Mickey Keating’s OFFSEASON starring The House of The Devil’s Jocelyn Donahue
and GEP pal Joe Swanberg, now in theaters.
And opening Friday, from A24 comes X, directed by Ti West (The Innkeepers, The House Of The Devil)
starring Brittany Snow, Mia Goth, Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi), Martin Henderson, Stephen Ure, Jenna Ortega
and DEPRAVED’s Owen Campbell.
100% on Rotten Tomatoes!
Check your local listings!
From Bloody Disgusting: No two Mickey Keating films are alike; the filmmaker consistently explores different corners of horror and influences with every production. From neo-western horror to psychological to sci-fi horror and beyond, Keating seems uninterested in retreading the same ground. His latest, Offseason, takes on cosmic horror.
In Offseason, “Upon receiving a mysterious letter that her mother’s gravesite has been vandalized, Marie quickly returns to the isolated offshore island where her late mother is buried. When she arrives, she discovers that the island is closing for the offseason with the bridges raised until Spring, leaving her stranded.
“One strange interaction with the local townspeople after another, Marie soon realizes that something is not quite right in this small town. She must unveil the mystery behind her mother’s troubled past to make it out alive.”
RLJE Films and Shudder will release the horror film in theaters and on VOD and Digital on March 11, 2022. The cast is led by Jocelin Donahue (The House of the Devil, Doctor Sleep). Joe Swanberg (You’re Next, The Sacrament) and Richard Brake (3 from Hell) also star.
Ahead of the release, we look back at Keating’s horror films and how he switches up the aesthetic and style for every single one.
…
Ritual establishes the core constant to every Keating horror movie: Larry Fessenden appears in every single one.
In the Shade is a new play with music based in fact,
told through the interconnected lives of three women writers –
Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood –
each of whom was married for a time to the poet Robert Lowell – and their children.
Lowell suffered from severe manic-depressive illness, with over a dozen major hospitalizations.
Lowell was also a pioneer in writing openly about his own mental illness,
helping to begin a process of destigmatization that continues to this day.
Tom Laverack is a singer-songwriter from NYC and co-founder of the independent label, Sojourn Records. He released his seventh album, One Stop Past Your Destination in 2014. Laverack has recorded as a solo artist and as part of the duo, Just Desserts, featuring long time collaborator Larry Fessenden.
In 2007, Laverack and Mark Ambrosino co-founded Sojourn Records. Laverack’s album, Cave Drawings, produced and recorded by Ambrosino, was the debut release for Sojourn and the inspiration for starting the label. Laverack’s music has also been featured in Larry Fessenden’s films, including No Telling, Habit, Wendigo, The Last Winter and Depraved.
For more than 40 years, Larry Fessenden has not only reinvented and reinvigorated the horror and fantasy genre through his contemporary re-imaginings of mythic archetypes—the chimera, the vampire and the Leviathan, the Wendigo and the Modern Prometheus—he has also, as the founder in 1985 of the scrappy, resolutely independent New York production company Glass Eye Pix, nurtured the early careers of a diverse array of talents including Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass and Wendy and Lucy), Ti West (The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers), Rick Alverson (The Comedy), Graham Reznick (I Can See You), Jim Mickle (Stake Land), Ilya Chaiken (Liberty Kid), and James Felix McKenney (Automatonsand Satan Hates You).
Celebrating his extraordinary career as a writer, director, producer, actor, cinematographer, editor, and songwriter, this major retrospective of Larry Fessenden and Glass Eye Pix presents more than 20 feature films screened in MoMA’s theaters, as well as an additional selection of features and shorts streaming on our Virtual Cinema platform (available to MoMA members across the US). Perhaps the true terror—and the liberating promise—of Fessenden’s work, which includes Habit (1997), No Telling (1991), Wendigo (2000), The Last Winter (2007), and Depraved (2019), is the extent to which the world today, our so-called Anthropocene epoch, has come to mirror his own uncanny visions of existential crisis: of ecological collapse and worldwide plague, historical trauma and amnesia, the dehumanizing effects of technology, and a profound alienation from the animal world and ourselves through a failure of the empathic imagination.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.
From Dread Central: Shudder has announced that The Spine of Night will be available
exclusively to stream on the platform starting on Thursday, March 24, 2022.
Fessenden as “The Prophet of Doom”
Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King directed The Spine of the Night.
The film features the vocal talents of Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt,
Betty Gabriel, Joe Manganiello, Abby Savage, Larry Fessenden, and also Rob McClure.
Read article HERE
Riley Cusick’s second feature film The Wild Man now has its cast set.
Veteran actors Larry Fessenden (Jakob’s Wife), Jenna Kanell (Terrifier), and Kelli Maroney (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) have joined the cast of the upcoming indie drama directed by Cusick (Autumn Road), who will also star from a script he wrote.
“With one week left until his mentally unwell father moves into a nursing home, Scott Treadwell (Riley Cusick) starts to unravel. His dysfunctional uncle, Walter Treadwell ( Fessenden), can’t seem to stay out of trouble,” says the official synopsis. “His house-arrested neighbor, Jackie Foster (Kanell), offers the opportunity for a life he can’t have. And his father, Jeff (Jeff Cusick), believes himself to be a dangerous wild animal. Unable to get his life together, Scott’s wellbeing starts to slip through the cracks as he reaches his breaking point.”
Thanks to the growing abundance of weird and dangerous weather, it’s getting harder to ignore the bleak reality of climate change—though that doesn’t stop many people, especially people in power, from blithely denying its existence. Released in 2006, Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter asked a question that’s even more pressing today: What if the Earth, drained and damaged from generations of careless humans, started punching back?
In a part of Alaska so remote it feels like the edge of the world, a small team working for an oil-drilling company that’s just gotten congressional approval to tap into a well situated within a wildlife refuge (red flag!) has two big problems. First, the temperature is so oddly warm they’re unable to construct the ice roads they’ll need to bring their heavy equipment in. And second, the on-site environmental experts, a required component of their government deal, refuse to sign off on any other transport methods, despite toxically macho crew chief Ed Pollock’s (the great Ron Perlman, who is perfect in this role) way of “ordering” instead of “asking.”
Those roadblocks pile on top of the expected hazards that go with this type of work (boredom, loneliness, cabin fever), but there’s another issue that’s starting to creep its way into the camp: The land itself is having a decidedly negative reaction to their presence. The first to pick up on it is lead environmentalist Jim Hoffman (James LeGros), who’s as concerned with the rising temperatures as as he is with this variable he can’t chart. “Something up here is off,” he muses. “It’s in the numbers… but I can also feel it.” He has a hard time convincing the others, especially the blustery Ed—whose general attitude is “fuck this hippie bullshit, we got a job to do”—but as The Last Winter progresses the signs become exceedingly difficult to ignore.
The tension that builds throughout The Last Winter feels very familiar to the realm of snowbound survival horror. Think The Thing, The Shining, or basically any movie where an isolated group of people are set upon by a supernatural force that causes paranoia, distrust, and other behavior changes, on top of other external horrors. (In this case, well, a lot of eyes get pecked out by aggressive ravens, and that’s merely one example.) And there’s been no shortage of “environmental revenge” films—from thoughtfully existential forest nightmares like Ben Wheatley’s recent In the Earth to more hysterically schlocky examples, like the subject of another recent Retro Review: pollution-spawned mutant-bear saga Prophecy.
The Last Winter’s blend of these two genres is effective throughout, with its oil-drilling themes (bolstered by actual footage of oil-well fires and mentions of real-life disasters like the Exxon Valdez spill) giving extra weight to its central conflict. Though we’re meant to sympathize with the humans, it’s obvious that they’re also the antagonists, the invaders, and the aggressors of this story. Fessenden—an indie cult and horror luminary who co-wrote the script with Robert Leaver, and who has a brief on-screen role as Ed’s crass boss—works The Last Winter’s vengeful menace into its technical elements, giving us shots that fell like they’re from the POV of the howling wind as it swirls above and around the compound, even at one point dipping down and circling the buildings as if peeking at the people behind the windows.
The bad vibes come in small waves, but soon begin engulfing everything and everyone. Maxwell (Midnight Mass’ Zach Gilford), the youngest member of the crew, is the first to start behaving oddly, something everyone chalks up to his inexperience—especially Ed, who’d encouraged the kid’s father to toughen him up by sending him to the Arctic. Jim’s assistant, Elliot (Jamie Harrold), gets a nosebleed during an impromptu football match early in the film, and it never stops bleeding. There are random bursts of bizarre sudden storms, and the persistent sound of strange, disembodied hoofbeats that nobody wants to acknowledge. The crew’s two indigenous members, Lee and Dawn (Pato Hoffman and Joanne Shenandoah), wonder if maybe it’s all an omen that a mythological dark spirit like a Chenoo or a Wendigo is soon to arrive (as a side note, Fessenden had previously made a movie called Wendigo in 2001, so it’s clearly a topic of fascination for him).
Though Jim’s passion for completing this particular assignment begins to waver—at a certain point, he admits he’s tired of trying to convince people like Ed of scientific fact, and you’re just glad he’s living in a time before social media’s tsunami of disinformation took over—his investment in the mystery only grows more urgent. He wonders, both in conversations and in his private journal, if it’s “an atmospheric anomaly affecting everyone’s judgment.” Or maybe sour gas seeping from the melting permafrost, or some kind of virus, spores, or other contagion emerging from earth that’s been frozen for 10,000 years? Or maybe “something beyond science”? Like, say, that “the very thing we’re here to pull out of the ground” is “rising willingly to confront us”? He refuses to see what’s happening as revenge, because nature doesn’t work that way—but it’s hard for us not to think so.
The Last Winter isn’t subtle pushing its apocalyptic themes, and by the time it enters its final act it’s become a full-on horror movie, pushing aside icy suspense and back-of-the-neck prickles in favor of a rising body count. It may at times come across a bit heavy-handed, but its message is still a timely and valuable one, showing a microcosm driven to total collapse by a planet that’s ready to kick humans out of the ecosystem for good. Really, can you blame it?
The Last Winter, which also stars American Horror Story’s Connie Britton and ubiquitous indie actor Kevin Corrigan (The King of Long Island), is now streaming on Shudder.
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!
