Episode 11: Natural Selection

On the path to find a new species in the storied Galapogos Islands,
a TV Naturalist and his cameraman encounter terrors in the night.

Written and directed by Larry Fessenden.
Featuring Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, James Ransone, Pat Healy, Darroch Greer
Poster by Graham Humphreys.

for more Tales, Box Sets and Swag, visit
www.talesfrombeyondthepale.com

From Villain Media: Director Jenn Wexler has such a sleek visual style that dominates the punk-infused slasher. Amanda Grace Benitez beams with personality and radiates lively energy as the light-hearted Amber. Chloë Levine captures Chelsea’s inner torment and her defiant attitude. Make sure you see it on Shudder.

Fessenden’s film joins eclectic list of hidden gems from the last year.

From Bloody-Disgusting’s Meagan Navarro: In the digital age, we’re inundated with content constantly. Between endless streaming services and VOD, there’s a wealth of horror available at our fingertips at all times. So much so that it’s tough to keep up. It doesn’t help that the marketing for VOD, limited theatrical, and straight-to-streaming titles don’t have the same budget as major theatrical releases, if at all. 

In other words, some of the year’s best offerings can slip through the cracks with ease.

If you’re looking for great horror releases that you might have missed this year, these ten horror movies are among the best of 2019.

Depraved

A PTSD-suffering field surgeon harvests body parts and uses them to create an entirely new man in his Brooklyn apartment. If that sounds like a modern-day retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that’s because it is. Only this time, it’s through the lens of indie horror master Larry Fessenden, in his first spin back in the director’s seat in years. The result is a refreshing twist to a familiar story, with surprising new depth and poignancy. Moreover, it continues Fessenden’s penchant for maximizing a minuscule budget to create something far more luxurious in style.

Read Full List HERE

From Literary Hub: There is one notable exception to the usual reality-to-dystopia ratio, though, that is both humbler and infinitely more unsettling. On September 11, 2006, Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was the most ambitious and expansive of the independent horror auteur’s career, and a long time in the making. Fessenden started writing the film in November of 2001; producer Jeff Levy-Hinte began shopping the script, on which Fessenden collaborated with the writer Robert Leaver, in 2003. It was a horror movie, but more specifically it was a Larry Fessenden Horror Movie, which is to say a doomy character-driven mood piece, with the dominant mood being Choking Dread. Also, it was about climate change, and set at a remote oil company outpost in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve where debates about the ethics of natural resource exploitation give way to something darker. It was not going to be an easy sale, in other words, and it did not sell. Levy-Hinte struck out with the larger independent studios.

…

It’s a commonplace of discussions on the it-actually-exists-and-is-bad side of the global warming debate to opine that better storytelling is needed. This is the side of the debate on which virtually all of the scientific facts and elite consensus reside, but that consensus routinely expresses itself in the washed-out language of scientists trying to speak English; the facts, factual though they may be, are so crushing in what they promise that they become abstract again. It is natural to turn away from horror at that obliterating scale. It is a difficult story to tell because it is one humans are seemingly built not to understand.

In The Last Winter, Fessenden chose to tell it anyway, and much of what is most powerful and most powerfully unsettling in his movie owes to that. He literalizes where he has to in order to make the story work, and he caricatures where he must to make the points he wants to make; this is his job. But his first decision was his bravest, and it would make The Last Winter stand out even if more—any, really—films had similarly risen to this challenge in the decade since. Plenty of horror filmmakers have wrestled with monsters. Fessenden took on one that he knew he couldn’t beat.

Read Full Article HERE

IFC Unlimited brand new app features Fessenden’s flick THE LAST WINTER,
along with WENDIGO streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

And DEPRAVED starts streaming on HULU.

Read the garbled interview with Fessenden here: Comingsoon.net

“SOUNDS OF THE AVIARY,” a collection of the time-warped, oscillator-detuned,
cassette-damaged synth music from #TheChambersTape,
is finally available! Includes the 35 min ambient odyssey SIDE B,
previously unheard in any digital form.

From Complex Distractions: “Where am I going with this? Well I’m leading you to something called The Chambers Tape, folks. What is The Chambers Tape? It’s a complete and absolute mindf**k of an episode of the podcast Tales From Beyond The Pale, which was written and directed by Graham Reznick. Reznick spins a story of a mysterious tape titled The Aviary which appeared in just a couple random cities back in 1974. It’s a self-help tape fashioned to lull the listener into becoming one with themselves and the world around them. The voice on this tape is Dr. William Chambers. Of course, nothing you are hearing is what it appears to be. Reznick works the episode as if we’re listening to the tape and taking instruction from Chambers, as new age-y synths come in and out of the mix. Think of the old tapes of The Dharma Initiative on Lost, or Mercurio Arboria’s Arboria Institute in Beyond The Black Rainbow. A mixture of new age psychology, psychedelics, and something sinister just below the surface.”

See Full Review HERE

Take a listen to THE CHAMBERS TAPE, now available on the
TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE PODCAST

Episode 10: The Chambers Tape

Life got you down? We have just the tonic! Relax, breathe deeply and close your eyes.
Let the calming effects of The Aviary work its magic on you.
Written and directed by Graham Reznick.
Featuring Misha Collins, Lawrence Michael Levine, Sophia Takal, Kersten Haile.
Music and Sound Design by Graham Reznick.
Poster by Graham Humphreys.

for more Tales, Box Sets and Swag, visit
www.talesfrombeyondthepale.com

OLD JOY, directed by GEP collaborator 
Kelly Reichardt (WENDY AND LUCY, CERTAIN WOMEN)
is now part of the Criterion Collection.

Available today at your local
brick & mortar video store.