Fessenden among the Executive Producers on director Rick Alverson’s followup to the Glass Eye Pix production THE COMEDY. Newest film, ENTERTAINMENT, will  premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the Next section.

Entertainment (Director: Rick Alverson; screenwriters: Rick Alverson, Gregg Turkington, Tim Heidecker) — En route to meeting with his estranged daughter, in an 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, Michael Cera, Amy Seimetz, Lotte Verbeek.

Check it: First images on Collider.

From SUindependent.com:

“It should come as no surprise that Late Phases was produced by Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix, a studio known for ushering in unique genre talent and for shepherding horror projects that really have something to say. Father/son relationships, growing older, living with the scars of war, wrestling with religion, etc., Late Phases isn’t simply a werewolf picture. It has a lot more upstairs than your typical monster movie.“

Read the full review here.

Check out LATE PHASES in theaters, or see it On Demand and streaming services including Sony Entertainment Network, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, and Google Play.

Congrats to our friends at Last Pictures, whose thriller BODY is set to world premiere at Slamdance. The film features Fessenden alongside Helen Rogers, Alexandra Turshen, and Lauren Molina. It’s written and directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, and produced by Berk, Olsen, Chadd Harbold, Bryan Gaynor, and Michael Gray.

Synopsis:
After three twenty-something girls break into a mansion and inadvertently murder the groundskeeper, they slowly self-destruct as they decide what to do with the dead body in the living room.

Check out the announcement in Variety, and keep up to date with BODY by following the film on Facebook and @LastPictures on Twitter.

Fessenden’s HABIT sighted along with LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, NOSFERATU and ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE in this list of 13 vampire pix. Article originally appeared in Indiewire.

check it!

Watch right here, and get LATE PHASES to the top of iTunes Horror!

Glass Eye Pix invites you to count down 25 days till Christmas with GEP’s Creepy Advent Calendar. What better way to celebrate the holiday season than with a daily peek behind the doors and windows, nooks and crannies of this mysterious doll village assembled by artist and stop-motion animator Beck Underwood? See vintage dolls and Santas, stuffed critters and misfit toys, all to delight and tease in this merry celebration of Christmas mischief.

Order by Monday, November 24th and get it by December 1st!

Also check out the Creepy Christmas Film Fest, featuring 25 shorts by a variety of GEP pals.

This is officially on our top horror picks for 2015! From what we have experienced, Until Dawn forces you into emotional and moral hell and we love it! We’ve all seen the movies now it’s time to experience it for real. This gameplay pushes gaming to another level of interaction. Playstation continues to raise the bar for 2015.

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Supermassive games wrote the story in collaboration with horror auteurs Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick (Stake Land, Habit, The Last Winter) who’ve been bringing great independent horror movies to the big and small screen for decades. That story challenges you to unravel the terrifying mysteries of Blackwood Pines. Look out for clues whilst your emotions are torn limb from limb but remember, things aren’t always as they seem!

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Read the whole article here

LATE PHASES, GEP’s new werewolf film directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano and starring Nick Damici, hits theaters and VOD TODAY. And the web is howling about it…

From The Village Voice:

Two key elements in horror movies are anticipation and pacing, with the latter simply the heightening and lowering of the former.

With Late Phases, Adrián García Bogliano artfully engages with those tools, crafting a narrative whose close feels a touch underwhelming only in relation to the impressive buildup. In the most entertaining tough-old-crank turn this side of Gran Torino, Nick Damici stars as Ambrose, a blind Vietnam vet who has no sooner moved into the placid retirement community of Crescent Bay than he becomes auditory and olfactory witness to a murder committed by a werewolf.

After the beast also kills Ambrose’s seeing-eye dog, Shadow, the vet vows revenge. (And how! Wait Until Dark this isn’t — file Late Phases as the best film in which a blind individual gets trigger-happy with a series of firearms.) The filmmakers wisely reveal the werewolf early, as this shifts the source of suspense from an obvious question (Will there turn out to be a monster?) to a more mystifying one (Why is there a monster?).

In addition to the careful parceling-out of information and anticipation, the film benefits enormously from Damici’s lead performance: gruff, funny, aggressive, and, of course, commanding sympathy, the character compellingly entices the audience to board this ride.

The narrative ends up working in a smaller scope than one might expect given the premise of a beast plaguing a community, but the journey getting to the finish is exhilarating all the same.

 From the New York Times:

A blind Vietnam veteran is all that stands between a hungry werewolf and the frail residents of a retirement village in “Late Phases,” a sprightly horror movie about finding new purpose for old bones.

Our gruff hero is Ambrose (Nick Damici, far from geriatric), a brusquely independent widower who’s closer to his service dog, Shadow, than to his harried son. Deposited in his new home, he quickly deflects a delegation of glammed-up grannies scenting fresh meat. They’re not the only ones: A terrifyingly gory first night will leave poor Shadow flayed and Ambrose’s closest neighbor chomped to bits.

Working in English for the first time, the Spanish director Adrián García Bogliano forgoes the veiled menace of his 2013 mystery, “Here Comes the Devil,” for something altogether less subtle. Skipping critical narrative beats — Ambrose instantly decides that “Werewolf!” is the answer to “What just happened?” — the plot favors simplicity over rationality with a cheerful insouciance that’s hard to dislike. Much of this good will is inspired by Mr. Damici, whose testy line readings and credible sightlessness give Ambrose’s neighborhood perambulations an oddball intensity. I didn’t see him blink once.

Matching the movie’s homely feel, Robert Kurtzman’s old-school effects produce an endearingly shaggy creature that’s pleasingly tactile and beholden to the laws of physics. And if the central transformation scene strains fruitlessly for the sky-high bar of Rick Baker’s groundbreaking work on “An American Werewolf in London” (1981), it’s no matter: “Late Phases” is really concerned with change of a different sort. Before, Ambrose was resigned to death’s waiting room; now, he has a reason to work out.

LATE PHASES CLIPS on Bloody Disgusting

WHERE TO SEE IT

Fessenden, JT Petty, Travis Stevens and more discuss the biz of genre filmmaking in the Fall 2014 issue of MovieMaker Magazine, on newsstands Nov 25th.

From MovieMaker.com:

“A decade ago, the primary focus of independent horror moviemakers was making a good horror movie, knowing that if they did their job well, they were virtually guaranteed to find an audience and make their money back (and then some). Horror was the Teflon genre—or so it seemed.

“In the last decade it’s gotten cheaper to make movies, and harder to make money off of them,” says J.T. Petty, writer-director of horror features The Burrowers (2008) and Hellbenders (2012). “The ‘guarantee’ most people took for granted was the DVD market, and that’s all but gone.” Today, the business of independent horror moviemaking has changed dramatically, and while making a good movie is still paramount, the moviemaker of 2014 must wear other hats just as well in order to survive: branding expert, distributor, producer, publicist, sales agent. “And,” as Eduardo Sanchez, director of 1999’s game-changing The Blair Witch Project and the upcoming Exists, says, “most of us didn’t get into this to become distributors.”

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According to Larry Fessenden, director of Wendigo (2001) and producer of Stake Land (2010), “Executives often say, ‘Do you have anything in the Blumhouse model?’ The thing to understand is: Blum’s films have name actors (Ethan Hawke, Patrick Wilson) who work at scale, the films are made relatively cheaply, and there is a distribution scheme that gets the movies onto 3,000 screens on opening weekend. This is not the same as making an independent haunted house movie on the Canon 5D and hoping it makes a lot of money. You can’t guarantee your investors that your $15,000 movie will earn $200 million at the box office.”

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“Horror used to have that whiff of danger and discovery,” says Fessenden. “That is why the remakes don’t excite the fans, because there is no discovery there, just studios cashing in. Blum’s films are original stories, even as he franchises them, and that alone makes his approach more compelling than the studio approach.”

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Stevens is philosophical, though optimistic. “Your perspective shifts a bit. Maybe there isn’t more money coming in, but what are the upsides? Our film played around the world in festivals, which gave us opportunities to meet more filmmakers, financiers and distributors. It played globally in cinemas and was easily available in retail outlets. This meant we were building an international audience and international distributors see value in that. It allowed us to secure more money on our other projects. Your definition of ‘profit’ expands a bit, working in this space.”

Check out the full article at MovieMaker.com.