GEP pal Jim Mickle (STAKE LAND) is back this month with IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON,
a brand new psychological thriller that’ll be arriving exclusively on Netflix on September 27.
Starring Boyd Holbrook, Michael C. Hall, Bokeem Woodbine, Rudi Dharmalingam,
Rachel Keller and Cleopatra Coleman.
Score by GEP collaborator Jeff Grace.
Cast of FOXHOLE gathers for the screening:
Joe Yankick of Sales Company Yellow Veil Pictures with producer Jenn Wexler and the monster
Wexler and event hosts Matt and Katephotos by Nicholas Sansone
“MOVIE PICK
fun, scary, and tragic”
—L.A. Weekly
“thoroughly modern, utterly disturbing …
but there’s real heart and empathy here too.”
—Kimber Meyers, Los Angeles Times
“American indie horror king Larry Fessenden is just as much a pulp fiction aficionado
as he is a neo-gothic romantic: his doomed heroes and sorrowful monsters
are all messy, small people whose apparent sense of compassion
is often dwarfed by their titanic egos and their general cosmic insignificance.”
—Simon Abrams, Roger Ebert.com
“If Mr. fessenden had a gospel to preach it would be about
the virtues of low-budget, intellectually rigorous, topical, mayhem-rich movies.
Depraved is a perfect example… delightfully gritty, sometimes gruesome…”
—John Anderson, The Wall street Journal
“Builds empathy for its exploited creature.
Beginning in lovemaking and ending in loneliness,
the movie has an unexpected poignancy”
—Jeanette Catsoulis, New York Times
“Moving and frightening and exciting in its intelligence”
—Michael Gingold, Rue Morgue Magazine
“serious but not pretentious”
—John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
“a triumphant piece of outsider cinema
which will sear itself onto the consciousness like Promethean fire.”
—Jenny Kermode, Eye for Film
“diagnoses the rot of our era through
the shifting personalities and power dynamics of solipsistic men.”
—Steven Scaife, Slant
“CERTIFIED FRESH”
—Rotten Tomatoes
Musings of a Filmworker: As his latest opus, Depraved hits theaters, indie horror maestro Larry Fessenden takes a moment to remind himself exactly why he makes movies.
I’ve had an odd couple of weeks, so I thought I’d share some thoughts about them, and about work, show biz and cinema.
I spent the summer making a film called Foxhole with a small crew of artisans. It was directed by my son Jack, who is 19. It’s very difficult mounting a no-budget film nowadays. Though it’s my stock and trade making no-budget films, I haven’t been involved in the nitty gritty for a while, lucky enough to have had people at my company Glass Eye Pix like Jenn Wexler to do the heavy lifting on these productions. But Jenn has gone off to focus on directing and this movie was for Jack, so I had to step up.
I had help, don’t get me wrong. But working on behalf of my son made the struggle more acute, I think; I was very protective of the director. And the film was ambitious, so it crept beyond the bounds of a home-spun DIY production. Everything from negotiations in the casting process to dealing with a payroll company seemed invasive and bureaucratic, like I was stuck in a Terry Gilliam film with an excess of paper-pushers and hoops to jump through. It seemed aggressive, somehow; we were working with an incredibly low budget, so why were these institutions intruding on our process? Even the bank would get in the way of us doing business: Every time we moved money around, it seemed like there was a three-alarm fire, with alerts and codes impeding basic transactions.
And then as soon as Foxhole ended, I was tasked with overseeing the completion of a series of behind-the-scenes featurettes about my own film, Depraved, which I finished a year prior and is in theaters this week. It was an odd experience, decompressing from one film while watching behind-the-scenes footage of another. Both had been very personal enterprises. Core crew members from Foxhole also worked on Depraved, so there was a continuum to the vibe and philosophy that got these movies made. Depraved had taken years and years to set up. It hadn’t been easy.
Reflecting on making movies on the fringe of the industry with little financing leads inexorably to the question: why do this? Why try to make original, hand-crafted movies in the face of such adversity? It doesn’t get easier with time. If you’ve made enough of them, you know it’s not for the financial payoff – that fantasy dissipated some time ago.
I guess, for me, the answer is simple: cinema. Like Al Pacino in The Godfather Part III, even if I wanted to walk away, it would just “pull me back in.”
Cinema is an intoxicating art form, never mastered, but always beckoning. All the decisions that go into the creation of a single shot in cinema — the choice of the lens, focal length, color, lighting, camera movement, art direction and props, the visual effects, the ephemeral moments captured in an actor’s performance, all the uncontrollable elements unfolding in the frame — combine to create a unique image. Every take in a film is a record of the effort that went in to it, a document of the moment in which the shot was executed. Butt that up against another shot, and that is the essence of cinema: The psychological impact of seeing one image juxtaposed with or flowing into the next, enhanced with sound design and music — this is the vocabulary of moviemaking, and when it comes together and speaks to you, it is alluring and potent.
Creating a movie is a campaign to make as many of the right decisions as possible, one after another in the building of a shot, a sequence, a scene, a story. There are myriad considerations in play, and the trick is to make good decisions in the face of the harsh realities of limited time, money and creative options. All the wars with the paper-pushers leading up to and during a production are waged to create a space in which you can make the best creative decisions. At any budget level, filmmaking is an artisanal process, mixing new technologies and old techniques in a hierarchical construct of rank and cooperation.
When we make cinema, we become kin to an amazing family of iconic artists who have also wrestled with this art form, people so beloved we know them by nicknames: Marty, Hitch, Stanley, Werner, Woody. I don’t mind going on record as saying that it is movies I love; I know there is good television, but it feels like a writer’s medium. (For any executives reading this, I do have a couple TV pitches …) Movies are succinct by definition. “Be efficient. Show, don’t tell,” they taught me in film school. (Not that I actually went to film school.) The greatest tool that can be wielded by a filmmaker is the design of the image, the order in which information is revealed. Hitchcock spoke about “pure cinema,” by which he meant storytelling through the construction of shots to manipulate and transport the viewer.
Picture, if you will: the big-wheel driving down the hallway at the Overlook Hotel.
Picture: the overhead slow motion tracking shot of the carnage in the Taxi Driver finale.
Picture: the dolly in/zoom out to Chief Brody at the beach in Jaws.
Picture: descending from an overhead wide-shot of a party to the close-up of a key clasped in Ingrid Bergman’s hand (Notorious).
OK, OK, famous shots, but I was going for the familiar. There are also images and sequences from Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Polanski, Murnau, Cocteau, Welles … the list goes on.
Of course, everyone today is surrounded by images. Now there are screens at the bank, in taxis, on the subway platform, at bus stops, and in everyone’s pocket. Moving pictures are everywhere. Maybe the only reason to employ a term like “cinema” is to reclaim some reverence for the medium, some understanding of its power and for the effort it takes to create.
So, back to the last few weeks: I was reflecting on the difficulty and exhilaration of filmmaking while editing the behind-the scenes footage of Depraved. I often edit the BTS features myself as a way to say farewell to a project. I’ve cut BTS epics on the making of many Glass Eye Pix movies, including The Last Winter, Beneath, Stray Bullets and Bitter Feast. I enjoy finding the hidden narratives and threads in the found footage. Again, it comes down to the language of film, the essence of cinema: The edit is where the story is revealed. All this is to say, cinema is about the act of putting images up against each other, building a rhythm with the material that creates meaning and mood. And it is a celebration of process, the extraordinary act of gathering a group of people together to make something that never existed before: collaboration in service of a single vision.
It has been fortifying to reflect on this process, so fraught with angst and disappointment, and take the time to assess and recharge. Maybe it’s been a good couple of weeks after all.
Cherish cinema. For viewers and makers, it is vital.
Henry (David Call), the doctor in Larry Fessenden’s “Depraved,” isn’t actually called Frankenstein, but he’s the contemporary equivalent. A onetime Army surgeon, Henry suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and a maniacal need to make positive use of his harrowing experiences. What he learned about death, he believes, he can use to create life.
The result of this obsession is a bundle of stitched-together body parts known as Adam (Alex Breaux), whose brain we meet while it’s still inside the skull of its about-to-be-murdered previous owner. That organ’s memories — often surrounded by bright bubbles of light, as if trapped in a lava lamp — help bond Adam to his creator, whose battlefield flashbacks are equally destabilizing.
In time, their relationship grows quietly touching; yet if Henry’s motives seem pure, those of his cynical business partner (Joshua Leonard) are anything but.
Shot in just 24 days in Brooklyn, N.Y., “Depraved” updates Mary Shelley’s classic tale with a coating of wartime trauma and medical-breakthrough profiteering. Making the most of his limited budget, not unusual for the prolific Fessenden, he has produced possibly his most coherent and visually polished work to date. The makeup effects and lead performances are excellent, and Fessenden’s signature cheek (two strip-club employees are called Stormy and Melania) never tips into silliness.
Though overlong and leaning predictably on old-school horror setups — like the beautiful barfly (this one is played by Addison Timlin) who trustingly toddles home with the monosyllabic weirdo — “Depraved” builds empathy for its exploited creature. Beginning with lovemaking and ending in loneliness, the movie has an unexpected poignancy: At the end of the day, it seems, all a monster really wants is a girl of his own.
Review: Depraved Views Modern Society Through the Lens of Frankenstein
For much of Depraved, Fessenden’s focal point is essentially the monster’s brain, which starts in the body of a man named Alex (Owen Campbell) before being unceremoniously transplanted to its final container in Adam, whose ghastly scars and stitches betray his unnatural heritage. Aside from vestigial flashes of his former life, Adam is a vessel to be filled with the perspectives of those around him. Fessenden devotes long stretches of the film to that learning process, an enthralling canvas for his usual bag of editing tricks.
As Adam’s brain develops and reconfigures, the screen is covered in green blots, time-lapse constructions, hyperactive movements, montages, and other music video-esque trappings that somehow are never incongruously showy so much as a mesmerizing fit for the material. In Wendigo, such flourishes followed the film’s spiral of supernatural unease, and in Depraved they give Adam’s learning process an odd, hypnotic beauty. Fessenden imposes brain scans and firing synapses over the screen as characters’ voices echo for an effect that compares these parts of the human body to the fingers of tree branches or the forks in a peaceful forest creek. Adam’s thoughts and feelings are natural, even if his existence is not.
His hair grows, his speech patterns diversify, he reads, and we learn what Henry deems important by what he teaches Adam as foundational, or what he doesn’t teach him at all. “Gravity is your friend,” one lesson goes, and then Henry drops a bouncy ball. Adam may not learn how to shake hands until he meets Polidori, but he learns how to play ping pong. In his loneliness, Henry has built himself a buddy, albeit one he may control and whose interests he may dictate. When he teaches Adam about music, he mentions Bach and Beethoven because they’re important, but you sense him skipping to the important stuff, to the music he personally likes. He’s the date who invites you over to tell you about his record collection.
At the museum, Polidori and Adam linger on a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, noting the similarity between the painter’s ear and Adam’s, which is discolored and conspicuously sewn on. But Van Gogh cut off his own ear; no one cut it off for him. So who’s the artist in this relationship? Is it Adam or Henry or Polidori, who supplies the body parts and the money and is named for John William Polidori, the writer who both played a small role in the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and himself penned “The Vampyre,” one of the first vampire stories? With bad blonde hair and names for strippers including “Melania” and “Stormy,” Fessenden paints him as a Trump-like figure, a talentless bloodsucker.
The comparison is far from graceful. Though Fessenden’s films leave no mistake as to what they’re about, the characters of Depraved feel overly prone to calling out the obvious, ensuring that each name-drop and reference is processed appropriately by the audience. But if, as in the somewhat baggy final 30 minutes, the film’s thematic reach exceeds its grasp, it remains firmly focused on its thesis of Frankenstein as a lens for examining modern society. Throughout Depraved, Fessenden catalogues what personalities and power dynamics have shifted and what hasn’t changed at all. The filmmaker diagnoses the rot of our era through these solipsistic men that pour their prejudices and their insecurities into Adam, an open book eventually read back to its authors with a violence they cultivated themselves.
The Films of Larry Fessenden: Vol 2
Wendigo & The Last Winter
The Films of Larry Fessenden: Vol 1
Habit & No Telling
The Innkeepers
Limited Edition Blu-Ray
The House Of The Devil
Collector Edition Blu-Ray
WENDIGO Figures
From Glass Eye Toyz
CRUMB CATCHER Blu-Ray
From Arrow Video
BLACKOUT BLU-RAY
From Dark Sky Selects
FOXHOLE BLU-RAY
From Vinegar Syndrome
9 Tales From Beyond The Pale
on Amazon!
THE LARRY FESSENDEN COLLECTION Blu-ray
on Amazon!
BENEATH Blu-ray & DVD
on Amazon!
