A GLASS EYE PIX EXCLUSIVE:

Episode 11 of TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE The Podcast is written and directed by Larry Fessenden and stars Dominc Monaghan and Billy Boyd, know the world over as Merry and Pippin from Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS Trilogy. Monaghan went on to icon status as Charlie in JJ Abram’s LOST and is featured this week’s STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, also by Abrams. Monaghan also happens to be Fessenden’s co-star in Glenn McQuaid’s Glass Eye Pix production, I SELL THE DEAD. McQuaid and Fessenden decided to have a chat about Fessenden’s audio drama “Natural Selection” in which a naturalist and his cameraman get into a heap of trouble while exploring a remote Galapagos Island. Glenn gave Larry a ring from across the pond and here is their conversation: 

GLENN McQUAID: “Natural Selection”, if I remember correctly, was inspired by a trip to The Galápagos Islands, did the ideas flow while in the environment or in retrospect? 

 

LARRY FESSENDEN: I wrote the tale some years after I had been in the Galapagos Islands. But that trip was very vivid to me. And I was thinking about the Fukushima Nuclear disaster (March 2011) and the anxiety a lot of people had that the Pacific Ocean currents would bring nuclear waste across the ocean. There is of course a tradition of making monsters out of nuclear disaster (GODZILLA, anyone?), so I was riffing on those tropes.

 

GM: And pollution in general. PROPHESY comes to mind And Have you see THE HOST by Bong Joon-ho? It has the most profound opening where an American  scientist orders his assistant to empty bottles of formaldehyde into the Han River. It’s surreal in its cause-and-effect simplicity. 

 

LF: Of course, love both those flicks! Nature revenge movies, a class all their own.

 

GM: I completely forgot that Natural Selection adheres to the found-footage format, what inspired you to take a stab at that style for an audio drama?

 

LF: I always find it funny when you see a character in a remote situation on these reality TV shows and they seem to be alone and suffering but I say, what about the cameraman? So I wanted to bring that into the story. And yes, try doing a “found-footage” piece for radio.

 

The piece came together very organically. I had been haunted by my trip to the Galapagos for some time, the sounds as well as the images; it was certainly a great setting for the sort of immersive audio tales we are interested in creating. You and I have both been intrigued by the sort of nature audio that is out there, sound of the seashore or birds that play for an hour…

 

GM: Dan Gibson‘s series of SOLITUDES records have always inspired me and I have had a mind to make a serious of nature records myself but each one should have a hidden little spot of peculiarity to them, a drowning or a rift in the space time fabric.

 

LF: My favorite of my Tales are the ones where I have collected my own ambiences. For “The Hole Digger” I got my sound from Cape Cod where the story takes place. There’s a drowning in that one!

GM: I have fond memories of Dom between takes on I SELL THE DEAD, rummaging through bushes and investigating the local insect life of the grave yards we shot in, and since then he went on to have his own nature show, he seems like the perfect lead for Natural Selection, was he on your mind when writing? What was his response to the material. 

LF: Dom has a TV show called WILD THINGS in which he travels to exotic locations and interacts with unusual creatures and tries to excite people about the natural wonders all around us. I knew that my story would make sense to him. While I don’t claim to be an adventurous sort, I have a deep simpatico with nature and other creatures and Dom’s attitude is a lovely and profound expression of my own sense of place in this world. Difference is, he actually goes out there…

 

The tale has another more existential aspect to it, and I try to contemplate the character Ross confronting death, and how he doesn’t fight it, he goes with the flow of his terrible fate without judgement and that eases his passage. But he leaves his cameraman behind to face a similar fate without the same perspective, a worse end for him.

 

GM: Ross is deeply enamored and respectful of the environment but through celebrating it he ends up in a bit of a bind, I’m reminded of Hoffman in THE LAST WINTER, even the good guys will suffer the consequences of mankind’s greed and willful ignorance, perhaps more so than most as they tried to do something about it. Is it fair to say this existential tragedy is made more bearable with the addition of monsters? 

LF: I always find that monsters sweeten the pot! The story here seems to be that the Ross character has too much comfort in his own relationship with nature and gets too close to the creature and it snaps at him, causing his demise. Doesn’t take away from the truth of Ross’s world view, but fate has its own plans. My stories are not about winning, but how to accept defeat. That is the place where we can all have control.  

GM: So fun to have Billy Boyd along side Dom again, they have such wonderful chemistry, how was it having them back together during  the production?

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