Last month Shudder, the horror streaming video service backed by AMC Networks, launched Shudder Labs, an intimate and immersive workshop for aspiring genre filmmakers; and at that time the deadline for registration was March 30th. However, the date has now been extended, and along with more info on that, we have news about the Labs’ first Masters-in-Residence and workshop leaders, which include the great Larry Fessenden!
There’s barely any dialogue throughout the whole film, so the music had to play a major role by being another character in the film that is always present. It is a rare opportunity in today’s film industry, as well as a major challenge. The score has to be incredibly focused on guiding the audience through the film with confidence. – Giona Ostinelli
Entertainment Weekly invites you into the terrifying house from DARLING. Watch this behind-the-scenes clip with comments from writer-director Mickey Keating. Catch Darling in theaters this Friday!
By Chris Alexander at ShockTillYouDrop.com:
It’s not what you have.
It’s not the colors in the pallete.
It’s not the gear.
It’s not the tech.
It’s not the government funding. It’s not the marketing.
Art is none of these things.
No, art is simply the reflection of the artist, authentic and true and brave and bold and alive and visceral. Art is using whatever you have at your disposal to project the dreams and nightmares and hopes and fears and horrors and truths and fantasies you want to share in ways that are pure. In ways that are yours, unique to you.
…
The movie we’re chiefly here to discuss today, right now…It’s an immaculate work of art and one of the most affecting horror movies I’ve ever seen.
As you already know, that picture is director Mickey Keating’s poisonous psychodrama DARLING, a movie that breaks rules and is filled with so much innovation and such daring, deceivingly simple vision, that I actually yelled out loud as it un-spooled, shouting in excitement and a joy stemming from the revelation that the people that made it were not only making an auteur horror movie that was progressive and meaningful, but that a third party was backing the movie, distributing it and ensuring that people saw the movie and knew it existed.
DARLING. Sweet, horrible, savage DARLING.
Imagine early incarnations of David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Lars von Trier and Guy Maddin on a three day meth bender in one of Stanley Kubrick’s suites at The Overlook Hotel and you’ll get a sense of DARLING’s mission statement. Made for very little money with a skeletal cast on spare locations (primarily a looming house in what I think might be upstate New York), DARLING casts the doe-eyed Lauren Ashley Carter (JUG FACE) as an obviously disturbed girl who accepts a position as the caretaker at posh mansion owned by an elegant, icy and presumably wealthy woman (BLADE RUNNER’s Sean Young, looking great and a welcome presence back on the screen). Like Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance at the aforementioned Overlook in Kubrick’s impossibly influential THE SHINING, it’s clear that Carter is crackers from frame one. But considering the home’s haunted history, it’s a given that she’ll go even madder as the movie progresses. And she does.
My god, does she.
…
DARLING is co-produced by the great Larry Fessenden, who also appears in the film, a product of his Glass Eye Pix, a company that almost always makes interesting, modestly budgeted and wholly original horror films.
But here, backing Keating’s vision, they may have made their first real deal masterpiece.
DARLING is a perfect movie in its imperfection. It’s a movie that bends rules and defies expectations and always remains a messy, personal primal scream of a picture. It’s most assuredly a work of dark, seething art and, as the hyperbolic headline of this review screamed, it’s the best horror movie of 2016.
Well, so far, anyway.
But I can’t imagine it will get any better than this.
Then again, I haven’t seen Keating’s Sundance hit CARNAGE PARK yet…
Look for DARLING when it opens theatrically and on VOD on April 8th.
By Robert Rice
The following is an account of an interview, not a transcript nor even a very coherent paraphrasing. It couldn’t have been, because what took place was too sprawling and fractal, because that’s the nature of a long conversation, because he is a non-discriminating student of the horrific and the convivial, because I got lucky. I got lucky because I was slated for fifteen minutes and he gave me an hour and fifteen. I got lucky because, via some serendipitous allowance of mutual and overlapping interest, we both felt like talking about neuroscience, frailty, nature, fathers, and fear with another person who knows about the killing of Tim McLean. Or, more likely, I felt like it, and he wasn’t actively opposed to indulging me.
Keep Your Eyes Open…
DARLING, directed by Mickey Keating, starring Lauren Ashley Carter, is only one week away!
Fessenden on the set of WENDIGO with James Godwin who played the titular monster.
Godwin would go on to star as the zombie in I SELL THE DEAD.
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!
