February 17, 2023
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

From The Gingold Files: A Fangoria WENDIGO review from 2002

From Mike Gingold: Welcome to The Gingold Files, featuring my past reviews and articles for Fangoria.com that are celebrating “anniversaries” this week, but have long been lost in cyberspace. This time, we’ve got reviews of Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo, Robert Parigi’s Love Object, and others, plus Gary Oldman talking about Hannibal, Matthew Modine on making his horror debut with Altar, and more!

Review: WENDIGO
An archive review from The Gingold Files.

BY MICHAEL GINGOLD · FEBRUARY 14, 2019, 9:55 PM PST

Despite rumors of its demise, the quality independent horror film has proven itself alive and well in the past year, if sometimes difficult to find. 2001 saw a strong crop of low-budget horror features, both foreign and domestic, come to light, and a high-water mark has been set early in 2002 with Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo. If many genre films that approach its quality follow in the next 10 months, it’s going to be a hell of a year.

The New York-based Fessenden made an underground name for himself with his previous feature, the downtown vampire film Habit, but the skill for character-based horror he demonstrated there truly finds full flower in Wendigo. Literally leaving Habit’s urban milieu behind, the new movie follows a city family—commercial photographer George (Jake Weber), his psychiatrist wife Kim (Patricia Clarkson) and their young son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan)—as they drive to a vacation at a farmhouse in wintry upstate New York. Before they even reach the place, their peaceful plans go awry, as George hits a deer that runs in front of their car.

Right from this point, Fessenden presents a scenario in which already upsetting situations can have even direr consequences, setting the stage for further unease to come

One of Fessenden’s achievements is that he’s able to evoke a sense of rural menace without condescending to the region or its people; nor does his depiction of the citified George stoop to obvious yuppie clichés. That’s a tribute to the director’s talent for creating very specific people and eliciting strong performances from his actors, with Weber and Clarkson lending nuance to their husband-and-wife characters, Sullivan just terrific as their observant, sensitive son and Speredakos genuinely menacing as the hunter with a grudge. The simple human interaction between these characters carries the story for a long while before the supernatural elements become pronounced, and Fessenden even leaves the fact of the Wendigo’s existence up to debate, with questions of its reality tantalizingly unanswered. Is the monster real, or just a legend that Miles seizes upon to deal with his own fears? Or, as the climactic scenes suggest, does it not only exist, but actually respond to the emotions of one who, like Miles, is conscious of its presence?

This is not to suggest that Wendigo is some kind of existential exercise, but rather that there are plenty of ideas underpinning its haunting, moving and ultimately quite chilling story

READ WHOLE REVIEW HERE

September 29, 2020
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

WED 30 SEPT: WENDIGO unspools at the Woodstock Film Festival


watch the original trailer, newly restored


Glass Eye Pix kicks off its 35th year anniversary celebration
with a DRIVE-IN screening of Fessenden’s 2001 film WENDIGO
at the Woodstock Film Festival
Q&A with Fessenden and Annie Nocenti before the show

WENDIGO
stars Patricia Clarkson, Jake Webber,
Eric Per Sullivan and John Speredakos. 

“…creates tension and fear out of thin air…”
-Roger Ebert CHICAGO SUN TIMES
“Fessenden approaches the themes and thrills of the classic American horror movies
through a determinedly modern approach, as if John Cassavetes had been working for
Universal in the early 30’s.”
– NEW YORK TIMES
“A lean, brainy horror fable … blurs the distinction between reality and myth,
spiraling us into a harrowing deluge of panic and fright.”
– VARIETY
March 27, 2020
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

GEP Quaranstream: WENDIGO movie & comic available online

Directed by Larry Fessenden.

Starring Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, John Speredakos and Eric Per Sullivan.

“…one of the best indie features in years..”
– Fangoria

“…creates tension and fear out of thin air…”
– Roger Ebert Chicago Sun Times

“A filmmaker with an uncanny gift for the creation of unsettling moods…
Fessenden manages to use snow, light and wind to create a potent, chilling dreamscape.”
– L.A. Times

Adaptation of the screenplay for Larry Fessenden’s WENDIGO. Working in tandem with Fessenden, illustrator Brahm Revel worked with the film’s location stills and design concepts and his illustrations served as a blueprint for the film’s shoot.

Comic available on Comixology.
Stream Wendigo on Shudder.

January 25, 2020
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

Shudder New Arrivals include Glass Eye Pix titles LIKE ME and WENDIGO

Our favorite horror streaming service has added
Glass Eye Pix to their roster of February titles.
Bloody disgusting has the skinny:

We’re always excited to see what’s coming from Shudder each month, and February 2020 is going to be loaded with fresh new arrivals.

Like Me (Director: Robert Mockler)
A masked YouTuber draws fame, followers and a few vocal haters from her increasingly dangerous videos. This trippy, “wonderfully twisted” (per IndieWire) SXSW selection features an alienated Addison Timlin (Little Sister) and a morally dubious Larry Fessenden (The Dead Don’t Die) as unlikely companions on a drug-fueled, neon road trip that goes where you least expect it. Starring: Addison Timlin, Larry Fessenden, Ian Nelson (Also available on Shudder Canada).

Wendigo (Director: Larry Fessenden)
A blue Volvo makes its way through the fading light of a chilly winter evening in Upstate New York. Kim, George and their eight-year old son, Miles, are city dwellers stealing a weekend away at a friend’s country farmhouse. But a fluke accident sets off a chain of events that alters their lives forever and conjures up the ferocious spirit of the Wendigo, a Native American myth made manifest in Miles’ imagination. Starring: Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, John Speredakos and Eric Per Sullivan (Also available on Shudder Canada).

See Full List HERE

April 12, 2019
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

Slash Film: WENDIGO “The Best Movies Streaming Right Now”

Wendigo Now Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

If you saw the new Pet Sematary, and were intrigued by the legend of the Wendigo that’s mentioned briefly in the film, you might want to check out Larry Fessenden‘s Wendigo. A low-budget affair, Fessenden knows exactly how to stretch his budget and create an effective, creepy chiller. Jake WeberPatricia Clarkson and Erik Peter Sullivan play a family who decide to take a vacation from Manhattan and head to a cabin in heavily wooded upstate New York. The trip runs into trouble almost immediately, when the family runs afoul of a group of rude, confrontational hunters. Once everyone gets to the cabin, things only get weirder, as some sort of malevolent presence seems to be lurking about. Is it all in the heads of the characters, or is there something supernatural afoot? You decide.

See Full List HERE

April 9, 2019
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

Looper: WENDIGO “After you see Pet Sematary, watch these movies”

Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo doesn’t share any talent with Pet Sematary, but you could argue that it shares a villain. The Wendigo is a demonic creature from Algonquian mythology. Living in the woods of the North Atlantic region, it eats people, and in some versions of the story possesses people and causes them to eat each other. Like Pet Sematary, Wendigo focuses on a family that leaves the city behind only to find that there’s a terrifying presence in the New England woods.

George (Jake Weber) wants to relax in a cabin with his wife Kim (Patricia Clarkson) and young son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan), only to end up facing an evil presence bearing down on them. Miles encounters a Native American shop owner (Shelly Bolding) who tells him the legend of the Wendigo, and Miles becomes convinced that’s what’s in the woods — and perhaps inside his father as well. As the wall between reality and myth appears to collapse, the Wendigo eventually appears onscreen far more directly than in Pet Sematary.

Read Full List HERE

February 25, 2019
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

Fessenden discusses WENDIGO on Geeks and Creeps Podcast

From Geeks and Creeps: “This month our Creature feature is the fearsome Wendigo,
and we have an interview with Wendigo expert and film director, Larry Fessenden.”

October 17, 2018
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

Glass Eye in the Catskills!

Join us this weekend at the Great Western Catskills International Film Festival,
hosted by GEP pals James Felix McKenney and Lisa Wisely.

FRIDAY 10/19
The Ranger
7:00PM

Only A Switch
9:30PM
Q&A with director Michael Vincent

SATURDAY 10/20
Wendigo
The Last Winter
3PM
Q&A with Fessenden

Tickets available NOW

September 26, 2018
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

Revel week continues with GEP project Manitou Valley

Enjoy a teaser trailer for MANITOU VALLEY from 2003.
Add the comic book to your collection,

also available for digital download on Comixology.

From Glass Eye Comix comes a tale inspired by Larry Fessenden’s indie horror film WENDIGO.
This 29-page full color comic book was written by James Felix McKenney and drawn,
inked and colored by Brahm Revel (Guerillas, X-men).

Meet Brahm Revel at
New York Comic Con!

June 8, 2018
Share:
Facebook Twitter Email

HOME IS WHERE THE HORROR IS.

On the occasion of the opening of the new horror flick HERIDITARY, one of GEP’s favorite authors Jason Zimmerman (SHOCK VALUE) writes about a new era of horror in The New York Times.

 From the article:

Moving into territory once the preserve of prestige dramas, horror has never been more bankable and celebrated than it is right now. And while evil clowns and serial killers at sorority houses still haunt young viewers (and make tons of money), we’re in the midst of a golden age of grown-up horror. Hushed and character-driven, this mix of indie fare and blockbusters works ferociously on adult anxieties in an age of dislocation.

Part of the reason horror has long targeted young viewers is that it’s harder to scare adults. We have seen too much, including other scary movies. But that experience can be used against us. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote that the strongest kind of fear was that of the unknown. But the older you get, the less unknown there is. Vampires, werewolves and zombies don’t frighten like they once did. But ghosts still do — when they remind us of what we have lost.

This weekend, check out HEREDITARY in theaters and then cozy up with Fessenden’s home horror family drama from 2001, WENDIGO

');