“weird and wild… a truly subversive work of art.” — SHOCK CINEMA
We follow Marc (Don Wood) a homicidal maniac driven by demons buried deep within his soul, and Wendy (Christine Spencer) Marc’s polar opposite who lives life fast and hard without a second’s thought to the consequences. Their separate paths will eventually cross, but will it be on the road to salvation or the highway to hell?
CAST: Don Wood, Christine Spencer, Angus Scrimm, Reggie Bannister, Debbie Rochon, Michael Berryman, Larry Fessenden
The Lunachicks, New York City’s legendary punk rock heroines, reflect on their crusade for equality as they hurtle towards a spectacular 20-year reunion. Unsung superheroes of the 1990s independent rock world and a force of nature, they inspired generations of young women with their musical chops, Spinal Tap-like antics, and uncensored defiance of the sexist status quo. Now, 30 years after their teenage debut, we meet Gina, Theo, Squid and Sindi as they convene to write their memoir, Fallopian Rhapsody. Interweaving contemporary vérité footage shot over eight years with archival video and a candy-coloured palette of photos, art and music, this feature documentary brings the band’s history to life while following their poignant and triumphant journey back to the stage.
Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ends today after another fantastic week-long run. Thanks for including me and honoring the work that Glass Eye Pix gets done. Thanks to Jenn Wexler for emceeing. And thanks for the bloodbag cocktails. See y’all next year… if we make it to next year. ~Larry
McCarthy-era paranoia. The AIDs epidemic. Post-9/11 Trauma. Scary movies have always reflected our biggest fears … and spun them into box office gold.These are frightening times. Of this, there is no doubt. We may even believe there’s never been more to fear. And for some populations, that’s true. But humanity has always lived in frightening times.
Since we first cast shadows onto cavern walls, we’ve made things to fear. Over time, those shadows evolved into performers donning masks, authors putting ink to paper, and filmmakers harnessing technology to project our nightmares onto the screen as we returned to our cave-dwelling roots to sit in the dark with others. We are a horror people. And as the world has gotten scarier, horror has been there to reflect back our fears.
The rise of Hollywood and independent filmmaking in the 20th century created a lasting dialogue between what we see in the fear-seeking news, and what films are made in response. Early American horror movies of the mid-1920s and 30s, particularly those produced by Universal Studios, brought the great literary tales of horror and folklore to the silver screen. The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933), Werewolf of London (1935), and all of their various sequels and crossovers through the ‘40s were tied to European stories and history, providing motion pictures with a level of prestige and literary merit, until the sequels started getting sillier and sillier, though nonetheless charming.
… Larry Fessenden, who had been making short films since the late ’70s, hit the feature film scene with No Telling (1991), an environmentally and ethically concerned Frankenstein story, and Habit (1997), a raw reimagining of vampire lore through the lens of addiction. … Even familiar subgenres popularized in the ’70s were given a new vibrancy in films like Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation (2015), which looked at grief through the lens of a suicide cult, just as cult personalities attempted to control America. Jenn Wexler’s punk-slasher The Ranger(2018) centered on a group of teens making a stand for their own space in America as a deranged park ranger attempts to enforce rules of patriarchal oppression.
… While fans of IP-shackled sci-fi and superhero movies are crying “woke” at every turn, horror has carved out enough seats at the table for everyone to have a voice, and those voices are growing louder.
So, what’s next? Where will the 2020s go from here? What can we expect from the 2030s? America faces a major turning point in just a few weeks. It would be nice to have fewer things to fear, but regardless of the outcome, we’ll do what we have always done. We’ll cast shadows and somehow, once again, we will manage to find ways to explore fears.
For Larry Fessenden, horror is everywhere, and eternal.
Larry Fessenden, through his production company Glass Eye Pix, shepherded many low-budget, independent horror films into the world. For decades, as he’s done this, he’s also carved out his own career as a writer/director (and actor – he turns up as one of the radio performers in the epilogue to Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon) of unique, emotional, often political horror movies.
One aspect of Fessenden’s films that distinguishes them from most of what’s done in the genre these days is the way he takes classic horror ideas, and tropes, from literature and cinema, and with all respect to what came before him, twists them so they reflect his own modern concerns. The first of his features to use this approach is his fifth, Habit from 1995. Starring Fessenden as Sam, an alcoholic waiter in New York, and Meredith Snaider as Anna, the mysterious women he obsesses over, Habit (streaming on AMC+) is Fessenden’s take on a vampire movie. Using the slow submission to the power of the vampire’s bite as a metaphor for alcohol addiction, Fessenden – giving a very good performance here, as does Snaider – never overplays Sam’s alcoholism, until, that is, Anna’s undead poison starts to grind him down, making him increasingly blank and stumbling, which his friends, naturally, chalk up to his drinking. But crucially, for all that, Habit remains a legitimate vampire film – Fessenden isn’t playing, he doesn’t think he’s above the genre. He’s just taking it seriously, which is a rare enough thing.
Fessenden’s next film to use this classic/modern perspective was Beneath(streaming on Shout Factory), from 2013. This is Fessenden’s “lake monster” movie and was not, for once, written by him. The screenwriters were Tony Daniel and Brian D. Smith, and the film itself has shades of both Jaws and Stephen King’s classic short story “The Raft” (as well as that story’s film adaptation, as part of Michael Gornick and George Romero’s Creepshow 2). In contrast to other Fessenden films, which tend to be filled with emotion and a kind of melancholy, or bittersweet, hope, or at least sense of justice, Beneath is a cruel, deeply cynical film. Six friends, about to depart for college, travel to a kind of tucked away lake, not frequented by tourists. They take a boat out on the water, and are soon attacked by a giant, meat-eating fish. In the course of this assault, they lose their oars, and therefore can’t row back to shore. So they’re stuck. What follows is a complete moral breakdown on the part of three of the four young men, the death of one of the young women, and the desperate attempts by the remaining woman, Kitty (Bonnie Dennison) to keep everyone’s consciences intact.
Which she fails to do. It’s important, though, that this remaining woman is no angel. A fair amount of the tension between the characters comes from the revelation that she’s cheated on her boyfriend (Chris Conroy) with his brother (Johnny Orsini), but she also tries to keep everyone from choosing a friend to sacrifice to the fish so that they might live. But here, Fessenden and his screenwriters, show no mercy, and underline a kind of immoral toxicity that rises to the surface in three of the men (two of whom, played by Griffin Newman and Orsini, are truly hateful), and how that can overwhelm any attempts by Kitty to keep their ethics in check.
Fessenden’s most explicit melding of classic horror with present day sensibilities came with his next film, Depraved(streaming on AMC+), from 2019. This, to me, is Fessenden’s masterpiece. In his version of the Frankenstein story, Henry (David Call), an Army medic suffering from PTSD, finds a way to revive the recently dead (if they’re dead too long, even a matter of hours, then it’s no dice).The result of his ill-advised scientific ambition is a reanimated corpse Henry dubs “Adam” (Alex Breaux). As Adam re-learns the basics of life, history, and science from Henry, we learn about Henry’s relationship with Polidori, the man with the money behind Henry’s project, and the one of the two who sees nothing but dollar signs when this scientific miracle goes public.
The viewer knows early on who Adam was – or who his brain belonged to – before his random murder, but gradually we learn how and why Adam got where he is now. As does Adam, and what he learns enrages him. Already, and through no fault of his own, Adam is violently unstable, and by the end of Depraved he’s on a rampage. That his horrific existence is the fault of greedy men, and men of science who have no sense of the terrible nature of their ambitions, is too much for Adam to handle. The innocent die with the guilty, as they did in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel. Rarely have the concerns of 200 years in the past felt so relevant in the present day.
Finally, in 2023, Fessenden released Blackout(streaming on Tubi). This is his werewolf movie, and, as most werewolf movies do, it concerns itself with the secret bestial nature of mankind – specifically, of men. In the film, Alex Hurt plays Charley, an alcoholic who received his lycanthropic curse before the film begins. Again, Fessenden uses an age-old supernatural horror idea as a stand-in for alcohol abuse, and the out of control behavior it can lead to. Charley is so far gone that when we meet him, he already wants to die, in order to protect loved ones, and innocent strangers, he might hurt, or kill, when he changes into a werewolf. As in Habit, Fessenden uses horror to tell a story of tragedy, and to make a film that is as much a straight drama as it is a horror film. Blackout also addresses bigotry against immigrants, when a local businessman tries to pin the responsibility of a rash of murders sweeping through the small town where Blackout is set, on a migrant contractor.
So, like Depraved before it, ancient horror finds a home among the greed, selfishness, carelessness, and basic human indecency of the world around us today. For Larry Fessenden, nothing ever changes. Horror is everywhere, and eternal.
Glass Eye Pix is the fierce independent NYC-based production outfit headed by award-winning art-horror auteur Larry Fessenden with the mission of supporting individual voices in the arts. Read more...
