The Shudder Labs team included Glass Eye Pals
Peter Phok, Jenn Wexler, Clay MacLeod Chapman,
Colin Geddes, Travis Stevens and of course our host Sam Zimmerman.
From Indiewire:

How Shudder Is Fostering a New Breed of Horror Directors

As luck would have it, I was settling in for a Larry Fessenden double feature the same night that Twitter—or, at least, the small corner of the platform occupied by film writers and cinephiles—was working itself into a tizzy about an article in The Guardian postulating a new subgenre of “post-horror.” The basic thrust of the Guardian article is that recent films like It Comes At Night and A Ghost Story are changing the horror paradigm by adding talky drama elements to genre narratives, which is exactly what Larry Fessenden was doing in the ‘90s. His 1991 debut feature No Telling combines a Cassavetes-esque relationship drama about a marriage in decline with the bare-bones structure of the Frankenstein myth, as an obsessive medical researcher turns to neighborhood pets after he finds himself unable to procure the animals he’s convinced he needs to complete his research. The result is rather like a naturalistic take on Re-Animator cut together with scenes from A Woman Under The Influence, as strange as that may sound.

That particular film also touches on themes of animal rights and environmentalism, displaying a social consciousness that was developed more fully in Fessenden’s follow-up film, 1995’s Habit. Like this year’s Colossal, Habit uses an alcoholic protagonist as a metaphor to tie in with the film’s fantastic elements; in this case, it’s Lower East Side resident Sam (Fessenden), who’s been a complete drunken mess ever since his girlfriend broke up with him and his father died within a few months of each other. Meeting the enigmatic Anna (Meredith Snaider) at a Halloween party ignites an obsessive affair unlike anything Sam has ever experienced in his life, but as their nightly rendezvous grow more intense, Sam starts feeling, well, ill. Blending classical vampire imagery—Anna is allergic to garlic, and can’t come in to Sam’s apartment without an invitation—with the pervasive fear of AIDS that hung over every sexually active person in the ‘90s, Habit is not only a metaphorically rich horror-drama hybrid, but a time capsule of the last gasp of bohemia in downtown Manhattan.

Both of these films are available in Shout! Factory’s Larry Fessenden Collection boxed set, and No Telling is also currently streaming on Shudder.

Read the full article…

Bundle Up With These 18 Horror Movies Set In The Freezing Cold

#3 The Last winter

Things start going very, very wrong for a group of Arctic oil drillers in Larry Fessenden’s cult thriller — but is it due to a natural causes… or supernatural ones? Inevitably, the survivors begin to turn on each other with increasing fervour as the Earth itself seems to start claiming lives, but intriguing characters (played by Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton and others) and a unique plot make The Last Winter an especially effective terror-in-isolation tale.

Check out the full list

From CHILLERtv.com:

Glass Eye Pix classix I SELL THE DEAD (Glenn McQuaid) and THE LAST WINTER (Fessenden)
celebrated in Tony Timpone’s list of 13 Unsung Independent Horror Flicks.

Also listed: Jim Mickle’s feature MULBERRY STREET which features Fessenden torn apart by rats,
and ZOMBIE HONEYMOON by Dave Gebroe, executive produced by Fessenden.

From TIME OUT NY:

MoMA is screening 70 amazing science fiction films this summer

Fans of sci-fi haven’t had a particularly great go of it this year, what with Scarlett Johansson’s Ghost in the Shell leaving bad tastes in our mouths and the fifth Transformers entry, The Last Knight, inducing vertigo. 

But it looks like our luck is about to change this summer: MoMA just announced “Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction,” an enormous showcase of more than 70 films made from 1901–2017. With a prompt of “what does it mean to be human?” the fest will only showcase movies set on Earth in the present or quasi-present, so all of your space-faring favorites are out. I know, I know: I was hoping to watch Dune at MoMA too. 

Opening on July 17 and running through August 31, the series will screen films from more than 22 countries, and features intros from filmmaker fans like Larry Fessenden, Lynn Hershman Leeson and John Sayles. Neil deGrasse Tyson will be on hand on July 14 to introduce The Quiet Earth.

There are too many features to list here, but some notable pics include Invasión (1969), Die letzten Tage von Gomorrha (The Last Days of Gomorrah) (1974), Fata Morgana (1971), Gattaca (1997), Children of Men (2006), Ex Machina (2014) and Marjorie Prime (2017). 

You can check out the full lineup here. 

Orion Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films have acquired North American rights to Most Beautiful Island, a psychological thriller from Glass Eye Pix directed, written, produced by and starring Ana Asensio. It won a Grand Jury Award in the narrative competition at SXSW this year.

Shot on Super 16mm, the pic chronicles one harrowing day in the life of Luciana, a young immigrant woman struggling to make ends meet in New York while striving to escape her past. As Luciana’s day unfolds, she is whisked through a series of troublesome and unforeseeable extremes. Before her day is done, she inadvertently finds herself a central participant in a cruel game where lives are placed at risk, and psyches are twisted and broken for the perverse entertainment of a privileged few.

Natasha Romanova, David Little, Nicholas Tucci, Larry Fessenden and Caprice Benedetti co-star. Jenn Wexler, Chadd Harbold, Fessenden and Noah Greenberg produced, and Peter Phok, Jose María Garcia, Ahmet Bilgen, Selim Cevikel, Christohper Todd and Gill Holland are executive producers.

The deal was negotiated by Peter Goldwyn on behalf of Samuel Goldwyn and Andrew Herwitz and Lucas Verga of Film Sales Corp. on behalf of the filmmakers. It comes ahead of the film’s bow Wednesday at BAM Cinemafest.

Check out the article…

Fessenden continues long-standing collaboration with auteur Kelly Reichardt, serving as Executive Producer on her recent work Certain Women, out on DVD and Blu-ray this Fall. From indiewire:

“Certain Women”

“The expanses of the American Northwest take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, Certain Women navigates the subtle shifts in personal desire and social expectation that unsettle the circumscribed lives of its characters: a lawyer (Laura Dern) forced to subdue a troubled client; a woman (Michelle Williams) whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who forms a tenuous bond with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone), whose unguardedness and deep attachment to the land deliver an unexpected jolt of emotional immediacy. With unassuming craft, Reichardt captures the rhythms of daily life in small-town Montana through these fine-grained portraits of women trapped within the landscape’s wide-open spaces.”