Written & Directed by Kelly Reichardt

A drowsy, sun-drunk road movie in which a would-be Bonnie and Clyde
never really commit a crime, fall in love, or even hit the road.

“Highly original and filmed with perfect assurance…
one of the finest independent films of recent years.”
Dave Kehr, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

“A lively, entertaining movie about how life isn’t like the movies.”
Kevin Thomas, LOS ANGELES TIMES

“One of year’s smartest indies. Not for squares.”
J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Now Streaming

TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE The Podcast

23 TALES now available at your favorite podcast outlet • FREE • Episodes drop each week

THE PALE MEN (Glenn McQuaid & Larry Fessenden) speak to Clay McLeod Chapman about “The Mattress King,” now streaming on TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE The Podcast.

THE PALE MEN: Bug Horror tends to gross people out, and, in fairness, Mattress King certainly has its icky moments but there is something very haunted, even dreadfully sad at the heart of the horror, can you talk about where the idea for the piece came from?

Clay McLeod Chapman: The idea coalesced from a few stray thoughts… Living in New York, we tell our children to steer clear of the errant mattresses that line the curbs for fear of bedbugs. In my neighborhood, I have witnessed the very same white van without windows trawl our blocks for abandoned bed mattresses. I kid you not, this gentleman driver will pull over whenever he comes upon a mattress, hop out, pluck the mattress off the sidewalk regardless of its condition and toss it on the stack bungee-corded to his van’s roof. I’ve seen him with a mound of five or six mattresses on some days. And thus the Mattress King was born.

CMC: Beyond that, I’ve always been curious about ghost stories and how we’re haunted… and whether or not there are new ways in which the supernatural can penetrate the world of the living. I thought bed bugs — and the blood they’ve ingested — could be an interesting way to explore new narrative territory when it came to ghosts. Haunted mattresses? Possessed bedbugs? Has that ever been done before?

THE PALE MEN: It is a sad twist of fate that we find ourselves releasing Mattress King at a time when there are even more dire contagions than bedbugs. We also recall a certain story you pitched called Seasick… Is there a pattern there…?

CMC: For better or worse, I am personally obsessed with societal order disintegrating and our civilized culture regressing. Global pandemics are wonderful catalysts for this. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, we’re only one sneeze away from collapse.

THE PALE MEN: You’re mainly known as a writer, how was the experience of directing Mattress King live?

CMC: It was petrifying, to be honest. I was terrified. I felt the awesome responsibility of working with such heavyweights as Kate Flannery and Martin Starr and… and this Larry-fella, what’s his name. Being a part of SpectreVision’s SpectreFest was amazing, and rummaging around LA with the rest of the Glass Eye crew was wonderful, but as soon as the show got underway… it was crippling. I felt like a conductor. I just had to lean into the script, the music of the moment, and just ride the words. At one point I remember feeling the audience at my back, hearing them react, and it was such a huge relief. Thank goodness they went along for the ride.

THE PALE MEN: You have written several radio plays for TALES on your own and in collaboration. Do you enjoy the form…? maybe speak to how it relates to your own oral performance work which predates TALES.

CMC: I feel like the oral tradition is at the core of most if not all of my work, regardless of the medium. We’re all sitting around campfires of some sort, whether that’s in a movie theater or with our ear buds. What’s great about Tales and how it dovetails with what I love about live storytelling, is that it truly intimates the listening experience… Onstage, the audience tends to close their eyes and lean into their ears. With these plays preserved and presented for the podcast, that live performance is in effect a frozen moment in time, an insect trapped in amber. Maybe a bedbug?

————

Clay McLeod Chapman (Brooklyn, NY) is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session “The Pumpkin Pie Show.” His previous publications include Rest Area, Miss Corpus, and The Tribe trilogy – Homeroom Headhunters, Camp Cannibal, and Academic Assassins (Disney). He is the writer of TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE’S “The Mattress King,” “Like Father, Like Son,” co-author of “Tales We Tell PT 1 & 2” and performs in several Tales including “Reappraisal,”  “In The Wind,” “Cold Reading,” and “No Signal.”

Episode #23 The Mattress King

Glass Eye pal Nick Tucci departed this world March 3, 2020.
Celebrate the life and works of the talented thespian and watch him in YOU’RE NEXT,
starring Barbara Crampton, Joe Swanberg, Amy Seimetz and Fessenden.
Revisit his contributions to GEP films THE RANGER and
SXSW winner MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND, now streaming.

Farewell Nick, thank you for all the memorable performances.

Raves for FIRST COW by long-time Glass Eye Pix associate Kelly Reichardt (RIVER OF GRASS, WENDY AND LUCY, CERTAIN WOMEN), now opening in theaters from A24. The New York Times calls it “A Masterpiece“

From Daily Beast

Reichardt agrees that her films don’t necessarily spell everything out in purely conventional Hollywood terms, but that’s because, “I like to think that my audience is smarter than me.” It’s additionally due to the fact that, in her mind, her target demographic is akin to her colleagues at New York’s Bard College—where she teaches—as well as her closest cinematic colleagues, Todd Haynes and Larry Fessenden, about whom she reveals, “I’ve been in conversations about film with them since the beginning, since I was young and they were young.”

Doug Jones, Ron Perlman and writer/director Jeff Buhler (Pet Sematary, Midnight Meat Train) chat after recording the TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE Space Oddity “This Oracle Moon”— now available on TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE The Podcast.

Episode #22 This Oracle Moon

Barbara Crampton Wraps Horror ‘Jakob’s Wife’ From ‘Amulet’ Outfit AMP International

EXCLUSIVE: Horror legend Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, You’re Next) has wrapped filming on her latest genre feature, Jakob’s Wife, after an under-the-radar shoot in Canton, Mississippi.

Travis Stevens (Girl On The Third Floor) directed. The project comes from production and sales outfit AMP International, which recently premiered its latest movie, Romola Garai’s Amulet, in Sundance’s Midnight program.

Jakob’s Wife was developed by AMP and Crampton from a script by Mark Steensland, Kathy Charles and Travis Stevens. The story, a supernatural horror, follows a woman in her late 50s who, after a chance encounter with ‘the Master’, discovers a new sense of power, a change that comes with a heavy toll.

Also starring are Larry Fessenden (Stake Land), Bonnie Aarons (The Nun), Robert Rusler (Weird Science), Sarah Lind (Edgemont), Mark Kelly (Fear the Walking Dead), Nyisha Bell, and Phil Brooks (Girl On The Third Floor).

Producers are Bob Portal and Inderpal Singh from AMP, alongside Barbara Crampton and Travis Stevens. The project was also fully-financed by AMP – the London and Los Angeles company is looking to ramp up production activity in 2020.

The film is a co-production with Mississippi-based Eyevox Entertainment, with Rick Moore from Eyevox serving as executive producer, alongside James Norrie and Nina Kolokouri at AMP. Co-producers are Joe Wicker, Morgan Peter Brown and Kim Barnard.

“I’m thrilled to be able to bring Jakob’s Wife to life with such highly experienced producing partners at AMP International. It’s been wonderful working closely with Bob Portal in developing this amazing project, and reuniting with two of my favorite colleagues in the business, Travis Stevens and Larry Fessenden,” commented Crampton.

“Since making We Are Still Here together, I’ve been looking forward to telling more scary stories with Barbara and Larry. Jakob’s Wife has been a chance for us to dig deep in to the lives of these fictional characters and test them in ways I think genre fans are going to love seeing,” added Stevens.

Producer Portal called the project “a wild ‘marriage’ of talent that’s created such a rollicking, smart, fun genre feast.”

Director Stevens previously acted as a producer on the 2015 Crampton-starring pic We Are Still Here.

AMP’s credits include Anna And The Apocalypse, and the Sam Rockwell-starring Blue Iguana.

read article on Deadline

Each year, the Film Independent Spirit Awards give the Someone to Watch Award to an emerging filmmaker of singular vision. In this column, film critic David Bax revisits some of the grant’s recipients to see how their work and careers have continued to develop. The 2020 Someone to Watch Award was given on January 4.

***

In the first full scene of Larry Fessenden’s Habit—which earned the NY-based actor and filmmaker Film Independent’s Someone to Watch Award in 1997—a man clomps, semi-purposefully, around a New York City apartment, arranging boxes. That man, Sam (Fessenden himself), with his lanky frame holding up a large wool trench coat from which his head and flopping hair sprout like the top of a carrot, is so perfectly Gen-X and the wide-angle 16mm photography so perfectly ‘90s American indie that, watching it from a quarter of a century’s distance you might be forgiven for expecting a movie that has perhaps aged into self-parody.

Or, rather, you would be if it weren’t for Habit’s actual opening: a brief, eerie procession of shots, including those a seemingly unmanned boat floating in midnight waters, all accompanied by Geoffrey Kidde’s ominous score. Before the screenplay’s first page is over, Fessenden has already established his assured, undeniably cinematic hand.

Turns out Sam—an erstwhile musician working as a night manager at a dive-y Manhattan Mexican joint—isn’t cleaning up his own apartment in that first scene. It’s that of his late father, who has recently died. But he has some rearranging to do at his place, too, since his longtime girlfriend, Liza (Heather Woodbury), has just moved out.

So Sam’s not exactly at his best when he shows up, already well into a night of sorrow-drowning, at his friend’s Halloween party. Still, that doesn’t keep him from catching the eye of Anna (Meredith Snaider), a party-crasher who leaves with Sam only to mysteriously disappear when he runs back upstairs for his forgotten coat. Soon, though, Anna will show up again and again—quickly becoming a fixture in Sam’s life even as he is increasingly convinced that she’s, y’know, a vampire. Sam’s suspicions stem from Anna’s ability to seemingly appear or disappear without a trace, the fact that their intense and erotic sex life involves a lot of biting on her part and (most concerningly) his increasing illness and pallid demeanor.

There’s an unsubtle metaphor at work here about the scary dangers of dating amidst the fear of AIDS. But Fessenden is clearly more interested in more specific, psychological allegories of indulging in compulsive behaviors and fixations as a means of not coping with emotional distress. It’s more likely that Sam’s physical deterioration is a result of his constant drunkenness than of Anna’s supposed state of undeath. But that doesn’t stop Fessenden from layering Habitwith chilling, unabashedly genre-based touches like jump scares and near-subliminal shots of unexplained otherworldliness.

It was, presumably, this blend of idiosyncratic independence and an unironic embrace of horror tradition that made Fessenden stand out enough to garner the Someone to Watch Award. I doubt anyone could have predicted, though, just what an epochal moment in American horror Habit would come to represent.

Fessenden has continued to direct—we’ll get to his most recent effort shortly—but his legacy has been chiefly solidified by his work as a producer and an actor. In the former role, he’s helped shepherd to the screen early works from unique horror talents like Ti West (The House of the Devil), Ana Asensio (Most Beautiful Island) and Mickey Keating (Psychopaths). But it’s as an actor that he may have made the biggest impression. He shows up in roles of various sizes in horror flicks ranging from Brad Anderson’s Session 9 to Adam Wingard’s You’re Next, to Bridey Elliott’s Clara’s Ghost, to truly bizarre, under-the-radar works like Chad Crawford Kinkle’s Jug Face. The upshot? If you’re watching an independent horror film and Larry Fessenden shows up on screen, you know you picked something good.

With strong showings from all of the directors listed above and more, American independent horror had a bit of a moment in the 2010s. It’s not difficult to imagine these filmmakers picking up Habit or Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001) at their local video store a decade before making their own films and being inspired by someone so geekily in love with the genre, yet so purely committed to making art that’s personal and new. Fessenden didn’t just kick off a career with Habit’s Someone to Watch award win (indeed, he’d already been directing for more than ten years); he kicked off a whole new wave of independent genre filmmaking.

In many ways, 2019’s Depraved offers a sharp mirror-reflection of Habit (making it particularly well-suited to the format of this column). Nearly 25 years later, Fessenden returns to New York City, though now the boho apartments have been relocated from Manhattan to Gowanus. And he once again plucks his premise from the classic monster oeuvre, trading Habit’s seductive female Dracula for a PTSD-suffering combat vet version of Dr. Frankenstein, giving his monster a sensitive beefcake twist.

Henry (David Call) is a brilliant doctor still reeling from his military experiences in the Middle East, who’s been given free rein by his childhood friend Polidori (Joshua Leonard), now a wealthy pharmaceutical exec, to pursue his life-restoring experiments, all in the name of testing experimental drugs. Using body parts (and a brain) procured by Polidori via methods about which Henry would rather not know, he’s created a new life whom he’s named Adam (Alex Breaux); for what it’s worth, Depraved both acknowledges the corniness of that name and, eventually, provides a powerful explanation for why Henry chose it.

There’s no need to delve further into the plot in this space. As you might imagine, things don’t go smoothly and we can leave it at that. It’s more fun to instead dig into the more subtle similarities between Fessenden’s early and current work.

There remain hints of the occult that add more to the atmosphere than to the narrative. In Habit, Anna gives Sam a creepy two-headed figurine. In Depraved, one of Polidori’s unwilling donors was wearing a necklace with an arcane symbol on it—a present from the dead man’s girlfriend.

Also intact is Fessenden’s penchant for sexual content as salacious as it is potentially upsetting. While nothing in Depraved approaches Habit’s Battery Park hand job scene, there’s a fascinating, almost humorous dichotomy found in the tenderly suggestive interactions between Adam and Henry’s girlfriend, Liz (Ana Kayne), and the more fantastical nightmare versions of these interactions plaguing Henry’s sleep.

What shines through most from 1995 to 2019, though, is Fessenden’s ability to blend the topical with the personal. Where Habit embodied STI fears, Depraved explicitly invokes the opioid epidemic in its tale of human bodies treated as commodities by a greedy and heartless pharmaceutical industry. But beneath that is an emotional exploration of the necessity of nurture to human development and the anxiety of not knowing if you’re up to the task of parenting. It’s not surprising to discover these concerns in a man who served as forefather to an entire generation.

Read whole article here