people in the small upstate town where everybody knows your name. Charley is saying goodbye to the long-suffering love of his life Sharon, daughter of the town Patriarch, and settling his affairs with a strange urgency that culminates with a call to a friend Earl, saying: “You better be ready, I’m coming.” But Charley never makes it to his friend’s house: When the sun goes down he has convulsions while driving his car, goes off the road and ends up in a ditch. Charley is a werewolf. He attacks his rescuers and moves through the outskirts of town wreaking havoc.
Waking the next morning on the forest floor, he tries again to find his way to connect with his friend to fulfill the unknown mission. When he finally arrives at Earl’s the two confer on what has lead to the decision by Charley to end his life by a silver bullet. It does not go well for anyone involved, and Charley once again wakes by a stream with blood on his hands. Now the town is alarmed, calling for remedies to the unknowable menace, blaming convenient scapegoats like the local Immigrant workers who are employed to build a luxury resort by the town patriarch.
Worlds converge on the last night of the full moon and a town is rattled to its core with little resolve as to the real culprit: legitimate fear, innocent paranoia, deliberate misinformation, or the fantastical existence of a werewolf in their midst.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT With BLACKOUT I wanted to continue my exploration of the classic iconic characters first seen in the Universal monster films of the 30s and 40s—Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman—just as I had done with my 2019 film DEPRAVED, which explored the Frankenstein story in a contemporary context and HABIT (1997) which was a modern-day vampire tale. In embarking on these stories, I let the character of the monsters speak to me; the specificity of their afflictions suggest broader themes to explore. In the werewolf I saw a man at odds with himself, just as contemporary America as a nation is divided along political and cultural and economic lines. And as the Pastor in the film remarks: “A house divided will not stand.” Also, as always with my monster stories which deal with the fantastic, I try to explore subjectivity and the slipperiness of reality. With BLACKOUT, the main character is an artist, who by definition sees the world through a prism of interpretation and he is also an alcoholic, which is another condition that affects perception. Faced with these afflictions, Charley must ask: “Do I go on?” And that becomes the central preoccupation for the character.
This is a story I have been contemplating for many years; One fraction of this narrative was presented as an audio drama performed live on August 2nd 2019 for the Glass Eye Pix series TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE. And so the story lived in the back of my mind for some time and while producing the film FOXHOLE by my son Jack Fessenden, I started to envision a low budget way to make BLACKOUT with the same producing and key talent. On that set I met the actor Alex Hurt, who confided that he had great affection for the old Universal monster movies. I was also intrigued with the fact that his dad, William Hurt, was one of the great actors of the 80s. The potency of the patriarch and fatherhood is an ongoing preoccupation in my work. And I saw in Alex a pathos that I felt was perfect for the main character Charley Barrett. It gave me the encouragement to expand the script and try to launch the film. I returned to two private investors whom I have worked with before (gluttons for punishment), and I was able to capture the tax credit from DEPRAVED that came in after three years: one film paying for the next. I had a budget.
I was determined not to let an extremely humble bank account impede my forward movement and leaned heavily on my collaborators to begin putting the film together. My boots on the ground producers from FOXHOLE where able to commit, as did the Cinematographer Collin Brazie. I called the project a “Hybrid Film” to be shot with the smallest possible crew: mobile, nimble, like a documentary, except for certain big ticket sequences where we might need additional crew. Oh, and there was also a werewolf. I enlisted my regular makeup collaborators Gerner and Spears to design the monster. I wanted a flat-faced werewolf, less common nowadays than the snouted design from AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, THE HOWLING, or DOG SOLDIERS. But I was also heavily influenced by the drawings of Mike Ploog in the Marvel comic “Werewolf by Night” that debuted in the 1970s when I was a teenager and of course Lon Chaney and most recently, THE MONSTER SQUAD. Our creature was to be more psychological in its presentation to preserve the overall ambiguity about the affliction really affecting Charley Barrett. And because Hurt was so committed to the physicality of the role, he achieved a sculpted physique like the character drawn by Mike Ploog so many years ago.
The rest of the cast I assembled with the extraordinary help of Lois Drabkin, with whom I had worked on BENEATH, THE RANGER and FOXHOLE. Because of the nature of the story, cast members were asked to appear briefly and make a strong impression as members of this troubled community. I also worked closely with the Brooklyn-based painter John Mitchell who had contacted me out of the blue in April of 2019 and asked me to do a sitting for a portrait, one of the many random hapenstances that converged and became the DNA for the film that would become BLACKOUT. Locations, Cars, sets, props; all were enlisted through hand-shake deals and very direct negotiations with the people and vendors in Woodstock, Andes and Bovina. I wanted to put the film together holistically with little dependence on money, but more emphasis on relationships and smarts. At the same time, we did not skimp when an effect was needed as with our crane shot at the car wreck.
We shot quickly from a strict design of shot-lists and diverse talent in front of and behind the camera. I like to point out that the film is a master class in acting styles, there is such a range of approaches to the craft, and I would like to believe that the shooting style highlighted everyone’s contribution. In comparing this film to my recent Frankenstein story and my early film HABIT, I like to contemplate that it is the fundamental nature of each monster that has effected the creative parameters under which each film was made: The Frankenstein movie was stylized, created on a set with complete control. This film was made with great spontaneity like the wild animal it depicts and the tormented artist at its center.
I enlisted regular collaborator Will Bates (BENEATH, DEPRAVED) to create the score and he made a tactile soundscape of winds and strings that seem to emanate from the forest itself, with an overtone of bebop cords, my favorite era of Jazz. Sound design was essential as well, for only in the sound can we explore the real psychological depths and triggers that effect our experience.
While I shower great affection on these outsider figures that populate the Glass Eye Pix monsterverse, with characters possessing traits and personalities like Gods from Greek Myths or The Marvel world, I never want to lose sight of the fact that the essence of horror is that there is much despair in these characters, as they are dangerous, primal and destructive, they are a mirror up to our desperate selves. I think we can still learn from these horror tropes.
PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT OCT 2022
Independent production shingle Glass Eye Pix is pleased to announce director Larry Fessenden has completed principal photography on his seventh feature film, Blackout. The picture, which stars Alex Hurt as Charley Barrett, a Fine Arts painter convinced that he is a werewolf wreaking havoc on a small American town under the full moon, wrapped under the glow of October 8’s Hunter Moon, with pickups completed October 16. The film features an Altman-esque array of co-stars – some newcomers and many long-time members of the Glass Eye Pix stable – including Addison Timlin (Little Sister, Like Me, Depraved), Motell Gyn Foster (Marriage Story, Foxhole), Joseph Castillo-Midyett (Equalizer, Death Saved My Life), Ella Rae Peck (upcoming Crumb Catcher), Rigo Garay (upcoming Crumb Catcher), John Speredakos (Wendigo, I Sell The Dead), Michael Buscemi (Habit, BlacKkKlansman), Jeremy Holm (The Ranger, Brooklyn 45), Joe Swanberg (You’re Next, Offseason), Barbara Crampton (You’re Next, Jakob’s Wife), James Le Gros (Foxhole, The Last Winter), and Marshall Bell (Total Recall, Stand By Me). Casting was handled by Lois Drabkin, who previously worked with Fessenden on Beneath and The Ranger. The film was produced by Fessenden, James Felix McKenney, Chris Ingvordsen, and coproduced by Gaby Leyner. Collin Braizie was cinematographer, following his previous stint on the Glass Eye Pix production Foxhole. Paintings for the main character’s artwork were created for the film by Brooklyn-based artist John Mitchell. Blackout was shot at local shops and locations in New York’s Hudson Valley and serves as a portrait of the area including Woodstock, Olivebridge, Andes, and Kingston. Many local merchants generously supported the independent production. Fessenden explains, “My approach was to blend a naturalistic docu-style with the mythological tropes of the werewolf story, an ongoing interest to blend realism with stylization, and to fuse themes of contemporary society with classic monster movie clichés.” Makeup and special effects were handled by long-time Glass Eye Pix collaborators Brian Spears and Peter Gerner, who previously created the Frankenstein monster for Fessenden’s 2019 film Depraved. Comments Fessenden, “Yes, I’m competing with Marvel and Blumhouse to create my own Monsterverse, but at a very different price-point.” Fessenden’s 1997 film Habit is a vampire film of some distinction due to its gritty 90’s New York atmosphere and naturalistic treatment of the genre. Fessenden heads into post-production immediately, with his trademark impatience to get the work out in a timely fashion.
ALEX HURT, “Charlie” – Alex Hurt is known for Bonding (2018), Minyan (2020) and The Good Fight (2017) and Jack Fessenden’s FOXHOLE.
ADDISON TIMLIN, “Sharon” – Addison Timlin began her career with the 2000-01 National Tour of “Annie”. She performed every orphan role before taking over the role of Annie when she was 9 years old. Her love of stage continued to several productions of Annie including Papermill Playhouse and the Theater of The Stars Tour alongside John Schuck before going on to Broadway as Baby Louise in “Gypsy” with Bernadette Peters. Timlin was seen in the film “Isabel Fish”, directed by Lara Zizic for the Columbia Film Festival.
MOTELL GYN FOSTER, “Earl”- Motell Gyn Foster is known for Marriage Story (2019), Anya (2019) and Clickbait (2021).
JOSEPH CASTILLO-MIDYETT, “Luis” – Joseph Castillo-Midyett is known for The Endgame (2022), The Equalizer (2021) and Death Saved My Life (2021).
ELLA RAE PECK, “Alice” – She is well known for her portrayal of Lola Rhodes on The CW’s teen drama series Gossip Girl, she is also recognized for her role as Mia Bowers on NBC’s Deception. She spent her early years in Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York. She made her screen acting debut in a 2006 short film titled Lilly in the Woods and went on to play the role of Emma in the 2007 feature Freezer Burn.
RIGO GARAY, “Miguel” – Rigo Garay is known for Crumb Catcher, The Leech (2022) and Size Up (2021).
JOHN SPEREDAKOS, “Pastor Francis” – John Speredakos was born on August 11, 1962 in New York City, New York, USA. He is an actor, known for The Mind’s Eye (2015), Wendigo (2001) and Inside Man (2006).
MICHAEL BUSCEMI, “Andy” – Michael Buscemi was born on February 13, 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for BlacKkKlansman (2018), Blended (2014) and Smothered by Mothers (2019).
JOE SWANBERG, “Stuart” – Joe Swanberg was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1981. He moved around quite a bit growing up, even spending two years on an island in the Pacific Ocean named Kwajalein. He studied film production at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he developed an interest in emerging video technology and the creative possibilities of the Internet. He became an avid web designer in school, and did this to make money while he financed his first film, Kissing on the Mouth (2005). He also worked for the Chicago International Film Festival as “Travel Coordinator,” though he had no formal experience with this prior to accepting the job.
BARBARA CRAMPTON, “Kate” – Barbara Crampton’s career as an iconic figure in the horror/thriller genres has spanned three decades and continues to gain momentum. Currently, she is starring in and producing the genre thriller, Jakob’s Wife, which recently wrapped production in Mississippi. Immediately preceding Jakob’s Wife, Barbara completed producing a remake of the Stuart Gordon classic Castle Freak, based on the HP Lovecraft story with Cinestate/Fangoria. Prior to that, she completed work on The Colour of Madness, a thriller shot in Norway. Other features due to be released this year include Run Hide Fight with Thomas Jane and Treat Williams, and King Knight with Aubrey Plaza and Matthew Gray Gubler. Earlier she starred in and produced Beyond the Gates, which won best horror feature in its debut at LA Film Fest. More recent titles as an actress include We Are Still Here, Little Sister, Sun Choke and the award winning Adam Wingard film, You’re Next.
JAMES LE GROS, “Tom Granick” – It isn’t hard to make James Le Gros bust a gut laughing. Just call him Brad Pitt. Okay, so he doesn’t get $6 million a film or have his photo air-kissed by legions of swooning schoolgirls during recess. But if you’ve caught Le Gros’ quirky personality, you may wonder why he’s still toiling away. But this Minnesota native, despite being tight-lipped on Pitt, Le Gros will happily chitchat about his career. Le Gros says he isn’t very “LA”, although he did live there for a short while.
MARSHALL BELL, “Hammond” – A tall, imposing character actor with a penetrating stare, Marshall Bell has provided excellent support in a variety of roles and genres. He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 28, 1942, and had been working as a consultant, teaching senior executives how to improve their speaking skills, prior to starting an acting career relatively late in life. His connection was his wife, the veteran costume designer Milena Canonero, herself a winner of three Academy Awards and nominee for five more. He made his motion picture debut in the drama Birdy (1984), which was seen by enough people to effectively jump-start his career. One of his next few roles was one of his most infamous: the creepy Coach Schneider of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985). But the role that really got him noticed was as resistance leader George / Kuato in Total Recall (1990) (the role re-united him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, as he’d played a hit man in the comedy Twins (1988)). Other substantial film roles include a frightening homeless man terrorizing Bill Paxton in the movie The Vagrant (1992), Gordies’ emotionally distant father in Stand by Me (1986), and General Owen in the movie Starship Troopers (1997), re-uniting him with “Total Recall” director Paul Verhoeven. He’s done many TV series, including Good vs Evil (1999), Wiseguy (1987), The X-Files (1993), Tales from the Crypt (1989), Hill Street Blues (1981), House (2004), and Deadwood (2004). He’s also appeared in commercials and done voice-over work.
KEVIN CORRIGAN, “Bob Kraus” – A native of the Bronx, New York, Kevin Corrigan has been acting and writing since the age of 15. He made his film debut in Lost Angels (1989) and around that time, when he was just 17, his original play “The Boiler Room” was produced by the Young Playwrights Festival of New York. He has gone on to star in countless independent films and has made quite an impression. Corrigan is also an experienced guitarist and has played in several New York City bands.
MARC SENTER, “Ernie” – Marc Senter is known for The Lost (2006), The Devil’s Carnival (2012) and Starry Eyes (2014).
CODY KOSTRO, “Burt” – Cody Kostro is known for Harvest Bowl (2021), I’m Rapper Girlfriend (2020) and Mare of Easttown (2021).
ASTA PAREDES, “Asta Carter” – Asta Paredes is an award winning actress and filmmaker. She is most well known for starring in Troma Entertainment’s subversive horror comedy Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 (2013) and Cinema Epoch’s indie slasher Sociopathia (2015) . Paredes’ career also includes a co-star role on Shades of Blue (2016) (NBC) as well as lead roles in acclaimed shorts The Shadow Scarf (2017), Eros Point (2018) , and The Creeper’s Curse (2020) .
CLAY VON CARLOWITZ, “Clay Carter” – Clay von Carlowitz is an actor and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. A graduate of Kenyon College, he made his feature film debut as actor, writer and director in ‘The House in the Woods,’ before scoring the role of Eugene in Troma’s ‘Return to Nuke ‘Em High.’ Between film projects, he’s appeared in satirical comedy play ‘Ophelia’ with Gotham Dance Theater, ‘Danny and the Deep Blue Sea’ at the Robert Moss Theater in the East Village, was nominated for Best Actor for the short play ‘Entr’acte’ at the Strawberry One Act Festival and had a lead role in the Zoom play reading of Simon Bowler’s ‘Forger.’ His flair for the subversive led to roles in Kafka-themed web series ‘Under InspeKtion,’ Liam Regan’s horror comedy ‘My Bloody Banjo’ and Michael Walker’s meta-slasher ‘Cut Shoot Kill.’ Through his Abandoned House Productions banner (co-owned by wife Asta Paredes), he wrote, directed and acted in ‘The Shadow Scarf’ and co-produced Paredes’ ‘The Slightest Touch.’ After appearing as Malcolm in two seasons of widely-praised LA drama series ‘Here Comes Your Man,’ Clay filmed three features in a row, including a lead role in Aimee Kuge’s toxic romance-horror ‘Cannibal Mukbang.’ He continues to pursue dark, original, emotionally-charged work in indie film.
BRAXTON SOHNS, “Joe” – Braxton Sohns is an American actor, writer, and producer from New York. His career started by being cast in independent films in Upstate New York. Filling a multitude of roles on set Braxton has worked as an actor, camera operator, writer, and producer. He is recognized for collaborating with people such as J. Christian Ingvodsen, Sean Price Williams, Larry Fessenden, Jack Fessenden, James Felix McKenney, Joe DeSalvo, John Weiner, Danny Kuchuck, and Michael Spiller.
GABY LEYNER, “Freida” – Gaby Leyner was born on June 26, 1993 in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. She is an actress and producer, known for Cell (2016) and Mouchette on East 4th (2019).
LARRY FESSENDEN, Director/Writer: winner of the 1997 Someone to Watch Spirit Award, and nominee for the 2010 Piaget Spirit Award for producing, is the writer, director and editor of the award-winning art-horror trilogy HABIT (Nominated for 2 Spirit Awards), WENDIGO (Winner Best Film 2001 Woodstock Film Festival) and NO TELLING. His film, THE LAST WINTER (Nominated for a 2007 Gotham Award for best ensemble cast), premiered at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival and was distributed through IFC. Fessenden directed SKIN AND BONES for NBC TV’s horror anthology FEAR ITSELF and the feature film BENEATH for Chiller films. He wrote the screenplay with Guillermo del Toro of ORPHANAGE, an English language remake of the successful Spanish film EL ORFANATO. He is the writer, with Graham Reznick of the Sony Playstation video game UNTIL DAWN. Fessenden was awarded the 2007 Sitges Film Festival Maria Award for his work as a producer, actor and director in genre film, and he won the 2009 Golden Hammer Award for “being such an inspiring force in the industry.” In 2011, Fessenden was inducted into the “Fangoria Hall of Fame” and was honored by the UK’s Total Film as an Icon of Horror during the Frightfest Film Festival.
J. CHRISTIAN INGVORDSEN, Producer – Since 1982 J. Christian Ingvordsen has written, produced and directed 25 feature films which have been released domestically and internationally through HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures and more. Ingvordsen’s productions have starred Robert Mitchum, Shelly Winters, Telly Savalas, and Kathy Ireland amongst others. As a director, Ingvordsen has worked with Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts, Danny Aiello, Martin Kove, Dan Haggerty, Lance Henriksen, Robert Davi, Billy Drago and many others.
JAMES FELIX McKENNEY, Producer – Jim McKenney was born in Connecticut and raised in Maine. He spent much of the 1990’s working in Boston underground theatre with the House of Borax and Acme Theatr groups, as well as with their various offshoots, in many capacities: actor, stagehand, playwright, director and doorman. In 1995, he founded MonsterPants, then the publisher of underground comic books. Three issues of COW were published, for which McKenney was co-editor and publisher, contributing writer and occasional artist. Also from MonsterPants Comics was a special edition of PSYCHONAUT by Serbian artist, Aleksandar Zograf. McKenney lived in Los Angeles from 1996 – 2000 where he performed writing chores on numerous projects, including: comic books, music videos, internet magazines and motion pictures. After a number of feature film projects fell through at crucial points in their development, McKenney decided to take matters into his own hands and make his own movie, the tongue-in-cheek bloodfest: CANNIBALLISTIC! After returning to the East Coast, McKenney continued to work on independent films until he began his relationship with Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix in 2002. McKenney has been a collaborator on several Glass Eye projects, including THE LAST WINTER and THE WENDIGO animated series. He is the Associate Producer on the ScareFlix film series which includes director Ti West’s THE ROOST and TRIGGER MAN. McKenney is responsible for writing and directing the first film in the line, the quirky supernatural drama THE OFF SEASON, as well as the retro-styled killer robot film AUTOMATONS. Both are currently available on DVD. 2010 brought the debut of McKenney’s satire of Christian “scare” films, SATAN HATES YOU, which is now available on DVD and won Best Feature at the Coney Island Film Festival. In 2012, James hosted the weekly internet radio show “The MonsterPants Are On!” on Cult Radio-A-Go-Go. That year also saw the release of the creature feature HYPOTHERMIA starring Michael Rooker (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Walking Dead), which McKenney wrote and directed for Glass Eye Pix and Dark Sky Films.
GABY LEYNER (CO-PRODUCER) is a New York based indie producer & filmmaker. After studying film and philosophy at The New School, she began producing and directing shorts, music videos, and commercials. She is Co-Producer on horror auteur Larry Fessenden’s seventh feature film, Blackout, with Glass Eye Pix. She is currently helping produce Hank Bedford’s Eugene The Marine, starring Nick Nolte.
COLLIN BRAZIE (Cinematography) is a Director of Photography who specializes in narrative and documentary films as well as branded content. He received his MFA (Film Production—Cinematography) from the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University under Bill Dill, ASC. He has lensed a wide variety of projects, most notably the award-winning drama FOXHOLE for Glass Eye Pix and RETAKE for his own Closing Time Productions. RETAKE was acquired and distributed by Breaking Glass Pictures. After a theatrical debut in Los Angeles, the film has been released all over the world and is currently streaming on Amazon and Hulu. His other work includes an Emmy winning advertisement for the travel bureau of NYC and Emmy-nominated web shows for the CW and Hulu. His documentary and branded commercial work spans industries and locations, including numerous Fortune 500 companies across the country. When not on set he enjoys traveling, photography, live music and watching the latest Criterion release. He is based in New York City.
LOIS DRABKIN (CASTING) is a Casting Director who has worked extensively on a range of projects, most notably in independent film, including: the Sundance premieres NANCY, LISTEN UP PHILIP, RESTLESS CITY, NIGHT CATCHES US, and THE MISSING PERSON; the Independent Spirit Award acting-nominated features COLEWELL (Karen Allen), NANCY (J. Smith-Cameron) and GLASS CHIN (Marin Ireland); and the future releases of Indiewire Young Filmmaker to Watch Jack Fessenden’s FOXHOLE, and Harry Greenberger’s FARAWAY EYES, with Christina Ricci and Andy Karl. Additional credits include the first season of the 2014 Emmy- winning Showtime documentary series investigating climate change, YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, and as part of the casting teams for Steven Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS, the acclaimed HBO series THE WIRE, and Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES. A member of the Casting Society of America, Lois has been nominated for multiple Artios Awards for Outstanding Casting.
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Music by Will Bates
Songs by Tom Laverack, Still Rusty, Dinoboy, Robert O Leaver
available on all platforms from Milan Records
Limited edition CD available from Glass Eye Pix
