Wendigo Now Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

If you saw the new Pet Sematary, and were intrigued by the legend of the Wendigo that’s mentioned briefly in the film, you might want to check out Larry Fessenden‘s Wendigo. A low-budget affair, Fessenden knows exactly how to stretch his budget and create an effective, creepy chiller. Jake Weber, Patricia Clarkson and Erik Peter Sullivan play a family who decide to take a vacation from Manhattan and head to a cabin in heavily wooded upstate New York. The trip runs into trouble almost immediately, when the family runs afoul of a group of rude, confrontational hunters. Once everyone gets to the cabin, things only get weirder, as some sort of malevolent presence seems to be lurking about. Is it all in the heads of the characters, or is there something supernatural afoot? You decide.

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2015, Fessenden, Barbara Crampton, Andrew Sensenig, Lisa Marie and
director Ted Geoghegan on set of WE ARE STILL HERE.

From PopHorror: “In Depraved, we get a look at Frankenstein’s monster in the way that Mary Shelley always envisioned… a desolate, confused creation rebuilt out of other people’s parts that only reacted to what he had learned in his short, miserable life…

… On the surface, the film is about a broken doctor named Henry (Call) who gets in over his head after agreeing to try out his friend, Polidori’s (Leonard), reanimation drugs on what is essentially a pieced together cadaver. He has this being before him that he is pressured to teach the most basic bodily functions and how to respond in society, all in the quickest way possible. Imagine being in his situation, one of responsibility and doubt, pressured to do more by his peers but feeling deep sympathy and even love for his subject.

But dig deeper and you find the tale of a paradigm who has no one in the world that he can relate to. Adam (Breaux) has memories of things he never did and people he’s never met. He looks in the mirror and sees a shattered face – both literally and figuratively – that he does not recognize. His body is pieced together, and not one of those pieces are originally his. Adam is a full grown man who has no control of his bodily functions or even the simplest tasks, like a newborn baby in a man’s body. He was never born; he just became. His wretched heart knows no mother or father, no name or identity. If you’re made up of other people’s parts, who are you? Is the brain in your head even yours? Do you even have a soul?“

Read Full Review HERE

As our friends at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies continue to grow and aspire to further the intellectual and studious side of the horror genre, their growth requires more collective brain braun.

It is important for any organization to be present for the genre’s movements and it’s reflections of currents in societal tides, yet still be reverent to its foundations. With its rise in power Miskatonic founder Kier-La Janisse began assembling an advisory board that will be consulted on the institute’s operations. She has gathered as fine a collection of horror icons, writers, directors, producers, festival programmers & program directors, and horror enthusiasts as we will ever see.

Horror filmmakers and icons Mick Garris, Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden, Buddy Giovinazzo and Sean Hogan bring their filmmaking and acting experiences to the table.

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Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo doesn’t share any talent with Pet Sematary, but you could argue that it shares a villain. The Wendigo is a demonic creature from Algonquian mythology. Living in the woods of the North Atlantic region, it eats people, and in some versions of the story possesses people and causes them to eat each other. Like Pet Sematary, Wendigo focuses on a family that leaves the city behind only to find that there’s a terrifying presence in the New England woods.

George (Jake Weber) wants to relax in a cabin with his wife Kim (Patricia Clarkson) and young son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan), only to end up facing an evil presence bearing down on them. Miles encounters a Native American shop owner (Shelly Bolding) who tells him the legend of the Wendigo, and Miles becomes convinced that’s what’s in the woods — and perhaps inside his father as well. As the wall between reality and myth appears to collapse, the Wendigo eventually appears onscreen far more directly than in Pet Sematary.

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Journalist Adam Nayman conjures Fessenden’s WENDIGO in article on the new PET SEMATARY

…

Watching Pet Sematary, I couldn’t help but think of Larry Fessenden’s gorgeously melancholy Wendigo, one of the great, underrated horror movies of the 21st century, which features the shape-shifting Native American spirit as its title character and antagonist. Fessenden’s conception of the Wendigo is more positive than King’s, which reduces it to a generic demon, and also more political: It appears as a kind of avenging angel on behalf of Mother Nature, wreaking vengeance against rednecks. The allegory is pure eco-horror (as it is in the director’s Wendigo-themed The Last Winter), but the film’s blindsiding power is located in the authentic love generated in its main father-son pairing of Jake Weber and Erik Per Sullivan. They’re beautifully drawn, both as archetypes and as characters, and the mix of myth and specificity gets channeled in the direction of genuine, unabashed tragedy. The movie isn’t scary, exactly, but it’s sad in a way that’s close to terror—its sense of loneliness like an open existential wound. In Fessenden’s masterpiece, monsters are real but so is loss. What’s dead stays dead, and so you learn to live without it.

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Read whole article in The Ringer HERE

Penned by Tales From Beyond the Pale regular Jeff Buhler (The Stranger, This Oracle Moon, Guttermouth)
the Stephen King adaptation features GEP pal Amy Siemetz (BITTER FEAST, TFBTP Johnny Boy)
and “Young Chelsea” Jeté Laurence from THE RANGER.

Let’s hope renewed efforts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
don’t result in the outcome depicted in Fessenden’s 2006 horror movie…

Watch the trailer HERE