Oh, the Humanity! The Films of Larry Fessenden and Glass Eye Pix

March 30-April 19, 2022

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 and 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 (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 (Automatons).

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.

ABCs of Death 2: N for Nexus. 2014. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden. 5 min.
Not since Alfred Hitchcock blew up a small child on a London bus in Sabotage have we witnessed a form of vehicular homicide as grisly or suspenseful as in Fessenden’s brilliantly staged short, made for a Fantastic Fest movie anthology. Courtesy Magnet Releasing

Depraved. 2019. USA. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden. With David Call, Joshua Leonard, Alex Breaux. DCP. 114 min.
Lest we forget, the first true horror novel was written by a woman in 1818: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Now, a remarkable 200 years later—and 18 after his first stab at tackling similar themes in No Telling (screening on April 3 and 12)—Larry Fessenden has put his own contemporary spin on Shelley’s myth while remaining true to its tragic spirit of hubris and pathos, human aspiration and godly delusion. While infamous for its toxic canal, Gowanus, Brooklyn, seems also to be a seedy enclave of Big Pharma profiteering and trafficking in body parts, as well as the makeshift factory lab of a Gulf War field surgeon whose PTSD and loneliness drive him to grotesque ends, a broken man desperate to be whole again. Courtesy IFC Films.
March 30, 4:00 T2 (Introduced by Larry Fessenden), April 17, 4:30 T1

Fever. 2021. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden. 8 min.
While many filmmakers have chronicled their COVID cabin fever these past two years, few but Larry Fessenden have done it with such panache and deadpan (bedside?) humor. It’s as if woebegotten Sam from Habit, having finally settled down with a wife and a kid, fled the now-gentrified city into his worst upstate nightmare. From the anthology film Isolation. Courtesy Gravitas Ventures.

Habit. 1995. USA. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden. With Fessenden, Meredith Snaider, Aaron Beall. DCP. 112 min.
“The first thriller to draw metaphorical links between AIDS, sex and vampires” (John Anderson, The Wall Street Journal), Habit is not only one of the truly erotic and sinister horror films of our time but also one of the greatest New York films of all time. In the 10 years since Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, the city has become soul sick and ravaged by disease and greed, Griffin Dunne’s yuppie yokel transformed into Fessenden’s grief-stricken, self-mulilating alcoholic Sam, who spends a lost weekend hungering for sex and oblivion. Courtesy IFC Films
March 30, 7:00 T2 (Introduced by Larry Fessenden), April 9, 1:30 T2

River of Grass. 1994. USA. Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt. With Lisa Bowman, Larry Fessenden, Dick Russell. DCP. 76 min.
For the past 30 years, Glass Eye Pix has been a remarkably successful incubator of young talent, and Larry Fessenden himself a nurturing and fiercely protective den mother to then-unknown filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, the writer-director who would go on to make Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy (also produced by Fessenden, screening on March 31 and April 5), Meek’s Cutoff, and First Cow. Reichardt astonished critics with this quasi-road movie, a melancholy noir set along the lost highways of South Florida that recalls Wim Wenders’s lonely visions of America—even as it deconstructs that peculiarly American theme of lovers on the lam, as seen in such films as You Only Live Once, Gun Crazy, and My Own Private Idaho. Courtesy Oscilloscope Pictures.
March 31, 4:00 T2 (Introduced by Larry Fessenden and Kelly Reichardt), April 16, 2:00 T1

Wendy and Lucy. 2008. USA. Directed by Kelly Reichardt. Screenplay by Reichardt, Jonathan Raymond. With Michelle Williams, Lucy, Larry Fessenden, Will Patton. 35mm. 80 min.
Michelle Williams’s career-defining portrait of a resilient but vulnerable drifter, stuck in Oregon with the vague promise of a decent job at an Alaskan fish cannery, her only companion her flaxen-furred mutt Lucy, brings to mind Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Gena Rowlands in any John Cassavetes film: adamantine women on the razor’s edge of destitution and abandonment. Jim Hoberman in the Village Voice writes, “This prescient tale—which, like her previous feature, Old Joy (2006), Reichardt adapted from a story by Jon Raymond and shot in the Pacific Northwest—is haunted by lonesome freight trains, hobo jungle solidarity, and the idea of redeeming empty beer bottles for gas money…. [If] the filmmaker weren’t so doggedly, unsentimentally prosaic, she might have called this ballad Pictures of the Gone World or even ‘I Ain’t Got No Home.’” Courtesy Oscilloscope Pictures.
March 31, 6:30 T2, April 5, 4:00 T2

Wendigo. 2001. USA. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden. With Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan. DCP. 91 min.
In Fessenden’s truly terrifying Wendigo, a comfortable and complacent white family spending a wintry weekend upstate accidentally encounter, or imagine they encounter, a shape-shifting chimera, half-deer, half-man, that brings out their own suppressed rage—seen through the eyes of an awfully frightened child. Once again ahead of his time, Larry Fessenden makes a deeply unsettling yet culturally sensitive horror film that draws on a Native American mythical creature, the Wendigo, to make subtly profound observations about our nation’s Original Sin: the rape of a land and its Indigeous peoples. “Fessenden has set himself a challenging project: to approach the themes and thrills of the classic American horror movies through a determinedly modern approach, as if John Cassavetes had been working for Universal in the early ’30s…. [F]or those in search of something different, Wendigo is a genuinely bone-chilling tale” (Dave Kehr, The New York Times). Courtesy IFC Films.
April 1, 4:00 T2, April 9, 6:30 T2

The Last Winter. 2006. USA/Iceland. Directed by Larry Fessenden. Screenplay by Fessenden, Robert Leaver. With Ron Pearlman, James Le Gros, Connie Britton, Kevin Corrigan, Jamie Herrold. 35mm. Courtesy IFC Films
Guillermo Del Toro has called Larry Fessenden “one of the most original voices to emerge in the horror field, and The Last Winter is his most accomplished work to date. He brings the Gothic trappings of the old classics to shocking new life.” Fessenden conceals his alarming and farsighted vision of global warming within a tale of horror and mystery worthy of Melville or Poe. When an American oil company sends an advance team to set up a drilling site in the brutally unforgiving Northern Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, inexplicable madness and death follow closely behind. In 2006, The Last Winter appeared on more than a dozen critics’ Best of the Year lists, and at the end of the day—or in this case, imminent global mass extinction at the End of Days—it will endure as a monumental indictment of human folly.
April 1, 6:30 T2, April 9, 4:00 T2

Bitter Feast. 2010. USA. Written and directed by Joe Maggio. With James Le Gros, Joshua Leonard, Amy Seimetz. DCP. 95 min. Courtesy MPI Media
To the sort of person who looks at a Jackson Pollock and says, “My kid could do that,” Joe Maggio offers his wickedly funny and nasty riposte Bitter Feast. Inspired by New York Times food critic Frank Bruni’s skewering of a Gordon Ramsey restaurant, a review Maggio himself reviewed as “odd, middling, lazy…totally ridiculous and unfair,” the film stars Fessenden-favorite James Le Gros as a pompous celebrity television chef who kidnaps and imprisons a smug food blogger (the deliciously insufferable Joshua Leonard), subjecting him to a torture chamber of culinary trials. “Maggio reveals a fluency in the horror-genre vocabulary while also translating it to his own twisted ends…. Technical credits are tops, notably Jeff Grace’s score and its recurrent themes, and the beautiful work of cinematographer Michael McDonough (Winter’s Bone)” (John Anderson, Variety).
April 2, 1:30 T2 (Introduced by Joe Maggio), April 14, 6:30 T1

Stray Bullets. 2016. USA. Written, directed, edited, and scored by Jack Fessenden. With James Le Gros, John Speredakos, Jack Fessenden, Larry Fessenden, Kevin Corrigan. DCP. 83 min. Courtesy Variance Films.
Sixteen(!!!)-year-old auteur Jack Fessenden made this feature debut during the summer between his sophomore and junior years in high school. With his killer aesthetic sensibility, comic timing, and deft balancing of quiet character study and explosive violence, his Stray Bullets plays like a bloody Ealing comedy (Lavender Hill Mob?) involving a couple of kids in way over their heads, a gang of thieves who can’t shoot straight, and a hitman who likely can. ”An enjoyably blood-soaked thriller with unexpectedly lyrical interludes—made very much in the shadow of classic genre forebears and on what was clearly a constrained budget—this is a strikingly impressive calling-card” (Neil Young, Hollywood Reporter).
April 2, 4:00 T2 (Introduced by Jack Fessenden), April 14, 4:30 T1

Foxhole. 2021. USA. Written and directed by Jack Fessenden. With James Le Gros, Andi Matichak, Alex Hurt. DCP. 95 min.
Situating an existential human drama in the most claustrophobic, terrifying, and monotonous of settings—a battlefield trench—has been an irresistible lure to filmmakers like Howard Hawks, Lewis Milestone, Samuel Fuller, Stanley Kubrick, and G. W. Pabst. Jack Fessenden’s ambitious contribution to this wartime genre achieves an almost abstract beauty as it spans 36 hours across three separate wars: the American Civil War, World War I, and the Gulf. Remarkably, Fessenden, who grew up watching his parents, Larry Fessenden and stop-motion animator Beck Underwood, make movies, and who began making movies of his own at age seven, wrote the script for Foxhole while still in high school, shot the film after his first year at Wesleyan, and cut and scored it while isolated in upstate New York during the pandemic. Courtesy Samuel Goldwyn Films.
April 2, 6:30 T2 (Introduced by Jack Fessenden), April 15, 5:00 T1

No Telling. 1991. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden. Screenplay by Fessenden, Beck Underwood. With Miriam Healy-Louie, Stephen Ramsey, David Van Tieghem. DCP. 93 min.
“This sexual, political, environmental thriller is the year’s real Sleeping with the Enemy” (Jay Carr, The Boston Globe). Subtitled “The Frankenstein Complex,” No Telling is Larry Fessenden’s unholy cross between romantic pastorale and Grand Guignol horror, wherein the lovely Liliian Gaines, setting out to paint landscapes and get pregnant during her quiet summer retreat, discovers that her scientist husband has something far crueler on his mind. Trashed on its first release, No Telling has nonetheless aged well (like a finely cured bresaola?), an upsetting meditation on animal rights and environmental despoliation that has only deepened over time. Courtesy IFC Films.
April 3, 1:30 T2, April 12, 5:00 T1

Beneath. 2013. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden. Screenplay by Tony Daniel, Brian D. Smith. With Bonnie Dennison, Daniel Zovatto, Jon Orsini. DCP. 90 min.
In his ingenious mashup of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, Joe Dante’s Piranha, and Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, Fessenden finds endlessly inventive ways of spoiling a camping reunion of ruthlessly selfish, horny teenagers cast adrift on a lake of (g)ill repute. Eric Kohn of Indiewire observes, “After a while, the lake itself takes on allegorical dimensions, the survivors trapped in an amoral purgatory of their own making in which virtually all allegiances fade in favor of cold, Darwinian logic. ‘I wanted to make it very, very spare,’ Fessenden [has said,] ‘almost classical.’” Courtesy IFC.
April 3, 4:00 T2, April 10, 2:00 T2

Stake Land. 2010. USA. Directed by Jim Mickle. Screenplay by Mickle, Nick Damici. With Connor Paolo, Kelly McGillis, Gregory Jones, Traci Hovel. DCP. 98 min.
The absolutely, horrifyingly fun Stake Land is to The Walking Dead what Night of the Living Dead was to the creation of Glass Eye Pix: a lodestar, an ur-text, transforming timeless mythologies of zombies, vampires, and gunslingers into a contemporary allegory of Mourning in America. Behold, as the gnomically named Mister (cowriter Nick Damici), a drifter, a samurai, a sherpa with a stake, guides his young charge Martin (Connor Paolo, of Gossip Girl!) across a pale landscape of devastation and loneliness—wraithlike shades of Badlands and They Drive by Night—dodging bloodsuckers, flesh eaters, and a Bible-thumping Aryan militia toward a “New Eden” along the Canada border. Courtesy MPI Media.
April 8, 4:00 T2, April 11, 6:30 T1

Tales From Beyond The Pale Season 3 Teaser. 2008 USA. Animation by Beck Underwood. DCP 1.5 minutes)

I Sell the Dead. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Glenn McQuaid. With Dominic Monaghan, Larry Fessenden, Ron Perlman, Angus Scrimm. DCP. 85 min.
Burke and Hare, the notorious ”Resurrection Men” of Victorian England who furnished doctors with freshly exhumed corpses while murderously creating a few of their own along the way, have been irresistible fodder for the movies, most notably in Val Lewton and Robert Wise’s Body Snatcher, Freddie Francis’s The Doctor and the Devils (produced by Mel Brooks and adapted from a screenplay by Dylan Thomas) and, most irresistibly, John Gilling’s The Flesh and the Fiends, starring Peter Cushing, on loan from Hammer Films. As they bring out the dead—and the undead—Irish director Glenn McQuaid and his grave-robbing, scenery-chewing actors Larry Fessenden and Dominic Monaghan infuse the lugubrious proceedings with an absurdly Pythonesque gallows humor, with faraway Staten Island, Long Island, and Manhattan Island standing in for “fog-drenched, blood-soaked” 19th-century Ireland. Courtesy IFC Films.
April 8, 6:30 T2, April 18, 4:30 T2

The Comedy. 2012. USA. Directed by Rick Alverson. Screenplay by Alverson, Robert Donne, Colm O’Leary. With Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, James Murphy. DCP. 95 min.
In the 10 years since Rick Alverson (Entertainment, The Mountain) collaborated with the merry pranksters Tim & Eric and James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem) on The Comedy, America seems to have become an even less forgiving and hospitable place, making this study in sneering entitlement and sour irony all the more piquant. “Could there be a more unsympathetic character in today’s culture than a well-born white male who uses his privilege irresponsibly?,” asked Karina Longworth in the Village Voice. “A highly improvised fictional exposé in search of the elusive heart and soul of hipster nihilism, The Comedy stars alt-comic superstar Tim Heidecker as Swanson, a trust fund 35-year-old hanging out in Williamsburg, fucking around, and waiting for his sickly dad to die.”
April 16, 6:30 T2 (Introduced by Rick Alverson and Larry Fessenden), April 19, 4:30 T2

Virtual Cinema – March 30 – April 19

PROGRAM 1: The Early Films of Larry Fessenden and Glass Eye Pix

See Larry Fessenden at his most primitive! Explore 1980s downtown New York at its most outrageous and obscene! This selection of rarities features the death-defying pratfalls of David “Impact Addict” Leslie and the performance-art stylings of go-go dancer Heather Woodbury. Program 95 min.
White Trash. 1980. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden. Restaged for the opening sequence of Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass, Fessenden’s Super 8 film White Trash imagines a rather unusual form of murder and an even more unusual form of compost. 7 min.
Lifeline. 1981. USA. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden. Out of the primeval soup, the muck and maw of prehistory, a man resembling Larry Fessenden discovers fire. He uses it to ward off predators and evil spirits while also creating light, heat, and moving pictures. 13 min.
Impact Addict. 1987. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden, David Leslie. The Evil Knievel (Gallagher? Jackass?) of downtown 1980s New York, David “Impact Addict” Leslie risked life, limb, and self-pride to relieve his childhood fantasies of kung fu fighting and leaping off tall buildings in performances at the Kitchen and the Public as well as the Staten Island Ferry and Morton Downey Jr. This is his story. 9 min.
Chinatown. 1986. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden, David Leslie. Ringing in the Chinese New Year on a bustling Chinatown street, David Leslie sets himself afire and metamorphoses from Tiger to Hare. 6 min.
Hollow Venus: Diary of a Go-Go Dancer. 1989. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden. Screenplay by Fessenden, Heather Woodbury. With Woodbury. Hollow Venus is a forgotten gem, a heady cocktail of 1980s East Village burlesque, performance art, and quasi-improvised restagings of Heather Woodbury’s many strange encounters as a topless dancer. 58 min.
Trailer for Habit. 1995. USA. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden. Of Fessenden’s many jarring, funny movie trailers, Habit is one of the best. The film screens in MoMA theaters on March 30 and April 11. 2 min.

PROGRAM 2: Glass Eye Pix: Independent Voices

The Past inside the Present. 2016. USA. Directed by Wolfgang Siewert. With Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, Schuyler Helford. A couple rekindle their marriage by plugging into a hallucinatory memory machine. 11 min.
The Roost. 2005. USA. Written and directed by Ti West. With Tom Noonan, Karl Jacob, Vanessa Horneff. With a ghastly turn of the screw and a cadaverous Tom Noonan as our late-night TV host, Ti West refreshes the hoariest of horror tropes: A group of naive teenagers, stuck in the middle of nowhere after their car breaks down, wind up scaring themselves to death. 80 min.
Darling. 2015. USA. Written and directed by Mickey Keating. With Lauren Ashley Carter, Sean Young, Brian Morvant. For a lonely girl in the big city, what begins as a plum gig—housesitting a Manhattan mansion—turns into a terrifying descent into madness. While this jarringly effective psychological horror has been compared with It Follows, The Babadook, and Repulsion, Mickey Keating found himself equally inspired by less obvious sources like Robert Altman’s Images, the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, and the video game Silent Hill. 78 min.

PROGRAM 3: Glass Eye Pix: Making It Reel

Providing a master class on no-budget filmmaking at its best—the trials and tribulations, thrills of glory, and spills of gory—Larry Fessenden (No Telling) and Jack Fessenden (Stray Bullets) pull back the curtain on the making of their breakthrough feature films.
The Making of No Telling. 1991. USA Produced by Larry Fessenden. 24 min.
Sweating Bullets: Making Stray Bullets. 2016. USA. Produced by Larry Fessenden . 54 min.

PROGRAM 4: Glass Eye Pix Docs

Uncle Ben [excerpt from American Jesus]. 2013. USA. Directed by Beck Underwood. Beck Underwood animated this scene for Aram Garriga’s documentary about devout followers of Jesus in every corner of America, from bikers and cowboys to surfers and artists. 10 min.
Birth of the Living Dead. 2013. USA. Directed by Rob Kuhns. This definitive documentary about the making of Night of the Living Dead features an extensive and illuminating interview by George Romero, as well as reflections on the movie’s immortal place in film history and popular culture by Gale Ann Hurd (producer of The Walking Dead) and the critics Jason Zinoman, Mark Harris, and Elvis Mitchell. 76 min. Courtesy First Run Features

PROGRAM 5: Glass Eye Pix Docs

Markie in Milwaukee. 2019. USA. Directed by Matt Kliegman. Drawing upon 10 years of home movies, Matt Kliegman creates a heartbreaking profile in courage as midwestern evangelist Mark Wentzel, a seven-foot, 400-pound middle-aged man with the gentlest of souls, begins transitioning into a woman named Markie Ann. Shunned and mocked by her family and community and forced to confront her own demons of uncertainty and guilt, she—he—makes a decision that is difficult, lonely, and brave. 92 min. Courtesy Icarus Films

PROGRAM 6: Celebrating Stop-Motion Animator Beck Underwood and Creepy Christmas

A producer, production designer, and art director on many Glass Eye Pix productions, including Hollow Venus, No Telling, Stake Land, and Stray Bullets, Beck Underwood is also an award-winning animator who creates “perfectly perfect” little eccentric worlds mixing stop-motion and live action. She is also the creator of the kids-friendly zine ZuZu and the founder of the Creepy Christmas Film Festival which, she recalls, “began as a large diorama I built, became a printed advent calendar, and eventually inspired two online film festivals, the first in 2008 and another in 2018. Twenty-five filmmakers were invited to create a short film based on images from the calendar or holiday-themed words.” Separately, Underwood’s short film An Exquisite Task screens theatrically with Most Beautiful Island, and Uncle Ben streams online with Birth of the Living Dead. Program 20 min.

Beck Underwood: Four films
That Creepy Old Doll. 1998. USA. Directed by Beck Underwood. Underwood made her first 16mm animation while a student at SVA. 2 min.
Perfectly Perfect. 2009. USA. Directed by Beck Underwood. Music video for Elizabeth and the Catapult. 3 min.
The Estate of Things. TKTK. USA. Directed by Beck Underwood. 2 min.
There in Spirit. 2021. USA. Directed by Beck Underwood. 5 min.

Creepy Christmas: Three films
Souvenir. 2019. USA. Directed by Merrell Rauch, with Sam, Maude, and Gareth Brown. 2 min.
Swollen Archive. 2008. USA. Directed by Glenn McQuaid. Music by Nico Muhly. 2 min.
Wild Ride. 2019. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden. Music by Will Bates. 4 min.

IN PERSON at MoMA

Beck Underwood, Jack Fessenden; MoMA host and curator Josh Siegel; Fessenden minds the posters; director Kelly Reichardt; I Sell The Dead and Stake Land crew members Matthew Cryan, David Bell, Beck Underwood, Peter Phok, Brent Kunkle; Fessendens with Foxhole dp Collin Brazie, producer Adam Scherr; Foxhole Q&A with Jack Fessenden and host Josh Siegel; The House of the Devil director Ti West; An Exquisite Task director Beck Underwood and Most Beautiful Island director Ana Asensio (with son); I Can See You dp Gordon Arkenberg; Automatons creator James Felix McKenney; No Telling dp David Shaw; Like Me director Robert Mockler and producer James Belfer; Liberty Kid director Ilya Chaiken, with actors Kareem Savinion, Anny Mariano; The Comedy director Rick Alverson.

Thanks to the artists and audiences that came to the shows…
and thanks to The Museum of Modern Art for hosting