Fessenden is pleased to announce he will be represented at SXSW this year in two turns as actor and as executive producer on ENTERTAINMENT, unspooling in the Festival Favorites section after its Sundance premiere.

Check out the Midnight World Premiere Showings of WE ARE STILL HERE and THE POD to see how long Fessenden survives each picture. Place your bets now.

We Are Still Here
Director/Screenwriter: Ted Geoghegan
In the cold, winter fields of New England, there sits a house that wakes up every 30 years and demands a sacrifice. Cast: Barbara Crampton, Andrew Sensenig, Larry Fesseden, Lisa Marie, Monte Markham. (World Premiere)

Pod
Director/Screenwriter: Mickey Keating
A family intervention goes horrifically awry within the snowy confines of an isolated lake house. Cast: Lauren Ashley Carter, Dean Cates, Brian Morvant, Larry Fessenden, John Weselcouch. (World Premiere)

Entertainment
Director: Rick Alverson, Screenwriters: Rick Alverson, Gregg Turkington
En route to meet his estranged daughter and attempt to revive his dwindling career, a broken, aging comedian plays a string of dead-end shows in the Mojave desert. Cast: Gregg Turkington, John C. Reilly, Tye Sheridan

The new Sony PS4 Horror game UNTIL DAWN, written by GEP alumn Graham Reznick and Fessenden is now available for pre-order at GameStop. 

Glass Eye Pal Graham Reznick writes about his favorite Carpenter flick IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS on Shock Till You Drop, proposing that MOUTH was at the forefront of “Metafiction” in popular culture. Check it!

“Movies and novels that both comment on themselves and directly involve the audience are nothing new. Famous examples exist at least as far back as 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, which has, in a non-story specific scene, a bandit shooting a gun directly at the camera, implying he is able to shoot through the screen and bring the audience directly into the world of the film. H.P. Lovecraft’s classic novel At the Mountains of Madness is another precursor, as the title “In the Mouth of Madness” implies. It’s an early example of “found” narrative – the entire story unfolds through diary entries from the members of an arctic expedition that has uncovered the frozen resting site of terrifying Elder Things (it’s also a precursor to The Thing). The narrative speaks to the reader directly, urging them to stay far away. It doesn’t tumble the reader directly into the madness of the narrative (like other Lovecraft stories), but it does indicate that the world of the narrative and the world of the reader are one and the same (much like the general conceit of most “found footage” films). Part of Lovecraft’s enduring relevance is due to his ability to use these self-reflexive methods to evoke the effect of a classic campfire tale: a horror story meant to convince you the terror of the tale may cross over into your own life.”

Read the whole essay at Shock Till You Drop

26 Directors! 26 movies! 26 Behind-the-scenes docs, 26 director commentaries!

Buy your copy in a brick and mortar store! (or follow the link)

At Glass Eye Pix, we always said Rick Alverson’s THE COMEDY was a horror film, both as a tongue-in-cheek answer to the question “why would an indie horror production company make a comedy?” (silly, because we make lots of movies outside of the genre), but more importantly because Alverson’s film was an uncompromising portrait of the detachment and socio-pathology of the modern, privileged, white male hipster, a less overtly violent version of the American Psycho, but just as debasing to society.

Now, after this year’s Sundance, Buzzfeed starts to catch on to Alverson’s themes, while simultaneously (and finally) acknowledging the scope of a genre too often pigeonholed. 

Check out the excerpts below and read the full article by Alison Willmore at BUZZFEED.

3 New Movies That Are Redefining The Horror Genre

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The Witch, The Nightmare, and Entertainment challenge old ideas of how horror films can look and feel.

PARK CITY, Utah — There are horror movies, there are art movies, and then there are those that fall in the sweet spot between where fans of the scary and fans of the exquisitely shot come together. And that usually happens at a film festival.

Like many fests, the annual Sundance Film Festival has a midnight section where most of its genre selections — including Eli Roth’s latest, Knock Knock, and David Robert Mitchell’s beautiful, terrifying sexually transmitted haunting movie It Follows — are grouped. But this year, the most talked-about horror film in Park City, The Witch, premiered in the bright light of afternoon in Sundance’s largest theater, courtesy of its place in the main dramatic competition. And, in addition to The Witch, two other movies also pushed the boundaries of what horror could be with innovative filmmaking and a willingness to show the many different types of fears people grapple with.

…

Rick Alverson’s dread-filled latest, Entertainment, isn’t a horror movie at all, not in the traditional sense. But by the end, it feels like it fits in that genre as much as it does comedy: Essentially, it’s like watching someone die repeatedly, albeit on stage.

…

the movie gets more Lynchian as it goes along, with strange, surreal cul-de-sacs in which the comedian encounters a nervous fellow traveler (Michael Cera), a chromotherapist, and a woman in labor.

…

This is a movie that is about as enjoyable as embracing a cactus. But once it starts to feel like Entertainment’s protagonist is actually stuck in some ironic, awful purgatory, waiting and waiting for someone to tell him it’s time to go home, it’s difficult to shake the movie off, even long after it’s over.

See Fessenden beg for pledges in the new Kickstarter campaign launched by indie distributor Oscilloscope, which hopes to re-transfer the original 16mm film elements of Reichardt’s debut feature RIVER OF GRASS (co-starring and edited by Fessenden) to an archival digital format.

Pledge today! Labcoats! Pocket Protectors! Posters! Wool caps! Studio time! The rewards they are a-plenty!

“Nowadays, there’s lots of talk about how easy it is to make a movie for little to no money. And that’s true… to a point. And that’s great… in theory. But to make a motion picture with the type of names that will enable that movie to actually get seen, and to assemble a group of collaborators that can bring one’s vision to fully blossomed life? That takes real money (by ‘real money’ I’m talking mid-six figures at the very least). Which is to say that for a movie like Entertainment to exist in 2015 is far more difficult an achievement than it seems. This is not just a refreshing or exciting thing to appreciate. It’s inspiring. Love it or hate it—and you will most certainly do one or the other in a big, big way—it’s impossible to deny that Entertainment is the expression of a daring artist who is hellbent on rejecting conventions and norms and firmly believes that the true purpose of cinema is to challenge, not satiate, viewers.”
— Michael Tully, HAMMER TO NAIL

Alverson, whose previous work The Comedymight be film’s finest examination of the corrosive nature of privilege, makes movies that are near impossible to sit through and even harder to stop thinking about.
— Jordon Hoffman, THE GUARDIAN

Rick Alverson’s surreal provocation “The Comedy” featured a bored, obnoxious Brooklyn hipster played by Tim Heidecker with such extreme discomfort that the entire project felt like a dare. That was kind of the point: Alverson forced viewers to get up close and personal with the trappings of modern day ambivalence. With his follow-up, “Entertainment,” Alverson takes the opposite approach: Rather than being corrupted by privilege, the glum comedian at the center of the new movie is a walking embodiment of failed ambition.
— Eric Kohn, INDIEWIRE

Five Questions for Rick Alverson of Sundance NEXT Premiere, Entertainment
— Alicia Van Couvering, FILMMAKER

“tightly wound and as sharp as a Fessenden’s hairstyle.
Morbidly entertaining and emotionally honest,
Body is one helluva debut for Dan Berk and Robert Olsen.
Keep their asses on your radar.”
— Patrick Cooper, BLOODY DISGUSTING

“..take it or leave it, Alverson’s fourth feature is singular stuff, and it reconfirms the director as one of the truly bold voices in the all-too-homogenous U.S. indie film scene. General audiences will keep a safe distance, but “Entertainment” should have no trouble finding a fervent cult to call its own…
Alverson is an original who doesn’t do anything to get a cheap rise out of the audience. Rather, there is a profound sadness and loneliness at the heart of his work — key tenets, as Alverson sees it, of the modern American male ego — and time and again he brings us to feel deeply for the most ostensibly repellent and antisocial of characters. The Comedian may not be the life of the party, but at least he is who he is, unencumbered by false hopes of redemption. It’s the rest of us. “Entertainment” suggests, who are the butt of some grand cosmic joke.”
—Scott Foundas, VARIETY

After premiering the Glass Eye Pix production THE COMEDY at Sundance in 2011, director Rick Alverson returns to premiere ENTERTAINMENT, starring Neil Hamburger. Fessenden Executive produces.