Glass Eye Pix and co-producers Zabriskie Films and Visualsuspects are pleased to announce the world premiere of Aram Garriga’s ambitious portrait of Christianity in American Culture entitled AMERICAN JESUS at the 2013 Woodstock Film Festival on Friday Oct 4th followed by its international premiere at Sitges Film Festival Oct 11-20th.
Indiewire has the exclusive poster art for AMERICAN JESUS. (See it here.) Big thanks to artist Uri Moline for the design.
Check out the trailer below, and learn more about the film at the official website, AmericanJesusTheMovie.com.
James Siewert has wrapped phase 1 of production on The Past Inside the Present. The ambitious animation project is a cyberpunk allegorical tale of a couple who have the ability to renew their dying relationship by plugging directly into recordings of their memories. When their illusion breaks, they must face the barren reality of the present.
The film is produced by Larry Fessenden and Chris Skotchdopole, and it stars Miles Joris-Peyrafitte and Schuyler Helford. James previously directed music videos as part of GEP’s music video project. Check the videos out here and here.
TALES creators Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid discuss the birth of the series, the production behind each episode, the sardonic TALES host, the wave of horror anthology in the audio realm, and much, much more.
Singer-songwriter/animator Voltaire, whose collaborations with GEP include the original TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE animated announcement and the animated short “Odokuro”, has released the rough mix of a new song entitled “The Devil And Mr. Jones”. The song is a tribute to actor Doug Jones – who starred in the 2008 FEAR ITSELF episode “Skin and Bones,” which was directed by Larry Fessenden – and its lyrics mention Fessenden himself. The first track to be released from Voltaire’s upcoming album Raised by Bats, “The Devil And Mr. Jones” is available to stream on SoundCloud.
Ain’t It Cool News is reviewing the new season of Tales From Beyond the Pale, and this week their review focuses on Clay McLeod Chapman’s “Like Father, Like Son”. Head to AintItCool.com to check out the whole post:
“This Frankenstein-ian tale is a gritty and dire story that most likely will churn your stomach and make you twist with unease. It’s a somber tale about a scientist working on a formula which reanimates dead tissue and, wouldn’t you know it, on the night he is celebrating his breakthrough, he gets into a car accident resulting in the death of his son. You see where this one is going, right? Sure the concept is predictable, but what makes it so effective is the fantastic voicework from Fessenden as the distraught scientist and the other members of the cast, especially that of the reanimated son. The sloshy and sloppy way the monster speaks brings forth all sorts of imagery, which is what these radio plays are supposed to do. The final grueling scenes are gory and splattery and all sorts of wrong and I loved every second of it. With the use of sound effects and some slurred speech, in my mind this was a story that would have made H.G. Lewis proud in the way the grue is wallowed in. Another fine episode from one of the coolest radio series around.”
Season 2 of Tales From Beyond the Pale is available for download on iTunes, Audible, Amazon, and the Tales Online Store.
A blue Volvo makes its way through the fading light on a chilly winter evening in Upstate New York. Kim (Patricia Clarkson), George (Jake Weber) and their eight-year old son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan), 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.
With stark simplicity, this eerie fable draws us into the potent imagination of Miles as he struggles to make sense of a wicked and arbitrary tragedy. Writer/director/editor Fessenden (HABIT, NO TELLING) crafts a kaleidoscope of sounds, images, puppetry and cinematic tricks to make a visceral analogue film-poem about existential angst, the power of myth, the relativity of revenge and the perpetuation of aggression through time.
“As of this past Friday the 13th, Season 2 of “Tales from Beyond the Pale,” the inventive radio drama horror series from Glass Eye Pix founder Larry Fessenden and director Glenn McQuaid, is now available for purchase independently via its online store.
If you were a fan of films like I Sell the Dead, The Innkeepers, The Last Winter (directed by Fessenden) or Stake Land, this is the company that brought you those films. Episodes for the new season were filmed live in New York and feature Vincent D’Onofrio, Sean Young, James LeGros and Fessenden himself – a fantastic character actor in his own right. The finished product is a classy, performance-driven version of “Tales From the Crypt” that’s reminiscent of the Old Time Radio shows featuring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Vincent Price.
Speaking with both Larry and Glenn, it’s apparent how much effort and creativity the two have put into this production along with everyone else involved from the actors to the designers.
Dread Central: I remember working on Fangoria Radio a few years ago and we kind of had a Glass Eye Pix night with Debbie Rochon and Dee Snider on the air and I think we played a good chunk of Graham Reznick’s radio play. I don’t know if you guys remember that but I was wondering if he was instrumental in getting this up and running since he was already doing something like this.
Glenn McQuaid: Basically, the idea sort of came out of the desire to get more content out there from ourselves and all of our collaborators without having to jump through all the hoops you need to get a movie made. In that respect, “Tales” grew from an idea to just get more out there. Having said that, just having Graham in our company I think probably, in the back of our minds, opened our eyes and our ears to the possibilities of audio. I worked with Graham on a couple projects and he’s actually quite the audio genius so, as I mentioned, having him there we felt he could come in and really put his touch on the work and I was really happy we could get Graham to write his own “Tales from Beyond the Pale,” “The Grandfather,” with Angus Scrimm and so on. I think that’s actually one of my favorites from Season 1.
DC: And every new episode was recorded live here in New York City, correct?
GM: Yeah, we went ahead and we just recorded live and we were pretty pleased with what we’d done with Season 1 and it was new ground for us. So as we moved forward, we wanted to keep that kind of goal to sort of be breaking new ground with ourselves. The opportunity came up with Clay McLeod Chapman that we could all get together and present the tales live. Very quickly we felt that this would be a great way to kind of keep on our toes with the “Tales from Beyond the Pale” project. I haven’t done theatre since I’ve been sixteen years of age so bringing all of what we had done onto stage and really pulling back the curtain to a live audience was really cool.
Larry Fessenden: It was fun for me because, you know, Dixon Place – I used to perform there in the ‘80s. It’s in a different location but the woman who runs the joint was always an advocator of performance art, so it was kind of two worlds converging for me: the new world of Glass Eye Pix as a film company and then my old roots in the New York performance scene. It had a great energy, I think – that quality. The actors that were involved – people like Sean Young and Mark Margolis and James LeGros and Vincent D’Onofrio – I think they couldn’t help but appreciate a little slice of the authenticity of the New York underground. So, it was kind of a melding of different vibes, I think.
DC: Well, from being from that stage background, have you guys ever thought about doing a classic radio play like “War of the Worlds” or “The Shadow” or even “The Mist” and putting your own spin on it?
LF: I love that you mention “The Mist” of all things. Has that been a radio play? Because that’s my favorite movie in recent years.
DC: It’s the one that William Sadler did. It’s an amazing 3D audio CD and I really love it.
LF: Oh cool, man. I love the idea of tackling a classic like Dracula or Jekyll and Hyde. Even more than the radio classics, that seems appealing.
GM: We had the conversation before and I’m of two minds about it. I really do respect our original goal of “Tales from Beyond the Pale” which was to get new content out there from ourselves and all of our colleagues. I’m really proud and truly really enjoy collaborating with Larry and creating these anthologies. It’s just sort of figuring out what’s missing from the new season; maybe we need a monster here or an old ghost story there. I really like the fact that “Tales from Beyond the Pale” is contemporary and not really harkening back to the early days of the format which I think a lot of people do. But, of course, having said that, I would love to do Dracula! And I think we would do an awesome Dracula. What do you think Renfield?
DC: I think Larry as Dracula would be fucking awesome.
LF: I like it, Drew. Thank you.
DC: What’s the first memory that both of you have being scared? Was it a film? Was it a bedtime story? Or was it a noise?
LF: Well, I can answer because I always say I was wired this way. People say why do I make horror films and they expect to be delighted by my macabre sensibility but in fact it’s the opposite. I’ve always found life quite scary and ever since I was little I was afraid of the dark. I took all the horror films I saw in the daytime very seriously and at night was convinced that Frankenstein was in the closet and even the truck from Duel was going to come crashing through the wall. I had a friend and his mother told stories around the fireplace in these weekend retreats we used to go on and I was always captivated by, I guess, the dark arts. In a way, that’s what the radio plays do for me is they take me back to that storytelling even more than movies.
GM: Quite early I really hooked onto horror and always found it as an escape and a fantasy in a way. And I would shy away from my real concerns. Honestly, I grew up in Ireland in the ‘70s and ‘80s and I was sure that we were all going to get nuked. It was a great fear of mine. I’d watch things like The Beast With Five Fingers and The Curse of the Werewolf. It pushed this fear in a comfortable way which was really therapeutic for me. The earliest, scariest memories of watching a movie I have is actually watching the title sequence for Curse of the Werewolf and just found it very unnerving. It was just Oliver Reed’s eyes staring back at you for five minutes. It was terrifying.
DC: Jordan Hoffman just wrote a great piece on Badass Digest about The Exorcist and how those certain combinations of sound and image produce these really terrifying results. As a director, you’re kind of saying my imagination is more fucked up than yours but, now, with “Tales from Beyond the Pale” you’re now just providing the catalyst for someone’s imagination to run wild.
LF: That’s so nicely put because I really think that is the idea behind “Tales” is to strip away. We have such a glut of imagery and, furthermore, literal imagery. I would say, as much as one looks forward to the design of the new Godzilla, it’s like there’s just going to be nothing left to the imagination and I think that’s the trend in horror. There’s something about stepping back and inviting the audience to participate as they always used to do. If you look at even films from the ‘80s, let alone years before that, it was a kind of participation. You had to suspend disbelief and become part of the fantasy-making when you watched effects that weren’t perfect but somehow had a spunk and a visceral charm. So, surely, by taking the humans away altogether you’re saying, ‘What do you see when I’m having my characters screaming in agony?’”
The red band trailer for HELLBENDERS has arrived! Written and directed by Glass Eye pal J.T. Petty, the horror-comedy about blasphemous Catholic Priests who sin to attract demons features Fessenden alongside Clancy Brown, Dan Fogler, Clifton Collins Jr., Andrew Royo and Samantha Buck.
HELLBENDERS hits theaters and VOD (and 3D VOD) October 18th.
“Sometimes, modern technology puts a brand-new spin on a beloved classic, even in the digital age. That definitely holds true for the radio dramas that were extremely popular in the 1930’s and 40’s. During a Halloween edition of Mercury Theater, for instance, Orson Welles even had people believing that Martians actually were invading Earth.
Like Welles, Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid, the men behind Glass Eye Pix, use theater of the mind to terrorize their listeners. Fessenden and McQuaid have returned with the second season of “Tales From Beyond the Pale,” a series of audio dramas that pay homage to the Golden Age of Radio.
In the two years since the original “Pale” went on the market, Apple’s iPod and iPad grabbed an even larger share of the technology market. Glass Eye Pix now has made it possible to listen to these tales on portable devices like these. It is quite easy to get lost in a purely audio world that’s fueled only by the listener’s imagination.
“On one hand, we are making radio in a digital age. I think a lot of people like Glenn and myself enjoy listening to books on tape. It actually seems very contemporary to have your head in an earbud enjoying audio programs,” Fessenden said during a recent conference bridge.
Getting lost in your earbuds definitely is possible with stories like “Ram King,” a food-oriented story from Joe Maggio. When listening to this cheesy (pun intended) audio adventure, the sound effects paint a vivid picture of an old-style marketplace. Foley, the art of reproducing everyday sounds in the studio, definitely comes into play here.
“We were really firm believers in using Foley and tapping into that tradition that harks way back to ‘War of the Worlds,'” McQuaid said, explaining how they created such realistic audio worlds. “We do mix our sound sources, but certainly we are very passionate about using props–like an old cabbage being stabbed with a knife to substitute for flesh.”
McQuaid also said it was exciting-and nerve wracking-to produce these tales in front of a live audience: “Having to bring all that live Foley work and having to choreograph it with whatever pre-recorded sound designs we had made was certainly a new frontier for us. We were absolutely determined to have real sounds in there-real Foley-as opposed to just being an electronic composer or composition”
Fessenden added that they used all the modern technologies to capture and celebrate sound in all of its glory. “We are all filmmakers in our daily lives, but to just strip away the picture to see what we can do with sound becomes its own challenge, its own world. That’s the fun part,” he said.”
What’s America listening to? Opie and Anthony, Rob Lowe, Bill O’Reily and Tales From Beyond The Pale!
All the season 2 episodes of Glass Eye Pix’s acclaimed genre audio series are on the Top Audiobooks Arts & Entertainment Chart in iTunes.
And not only that– Glenn McQuaid’s crime suspense shocker, “The Crush,” and Jeff Buhler’s otherwordly campfire tale, “Stranger,” are in the top 10!
Help get them to the very top spots by downloading them from the iTunes store. Tales From Beyond The Pale is also on Amazon, Audible, and the Tales website.
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...
Singer-songwriter/animator Voltaire, whose collaborations with GEP include the original TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE animated announcement and the animated short “Odokuro”, has released the rough mix of a new song entitled “The Devil And Mr. Jones”. The song is a tribute to actor Doug Jones – who starred in the 2008 FEAR ITSELF episode “Skin and Bones,” which was directed by Larry Fessenden – and its lyrics mention Fessenden himself. The first track to be released from Voltaire’s upcoming album Raised by Bats, “The Devil And Mr. Jones” is available to stream on 
Ain’t It Cool News is reviewing the new season of Tales From Beyond the Pale, and this week their review focuses on Clay McLeod Chapman’s “Like Father, Like Son”. Head to 
