James Siewert’s epic animated video for the Just Desserts song “TENDER”
wins Best Music Video at the Portland Festival of Cinema Animation and Technology.
Attending with Siewert were Walker White and Lily Jane, GEP pals and able collaborators
in the year-long process of making the video.
Watch it HERE!

by Troy Anderson in New Movie News

Read the cast list for Blood Shine and, if you follow this corner of movies at all, you do not see a random assortment of names. You see a family reunion. Two families, actually, and they do not usually share a table.

The Cast List Is the Story

Blood Shine hits theaters and digital platforms on August 21 from Dark Sky Films, and before we get to the light-worshipping cult at its center, look at who showed up to make it. The headline is Larry Fessenden, and if that name does not immediately mean something to you, allow me to fix that. Fessenden has spent more than three decades as the closest thing American independent horror has to a patron saint, writing, directing, acting, and, through his shingle Glass Eye Pix, quietly incubating an entire generation of genre filmmakers. When Brooklyn Horror handed him its lifetime honor a couple of years back, we were in the room for it, and the tribute was overdue by about twenty years. He is the connective tissue of this whole scene.

Now look a little further down. Toby Poser is here too, and Poser is one quarter of the Adams family, the self-funded filmmaking clan behind Hellbender and Where the Devil Roams who write, direct, act, shoot, and sound-design their movies themselves from a home base in the Catskills. They are the standout of nearly every festival they touch, a genuine cottage industry of witchy DIY horror. And David Call, who plays the lead, is a Fessenden veteran, having carried the director’s Frankenstein riff Depraved a few years back.

Here is the part that seals the thesis. The families did not just lend their faces. The makeup effects come from Brian Spears, a Fessenden regular, and the visual effects come from Trey Lindsey, who does the same job on the Adams family pictures. Two of the most self-sufficient DIY horror operations in the country pooled their people, on screen and behind it, into a single movie. Wrap in a producing assist from Paper Street Pictures, the outfit behind Shelby Oaks and Scare Package, and distribution from Dark Sky, the reliable MPI genre label, and Blood Shine starts to look less like a standalone release and more like a group portrait of exactly who keeps American independent horror breathing right now.

A Horror Director Walks Into a Cult

The premise has a sly self-awareness that fits a film this inside-baseball. Set in a desolate stretch of upstate New York, Blood Shine follows Clara, a religious zealot who worships light through solitary, sacred rituals. Into her orbit stumbles Brighton West, a troubled horror filmmaker who has retreated upstate to finish the screenplay for his next picture and instead becomes the raw material for Clara’s increasingly extreme spiritual practices. She is convinced her sadistic ceremonies will transform him into a god, and she draws him down into a hallucinatory descent through faith, flesh, and the sublime. A horror movie, made by horror lifers, about a horror director who goes looking for a story and gets devoured by a real one. The joke is intentional, and it is a good one.

The folk-horror framework here comes with a twist worth flagging, because Clara does not worship the dark. She worships the light. That inversion puts Blood Shine in conversation with the brighter, sun-drenched strain of the genre, the daylight-cult tradition where terrible things happen in radiant meadows rather than shadowed woods, and it gives the film a distinct visual identity to match its arthouse ambitions. The pitch is a blend of gallery-ready compositions and genuinely visceral gore, which is a difficult needle to thread and precisely the kind of swing this particular gene pool tends to attempt.

The Couple Behind the Camera

Blood Shine is written and directed by Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks, a married team whose partnership is one of the more interesting recent additions to the genre. Their debut feature, the pandemic-set Alone With You, won a Fangoria Chainsaw Award and carried a notable producing pedigree, backed by actor Theo James and by Andrew Corkin, whose credits reach back to Martha Marcy May Marlene. That is a serious calling card for a first film, and the follow-up expands the canvas considerably.

Bennett is the more publicly visible half, and not only because she also stars here as Clara. She is a working actor with a real horror resume, including a role in the buzzy Shelby Oaks, the debut feature from film-critic-turned-director Chris Stuckmann that arrived through NEON with Mike Flanagan among its champions. Brooks, for his part, comes up through nonfiction, a cinematographer and documentarian who has shot series for a stack of cable networks and streamers, which is not the usual on-ramp to folk horror and may be exactly why the film reportedly looks the way it does. A documentary eye trained on a light-cult fever dream is a promising mismatch.

The performances have been the loudest talking point off the festival circuit, with Fessenden and Bennett singled out most often, which tracks. Put a thirty-year genre veteran and a director playing her own zealot in the same frame and you tend to get sparks.

Where and When to Catch It

Blood Shine did not come out of nowhere. It worked the serious genre-festival circuit first, premiering at FrightFest in London before stops that included Sitges, Brooklyn Horror, and the Telluride Horror Show, the exact rooms where this kind of film earns its reputation before it ever reaches a wider audience. Dark Sky then picked up North American rights and set it loose.

The film runs a tight 91 minutes and arrives in select theaters and across VOD and digital platforms on August 21. If you have any affection for the scrappy, interconnected world of American independent horror, the one that runs on shared crews, self-funded ambition, and a few dozen people who keep showing up for each other’s movies, Blood Shine is close to required viewing on pedigree alone. That it also appears to be a genuinely strange and striking piece of folk horror is the bonus. Worship the light. Watch your back.

Read in in New Movie News

‘Blood Shine’ Review: Ambitious Psychosexual Cult Horror Fueled by Faith and Body Horror”
—Matthew Johnson, Bloody Disgusting

Audience Member Allegedly Loses Consciousness During Intense ‘Blood Shine’ Premiere Screening, Transported to Hospital
—Brad Miska

Cinema Village
Q &A following the 6:15 Screening
Featuring directors Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks
with Fessenden Moderating

Get Your Tickets NOW

by Shelagh Rowan-Legg from ScreenAnarchy

I hope I’m not the only one out there who loves radio dramas and podcasts. It’s a lo-fi way hear all kinds of spooky tales, and often more accessible (and cheaper) that film and television (which I still love, of course). Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid’s Tales from Beyond the Pale has been a staple for horror audio fans for about six years. If you haven’t given it a listen yet, you have lots of episodes to enjoy. And a new one is available now, with a very special star. Check out the details and link below.

Ron Perlman, the critically-acclaimed star of Hellboy, returns this month to Tales from Beyond the Pale, the long-running radio drama from Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid. Having last appeared in the 2010 episode “This Oracle Moon”, Perlman is back in a big way with episode 59: Glenn McQuaid’s “Three Raps on the Buoy”.

In the latest Tale, two open-water swimmers (Perlman and Declan Reynolds) meet at a buoy, where hopes and secrets rise to the surface. The episode also stars Ashley Bell of The Last Exorcism.

Producer Larry Fessenden says, “As we near the end of Tales season six, I look back at the amazing contributions by our writers, directors, actors, sound designers, musicians, and poster makers and I marvel at the ambition and humility of this project. These aren’t movies, but they take the same level of care and commitment. It has meant the world to me and Glenn to continue this project for so long, a testament to our love of art making in a brutal world. We’re not done yet. Stay tuned.”

Declan Reynolds, who also co-stars in McQuaid’s The Restoration at Grayson Manor, adds, “Glenn and I bonded over losing our fathers at a young age, and “Three Raps on the Buoy” feels deeply connected to that shared experience. Working opposite Ron Perlman was a genuine pinch-me moment. At its heart, it’s a tale about grief, something human and universal.”

“Three Raps on the Buoy” is available for free alongside all other episodes on all major audio platforms, as well as directly through the Tales from Beyond the Pale website.

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Larry Fessenden—founder of the downtown production outfit Glass Eye Pix, and the city’s reigning maestro of uncompromising, fiercely independent genre fare—returns to Scary Movies for a 25th anniversary celebration of the landmark 2001 chiller that might be his most influential work to date. Erik Per Sullivan stars as Miles, the watchful 10-year-old son of photographer George (Jake Weber) and therapist Kim (Patricia Clarkson), whose life is irrevocably altered in the course of a snowbound upstate vacation. Driving through icy woods to a borrowed cabin, the close-knit family of Manhattanites are rattled when their car hits and injures a deer, attracting the ire of three local hunters who’d been tracking it for sport and profit. As his parents struggle to establish a fragile peace with their disgruntled neighbors, young Miles takes an interest in the story of the Wendigo, a voracious shapeshifter from Native American mythology. This sequence of events sets the stage for a formative encounter with vengeful nature and the elemental—yet indelibly human—mechanics of violence, unfolding across a wintry Catskills landscape that Fessenden’s 16mm camerawork infuses with an otherworldly glow. An IFC Films release. 4K restoration from the original 16mm camera negative by Vinegar Syndrome. Anniversary screening co-presented by Hollywood Entertainment.

I have always had a thing for maritime spookiness (see: Trawler), and I’d wanted for some time to write a pandemic-set piece about open-water swimming. Swimming was one of the things that got me through lockdown. On a small rocky beach in Howth, I would swim out to the buoy and rap my knuckles against it, in memory of loved ones now gone.

Three Raps on the Buoy grew out of those swims, but also out of my friendship and ongoing collaboration with Declan Reynolds (The Restoration at Grayson Manor). On the cover of the script, we say that the Tale is dedicated to the memory of our fathers, Patsy and Charlie, who were both taken from us too early and in tragic circumstances. That became increasingly important to us as the piece developed. Beneath the darkness, this is really a story about grief, and about the shapes it can take when we carry it for too long. So this one is for the Dads, and those that miss them.

The production also became something of a reunion for me. I got to work with my I Sell the Dead pal Ron Perlman again, and to reunite with sound designer John Moros, who absolutely kills it here. John has thrown himself into this Tale with an extraordinary amount of care and invention. He has followed the direction on the page to a T, while constantly finding ways to make the world richer, and more tactile. John has given it everything, right down to having me in his pool splashing about to capture the water we needed.

And, of course, I got to work with Declan, this time as both story collaborator and performer. Larry suggested bringing Ashley Bell into the mix, which was a wonderful idea. Ashley came aboard as Lauren and brought a warmth to the role that gave us an emotional dimension that I hadn’t quite anticipated.

Working with actors, and playing alongside them, is the best job in the world. There is something so genuinely good about a group of people committing themselves to the same imagined world and seeing where it takes us.

Ron, Declan and Ashley, thanks for swimming in this ocean with me, where the waters were never the same twice. “Always in flux.”

A big thank you my Pale Brother Larry Fessenden for steering the ship along with Jordan Gass-Poore’ and Rigo Garay, and to Lee Nussbaum, who lent a hand at every step of the journey, from the earliest days of  the piece right through to the finish line. His support, patience and good instincts are woven into this one too. 

Glenn McQuaid

Top: John Moros records McQuaid • Middle: Perlman, Reynolds, Bell • Bottom: McQuaid at Monkeyland

Listen to THREE RAPS ON THE BUOY

Satan Hates You On blu-ray