DEPRAVED isn’t the first time Larry Fessenden has delved into the Frankenstein mythos. The Godfather of Indie Horror Cinema played with reanimation in one of his first films, the mad science drama NO TELLING. That was 1991 and even though NO TELLING was a memorable and powerful film, Fessenden has perfected his distinct style and delivered a stunning low fi masterpiece in DEPRAVED.
Fessenden brings Mary Shelley’s tale into the modern age, following a PTSD afflicted war medic named Henry (David Call) who pairs up with an opportunistic pharma businessman named Polidori (BLAIR WITCH PROJECT’s Joshua Leonard) to test their new experimental drug on a recent murder victim. Naming the reanimated victim Adam (Alex Breaux), Henry goes about his private rehabilitation in a meticulous and careful manner – teaching Adam basic coordination and memory skills. Of course, this isn’t fast enough results for Polidori. Meanwhile, Adam is having flashes of his previous life and urges to find a mate of his own, much like Henry’s devoted girlfriend Liz (Ana Kayne). You know where this is going…and it’s going to be bad.
Fessenden hits all of the story beats we’ve seen in tons of reinterpretations of the Shelley classic. The difference here is that Fessenden distills the basics from the story and applies it to a modern tale of big pharma, lofty ambition, and the conflict between corporate demand vs. humanitarian treatment. Despite those heady themes, DEPRAVED is drenched with character and heart all around, as Fessenden imbues both Henry and Adam with sympathetic traits. Henry wants what’s best for Adam, looking after him like a child. But this treatment isn’t happening fast enough by Polidori, who is desperate to report results and make money off of all of this. This conflict is one of two in this tale, paralleled with Adam’s struggle to regain his humanity. All elements work marvelously and reflects Shelley’s tale in an intricate way that most Frankenstein tales fail.
Another thing that sets this film apart is Fessenden’s unique cinematography. Fessenden uses quick montages of images, simple overlays of color and light, and other rudimentary (but effective) camera effects that gives even more substance and style. This is a technique Fessenden has used before in films such as WENDIGO and THE LAST WINTER. Though this technique has been used by other directors (Aronofsky’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, for example), it feels like Fessenden’s unique stamp on each of his films. I would love to see Fessenden get his hands on a big budget film. He has been behind the scenes for way too long and has been a major trumpeter for many of the best voices in today’s horror game. Maybe he is comfortable with the low budget control and personal take to all of his own films, but I’d love to see what this soulful and passionate filmmaker would do with a couple of mill. That said, DEPRAVED is truly one of the best FRANKENSTEIN adaptations you’re going to find. Be on the lookout for it
Jenn Wexler’s THE RANGER comes to Limited Edition VHS, a Lunchmeat exclusive.
“THE RANGER is the movie I wished I could have watched on VHS as a kid. It’s set in what I like to call “1980s dreamland,” an imaginary past reminiscent of ’80s punk horror classics like RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Having Lunchmeat create a RANGER VHS is a dream come true. Now all I have to do is time-travel back to sneak it onto the shelf of my local video store.” – Jenn Wexler
A clever, provocative, terrifically acted and written modern-telling of Frankenstein, it is the cult director-writer-producer-editor-actor’s best film in a long career that includes the prize-winning art-horror trilogy Habit, Wendigo, and—about another scientist doing diabolical experiments—No Telling). I especially appreciated how Fessenden exhibits respect for Mary Shelley’s source novel and the classic horror films it spawned, yet injects 21st century ideas and issues into the story in startling ways without angering don’t-change-a-thing traditionalists like me.
On Tues., March 26, the sixth annual NY Acker Awards will once again honor some of the
best and brightest local contributors to the Downtown arts community.
Among this year’s diverse group of recipients are
film directors Larry Fessenden and Beck Underwood
Produced by documentarian Clayton Patterson, the Acker Awards recognize
avant-garde artists, writers, musicians and community organizers
that enliven the Downtown arts scene. While the event’s name pays homage
to the late feminist writer Kathy Acker, it’s also an archaic Dutch word that means
“a visible current in a river.”
NY ACKER Awards
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Theater For The New City,
155 First Ave.
Doors Open 6 program starts 7 PM
FREE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC….
Larry Fessenden’s name is pretty much inextricable from independent horror cinema at this point. Over the course of the past few decades, he’s become not just an omnipresent indie character actor (turning up in everything from You’re Next to Session 9 to Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead), but through his company, Glass Eye Pix, he’s helped to bring countless ambitious low-budget films to to life—mostly horror (and what a resume: The House Of The Devil, Darling, Stake Land, to name a few), but also some bold drama and oddball fare (Wendy And Lucy, The Comedy). He’s also dipped into the world of video games, winning a BAFTA award for writing the hit survival-horror game Until Dawn. And through it all, he’s maintained a fairly consistent pace of writing, editing, and directing his own films at the slow but steady rate of one every five years or so. His latest, Depraved, (which had its world premiere last night at the What The Fest?! film festival in New York) is a modern reworking of Frankenstein set in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn.
When we caught up with Fessenden, what began as a discussion of his latest film turned into a fascinating and freewheeling look at the current state of indie cinema, the durability of horror, and why there’s no justification for being an asshole in the pursuit of great art.
Paul D’AgostinoThomas Micchelli
“Depraved” (2019), directed by Larry Fessenden, © Glass Eye Pix (all images courtesy Glass Eye Pix)
I wrote the following capsule review of Depraved, a new film by Larry Fessenden, just after viewing it, in part to spur on ideas for a fuller review:
Immediately ensnaring and narratively circuitous on levels literal, mesmerizingly visual, and metaphorical alike, Depraved is not a mashup, rather a pastiche of essentially all you might hope for it to layer, paste, stick, piece, and yes, oh yes, stitch together — from film and literary references to production values, chronologies, political critiques, and philosophies. Its enigmas run deep. Its puzzles are many. And especially with its setting in Brooklyn, it’s also a holistic embodiment of multiple forms and histories of DIY ‘life.’
But then something different took shape instead.
My colleague, Hyperallergic Weekend editor Thomas Micchelli, viewed the film as well. In a brief exchange we had right afterwards, he said that he also found Depraved compelling, and that he had some thoughts about it. So I sent him my initial thoughts in my capsule, and he then had more thoughts.
So then what we thought was this: Given that the film itself is all layers and multiplicities of disciplines, inputs, and chronologies, it could be more interesting to present a layered, multiple-voiced exchange between the two of us — a kind of review-qua-pastiche or pastiche-qua-review, not unlike the pastiche that is this film.
Below is an edited version of our exchange.
— Paul D’Agostino
Paul D’Agostino: It seems you too were flooded with thoughts after watching Depraved. Were you also flooded with thoughts as you watched it? I was, and I had so many and jotted them down so sloppily while watching, eyes wide open, in the dark, that at one point I actually turned a low light on my notes to make sure I’d be able to reread them later. I saw already that would be a challenge. Anyway, you too? And what were your initial thoughts, i.e. before I sent you the capsule? And after you read the capsule?
Thomas Micchelli: No, I never take notes. I just let my responses pile up, with the hope that the better ones will stick.
My reaction to the first frame usually presages my opinion of the entire film, and the first frame of Depraved — the overhead shot of a vinyl LP spinning on a turntable — seemed to be ushering in a movie that would be fatally arch and not terribly original.
But this was one of the rare times that the first-frame test failed, maybe because it belonged to a different movie, the five minutes of rom-com tease that you mentioned when we talked on the phone. I did think, though, that the way the overhead shot continued across the half-finished meal and ended in the voyeuristic glimpse through the bedroom doors had a refreshing earthiness to it.
We will be getting into the specifics of the movie’s pastiche of every Frankenstein imagining and then some in a little bit, but overall, the film that it evoked most strongly for me was Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), with the first part mesmerizing and inexplicable, and the second part surrendering to the demands of plot. The first half-hour was especially persuasive — the sound design was brilliant in its ability to communicate the monster’s disorientation in his new world. The use of his point of view, including the deficiencies in his eyesight, was a device that I think could have been used more and explored further.
PD: Well, I don’t always take notes either when watching films to review, but I do at least try to jot down quotes that strike me as piquant, revealing, maybe meaningful for what might follow. Or if they’re particularly stupid. Anyway, I like your description of the first-frame test. I should try that. I do something that’s less of a test than a search for an entry into a bit of writing, again if I’m watching something I might review: I look for how much the director has attempted to pull me in, all the way into the visuals and the narrative, in the first few minutes. It’s less of a gauge of the film’s entirety than your method, but useful for me for reviews.
At any rate, Fessenden does more in those first five or so minutes than I was prepared for. But I was excited by it. It was a true jolt. As you brought up, the film opens in such completely mundane, maybe rom-com-cum-drama ways, that you’re hardly ready for what’s next. It goes from that slowish pan over some unfinished meals in a living room, into a bedroom where the couple has retreated to burn off dinner with the dessert of coitus, to a moment of happy, maybe post-coitally enlivened chatter in the living room, only to then quickly transition into an argument out of nowhere, punctuated by a claim of, “You keep setting me up to be a disappointment,” barked by Alex, whose identity won’t remain exactly that for very long.
All that’s in the first few minutes, after which a brutal murder comes almost out of nowhere, and it is extreme in its immediacy and intensity — i.e. already a different genre of film, in a sense — before then transitioning into some of the near-campy, classic sci-fi-ish, a bit flashy but also not overwrought digital overlays suggestive of electrical pulses and cerebral flashes, and so on. It’s so fast, and so suggestive already of the film’s many layers yet to come. It’s already a pastiche, and it would become much more of one — much like we already know the ‘monster’ is as a ‘thing’ pieced together into ‘life.’
Early on I began thinking of films like Memento (2000) and Primer (2004) as kindred works. Further on I thought a lot about Matthew Barney’s films and art. We can come back to some of that, but I’m interested in what you say about the monster’s eyesight. True, that did come up a lot. Similar in import, and that we can infer as elaborated throughout, was the refrain, “Gravity is your friend,” which were essentially Adam’s — at this point the monster’s name is Adam — first words, to the great astonishment of Henry, Adam’s ‘Dr. Frankenstein.’
TM: I’d like to return to your initial take on the film, its stylistic use of pastiche as a mirroring of Adam’s bodily pastiche. As opposed to a movie by Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, in which the film-geek references are subsumed into the cinematic flow, a pastiche lets its edges show, like the scars on Adam’s body. The citations pull you out of the moment and divert your attention to themselves.
The references in Depraved seem out of the blue, such as the twisting camera angle when Adam breaks loose and roams the streets, which brought to mind The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921), or the close-up of Polidori’s mouth eating a piece of steak, a reference that’s eluding me but I know I’ve seen. (Caligari, which revolves around a carnival barker and an unnaturally tall somnambulist, seems as much of a touchstone as James Whale’s or Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein films, especially given the number of times Henry tells Adam how important it is for him to sleep.)
There were a number of narrative holes, some that bothered me (there was no setup for Adam’s discovery of his backstory, making it feel rushed and contrived), and others that I found fascinating, such as why Adam has been created out of multiple parts in the first place. If the idea, as we find out later, was to find a way to bring the freshly killed back to life, there seems to have been no need for Henry to sew together an Übermensch, other than to satisfy the director’s desire to make a 21st-century Frankenstein movie. And in that light, the monster’s pastiche of dead parts seems like a critique of the enterprise.
Still, I wonder why we are talking about this movie in particular. What makes it compelling enough to single out for discussion? I can’t quite articulate it.
PD: Great point. Great points. On the latter one, I suppose we’re discussing it because it offers itself as the direct product of the piecing together, rather than blending, of genres, styles, references, and angles of social critique. It’s true that we could just leave it at: ‘Hey folks, this movie is really good, even fun, and it’ll make you think!’
But then, yes, so do many other films out there to see. But it does make sense, given its internal multiplicity of points of view, its interdisciplinarity, to address the qualities of Depraved from multiple points of view. The film festival presenting it [WHAT THE FEST!? at the IFC Center in Manhattan] seems like it could feature a number of other pictures that have similar efficacy.
I can say that it was that latter aspect that initially got me intrigued. Fessender brings quite a mix of experience in filmmaking to the table and has worked alongside many of the greats in indy film, so I was curious to see how an art-horror director whose work is shown at MoMA, and who has worked on projects with Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch and Guillermo Del Toro, to name a few, might handle Mary Shelley’s classic text.
There’s also of course a very circumstantial aspect to my interest: I happened to see It’s Alive, the Frankenstein exhibition at the Morgan late last year, and it was exhilarating in so many ways. I could go on, or probably we could both go on for a while about how great it was, but that’s a different review. For now it’s worth noting that I particularly enjoyed the ways the exhibit conveyed the interdisciplinarity of Shelley’s brilliance, and the prodigious wealth of creative enterprise and expression her story has continued to generate.
Moreover, one part of It’s Alive! that I found hardest to budge from, in addition to that jaw-dropping suite of paintings by Henry Fuseli, including “The Nightmare” (1781) and “Three Witches” (1783) — and it seems that Fuseli and Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, according to the exhibition notes, had some manner of amorous rapport (what a detail!) — was the section detailing the impact of Shelley’s novel on the history of cinema.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a story that can seem destined to be envisioned and reimagined in so many ways, through so many mediums and genres. In itself it’s everything from allegory to Bildungsroman to gothic horror delving into sci-fi, and so much more.
So those are just some of the things that got me intrigued in this movie in the first place, which then got me watching those first five minutes that had me all-in, electrifyingly so. For certain, one thing that’s worth noting before turning to your Übermensch point is that Depraved had me constantly marveling at Shelley’s prescience in telling her story. By way of one of the most effective and broadly transmittable media of her time, she told a kind of pastiche of a tale that could be enjoyed just as well at any single level of its narrative or critique, or at all of them at once, and remain just as cogent, just as potent. To watch Depraved is also to be consistently reminded of the monstrous critical importance of Shelley’s creation.
This brings me right to your point about the Übermensch, and maybe also about the critique of the enterprise: PTSD and the wars of the day are regularly dropped into all kinds of films and streaming series these days, not often necessarily or effectively, other than as constant reminders of just how long certain wars, particularly US-led or ‘fed’ campaigns, have gone on.
Here, the references to the wars become relevant to the story in ways that make sense — from the variably stilted, jarred, dazed cognitive states displayed by the film’s protagonists and graphic effects alike, to the intuitable critique of the military-industrial complex, so interested in the successful creation of this monster.
TM: When Henry says to Adam, “I want you to be safe,” he’s trying to make amends for those on the battlefield he couldn’t save, but he had to deal in death to do it.
PD: Yes, he’s working through his own mental trauma. Meanwhile, instigator Polidori seems to simply regard it all as a game, another puzzle for Henry to give Adam to solve in some kind of venture-capitalist-funded experiment in “extreme sports biology,” a telling claim.
Also telling is that moments after Henry says to Adam, “I want you to be safe,” we see him tucking Adam into bed by covering him in a blanket that looks a lot like a quilt, which at that early point in the film is also what Adam’s body already looks like — a stitched-together quilt of flesh, limbs, materials, memories, traumas.
On that note, I think we’ve covered things well enough. Let’s put this critical monster to bed, and maybe awaken it some other time for some other film or whatever else.
In the meantime, let’s test our prescience. Brooklyn DIY trend of the future, ‘artisanal A.I.’? I can see it already: “How to Make Your Own Person at Home in Seven Easy Steps.”
And forget the references to the doctor. The conceptual origin and possible prototype should just be called ‘Mary’s Monster.’
“… Visually and aurally Fessenden’s film is a feast filled with animation and sound design meant to embody the multitudes that reside within Adam. These soundscapes of noise and reverse speech illustrate the conflicting dualities within him as his present mind tries to understand how to speak while his past mind struggles to remember who he once was. The film’s lighting is washed in warm reds and greens to give Depraved an almost E.C. Comics-esque color palette juxtaposed with Fessenden’s aesthetical camera work (shot by Chris Skotchdopole and James Siewert) imbued with his early 90’s DIY spirit. As his films are character studies as well as genre pieces, Fessenden gets the most out of his talented cast but especially Call and Breaux, who embodies this version of The Monster with a quiet intensity, unlike any other iteration we’ve seen before.
“Fessenden has been creating genre films with a message for years. In the director’s notes for the film he elaborates, saying “I have always been deeply moved by the archetypes of horror, and have made it my mission to breathe new life into these stories by grounding them in our contemporary world.” His works are emotional journeys, weaving you through unexpected territories until the rug is pulled from beneath you and you are left with the films emotional core. Or maybe it’s better to describe it as a pit, like the one each of his characters eventually have in their stomachs. He does this with every one of his films, from Habit’s commentary on alcoholism through the lens of vampirism to The Last Winter, his Eco-chiller using the Wendigo legend as a proxy for the destructive nature of climate change.
“For lack of a better term, I’d argue that he is our sole Activist Horror filmmaker, starting all the way back in 1991 with his ostensible debut No Telling. The film, a dark romance about a love triangle and ethically ambiguous animal testing, has a clear lineage to Depraved when viewed in tandem. But while No Telling ends on a visceral gut punch, this film leaves us with a modicum of hope. Fessenden is a director that is constantly evolving, finding new ways to let his voice be heard, and in a career of home runs, Depraved stands out as the film where his voice can be heard the clearest.”
GEP thanks What The Fest!? for a fantastic world premiere!
Go see all the other goodies they got cooking this weekend.
This week, the Second Annual What the Fest!? arrived in New York City. The five-day showcase of genre films kicked off with the world premiere of Larry Fessenden’s Depraved, which was shot on the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Fessenden’s contemporary take on the literary classic, the Vienna castle is now a Brooklyn loft and the reanimating lightening bolt a miracle drug that’s not yet FDA approved, while the monster—still very much cobbled together from various body parts—is similarly on a profound quest to learn what it means to be human.
Anthem joined Fessenden and Call at B Bar and Grill in Manhattan this week to eavesdrop on this exclusive 1-on-1 conversation and for our photo shoot before Depraved’s premiere at IFC Center.
The Films of Larry Fessenden: Vol 2
Wendigo & The Last Winter
The Films of Larry Fessenden: Vol 1
Habit & No Telling
The Innkeepers
Limited Edition Blu-Ray
The House Of The Devil
Collector Edition Blu-Ray
WENDIGO Figures
From Glass Eye Toyz
CRUMB CATCHER Blu-Ray
From Arrow Video
BLACKOUT BLU-RAY
From Dark Sky Selects
FOXHOLE BLU-RAY
From Vinegar Syndrome
9 Tales From Beyond The Pale
on Amazon!
THE LARRY FESSENDEN COLLECTION Blu-ray
on Amazon!
BENEATH Blu-ray & DVD
on Amazon!
