Jack Fessenden and Padre flanked by the undead at the Premier Event for
Jim Jarmusch’s THE DEAD DON’T DIE, opening nation-wide on Friday, June 14.

“The film is surprisingly sweet and melancholic – it aches with the soul of a poet. And the make-up effects used to bring Adam to life are convincingly icky. I went into Depraved wondering if we needed yet another Frankenstein adaptation. I left realizing I had just experienced one of the best.”

– Chris Evangelista, SLASH/FILM

“Depraved works like a master class in DIY horror filmmaking. Fessenden has always been able to create heady, emotionally centered horror on a shoe string budget, and this is still the case here. And yet it’s a gorgeous film that looks grander in scale than it is. The title cards, the psychedelic imagery that show off Adam’s synapses firing or drugs entering his veins, and a third act homage to Universal’s classic monster make for interesting visual choices that adds to this love letter to Frankenstein. This is Fessenden’s Frankenstein, not just in how he narratively stitches pieces of these characters’ stories together but in his visual approach, too.”

– Meagan Navarro, Bloody Disgusting

After DEPRAVED unspooled at the 2019 Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans,  
Fessenden joined a live recording of Post Mortem Podcast with Mick Garris.
Exclusively on the Fangoria Podcast Network.

From Fangoria: “From Wendigos to Frankenstein, we’re still blown away by the
conversation that just recorded at the Overlook Film Fest.”

Fessenden attends Overlook Film Fest where the opening night film was
Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, featuring an all-star cast
and Fessenden too!
Bloody Disgusting says: “The cast is utterly charming, especially Driver and Fessenden.”

From Pajiba: Celebrated New York auteur Larry Fessenden’s first film NO TELLING was subtitled THE FRANKENSTEIN COMPLEX, and now he tackles a more direct modern adaptation of Mary Shelley’s timeless tale. As always, Fessenden finds a distinctly personal way to shape classic themes, this time by telling the story from the point of view of the “monster.” Official selection: What The Fest?! 2019, Overlook Film Festival 2019. Sydney Film Festival 2019. Canadian Premiere.

Read Full Article HERE

Who Needs Enemies With Friends Like These? 10 Friendships Gone Wrong in Horror

by Howard Gorman

Broadly speaking, horror emanates from two places: There’s the horror of the unknown, the incomprehensible; and then there’s the horror of the familiar and comfortable becoming alien and threatening. For this writer, the latter of the two is especially perturbing as being betrayed by anyone is one thing; but when you’re betrayed by someone you thought was your best friend, the fallout is always going to be mortifying.

When it comes down to it, we’re all social creatures who depend on one another so our ability to assess just how trustworthy people are is essentially a survival mechanism. And if any specific movie genre has that particular knack of seducing us into assessing people’s trustworthiness it’s the horror genre.

With this in mind, what follows is a selection of ten of the most shocking examples of betrayal and backstabbing in cinema’s sordid history guaranteed to hardwire the paranoid android in all of us…

Beneath (2013)

Larry Fessenden’s eco-terror flick is deceptively straightforward and all the better for it. Following firmly in the footsteps of Creepshow 2’s “The Raft” segment, Beneath revolves around a group of keening horny teenagers as they head out on a canoe trip across a lake to celebrate high school graduation only to end up tormented by a menacing flesh-hungry catfish.

Everything kicks off with a number of beats that feel frustratingly familiar but the simplicity of this setup serves as the perfect springboard for some great terminal velocity tension as the so-called friends turn on one another. Running out of options, a desert island balloon debate ensues as the group resort to drastic dog-eat-dog decisions, dredging up all kinds of bad blood in the process.

Many people wrote this one off as just another dime-a-dozen proto-creature feature when it first came out but the narcissism at play exposes just how perverse, nasty and mean-spirited us humans can be when faced with a common threat. Rather than banding together, a survival of the fittest instinct kicks in and it’s not long before the real truth floats up to the surface: it’s not the blood-lusting catfish we should be worried about at all. It’s the motley crew of victims who are the real monster here.

Read full List at Bloody Disgusting

Before heading out on your Memorial Day weekend camping trip,
give TRIGGER MAN and BENEATH a watch.
Hopefully your trip goes better than theirs.

Ti West’s Trigger Man and Fessenden’s Beneath,
available on Amazon!