… 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…
“Even outside the Rob Bottin material, there are the obvious fears of parenthood: a.) no matter how good you are, you will eventually fail your children, and b.) eventually you will die and they’ll have to figure out all this shit on their own. So I thought, man, that sounds like fun listening.
“And working in pure audio is such a good opportunity to actually scare people. It’s clichéd advice by now to cover your ears if you don’t want to be frightened watching a horror movie. You don’t have that safety net for a radio play. If you don’t want to be scared, don’t listen at all. So I hope you enjoy “Johnny Boy.” It may not be as disturbing as the Ron Howard/Steve Martin meditation on parenthood, but it’s definitely scarier.”
I liked the idea of writing a literary piece, with plenty of voice over. Sometimes with our Tales we dive into the drama through dialogue and sound effects and let the audience figure out where they are, but here I wanted to celebrate the written word with a prose style and that approach worked for this piece.
GM: As somber as the piece gets, I had a lot of fun working on it with everybody, there was a fun, family oriented vibe about the production that echoed some of the lighter moments of the story. Was that intentional?
