With the release of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, we look back at the best creature features recent history has to offer.
BY ISAAC FELDBE
Depraved (2019)
Across his singular, stubbornly independent body of work, the New York-based filmmaker Larry Fessenden has specialized in stories about monsters and madness, crafting character-driven dramas that—from the vampirism-as-disease allegory Habit to Blackout, about an alcoholic who begins to suspect he’s a werewolf—draw their bone-chilling horror from morally conflicted men struggling to tame their inner darkness. But it’s perhaps Depraved, his re-envisioning of Shelley’s Frankenstein, that most succinctly captures Fessenden’s fascination with the tragic consequences of all that which man creates but fails to control. Playing out in a decaying Brooklyn loft, Depraved follows a disillusioned combat medic who, unable to make sense of his own lingering trauma, stitches together a man from body parts and brings him back to life. In recasting its central monster as the tortured offspring of one man’s heartbreak as much as his hubris, Fessenden gets at something essential about what makes Shelley’s story so enduringly ripe for reanimation. That he does so while deftly exploring such modern issues as war-time trauma, American exceptionalism, and urban malaise makes clear why he’s one of our savviest genre iconoclasts.
IN GOOD COMPANY DEP’T: See the very cool list at Men’s Health (?!)
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