Happy BENEATH Blu-ray/DVD Release Day! Fessenden’s killer fish flick is now available at Scream Factory, Amazon, Walmart and more.

Special Features include
Audio Commentary by Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick
A Look Behind BENEATH: Making the “Fish Movie”
Theatrical Trailer
Fessenden on JAWS
From the Web: WHAT THE ZEKE?
From The Web: WHAT’S IN BLACK LAKE?
Poster/Premiere Video
Digital Copy of the film

USA TODAY has an exclusive clip from the behind-the-scenes feature on the new BENEATH Blu-ray, coming out tomorrow from Scream Factory!

Fessenden gives basically the same interview all over again in Sean Alexander’s article for Cinephiled:

Watching with Larry Fessenden, director of ‘Beneath’

Larry Fessenden loves horror movies. As a director he has brought his own unique approach to the classic horror stories and conventions in such films as Habit, Wendigo, and his animist ghost story / environmental thriller The Last Winter. Through his production company Glass Eye Pix his has produced or co-produced dozens of films, including Kelly Reichert’s Wendy and Lucy andNight Moves, Ti West’s The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, Jim Mickle’s Stake Land, and the recent documentary Birth of the Living Dead, a tribute to one of the holy grails of modern horror.

Apart from an episode of the horror TV series Fear Itself, Fessenden hasn’t directed a film since the 2004The Last Winter, an eco-twist on the ghost story in the culture of big oil, so the arrival of Beneath, about a group of teenagers, a rowboat in the middle of a lake, and a giant, hungry, man-eating catfish looking for its next meal, is reason to celebrate. It begins as a classic tale of teens behaving badly, and more importantly stupidly, but what first appears to be a lazy set-up to stake out its victims for the movie menace turns out to be an insidious insight to the true nature of its characters and the basis for the real conflict of the film. It’s a smart, savage film that plays with the familiar conventions and then twists a knife in them, and it’s all done with a small cast, a confined space, and a script that reveals the worst in humanity.

Read full article

DAILY DEAD: Exclusive Interview with Beneath’s Larry Fessenden by Derek Anderson 3/21/14

Director Larry Fessenden’s latest feature, Beneath, focuses on six freshly graduated high school seniors who cross paths with a massive, human-eating fish one day on Black Lake. The film is a potent blend of physical and psychological scares, and it’s getting a Blu-ray & DVD release via Scream Factory on March 25th. With the home media release coming soon, I recently chatted with Larry about his experience making Beneath.

Larry, thank you for taking the time to talk about your latest directorial feature, Beneath. To start things off, can you tell our readers what attracted you to direct this screenplay by Tony Daniel and Brian Smith?

Well, I really loved how contained the story was. It all takes place on a lake, on a tiny rowboat, and I’m a fan of the experiments Hitchcock would get up to where you sort of limit your options. He made a movie called Lifeboat that was all in one boat. That was one thing that interested me, it almost becomes like a play. And the other thing I liked is the giant fish. What’s not to like? I just loved the idea of making a creature feature. I love monsters and fish and dinosaurs and all kinds of creatures so it seemed really fun to be able to make a practical effects creature feature, and also explore how dreadful these kids are to each other. Which is kind of my viewpoint of humanity, so I got to exercise three things all at once: cinematic limitations, a monster movie, and explore human nature at its darkest.

Read whole interview at dAILY DEAD

(photo from the director’s private collection)

From Entertainment Weekly: ‘Beneath’ DVD: Larry Fessenden talks ‘Jaws’ — EXCLUSIVE VIDEO

In the new horror movie Beneath — which Scream Factory is releasing on DVD and Blu-ray on March 25 — a group of folks attempt to fend off a huge fish in a boat too small for the task. If you think that sounds a lot like the plot of Jaws, then director Larry Fessenden (Habit, The Last Winter) will not be the least bit offended.

Indeed, Fessenden admits seeing Steven Spielberg’s film during its original release proved a massive, formative influence. “I saw it in Cape Cod in 1975,” the director told me, when he recently guested on SiriusXM 105′s Entertainment Weirdly. “I was obsessed with that film. I recorded the sound so I know the whole movie by heart, Mr Hooper! Then, I decided to make a GI Joe version and built the boat, a 6-foot Orca.”
Oh, if only Fessenden had kept that boat. Actually, he did! And the director shows it off with justified pride in the exclusive clip from the Beneath bonus features.

From SXSW Roundup by Mike Ryan at hammertonail.com

Late Phases (Adrian Garcia Bogliano, 95m) — One of the best films I saw in a once again very strong Midnight section was this straightforward-but-brilliant werewolf movie. As with Xan Cassavettes’ Kiss Of The Damned from last year, I am most attracted to genre purists who work within the three-chord structure of their respective genre and through rigorous personal exploration of the core foundations of the code, completely reinvent the genre.

Late Phases starts deceptively simple, with a very tart TV-movie-of-the-week set-up and pacing but, by the middle of the second act, gets torn to bits like the graphic transformation scene in which we watch a trusted deacon in the church pull off his nose and ears as hair pokes through his chest cavity. Or the bizarre scene on a church bench when the head priest (Tom Noonan) and our war hero Ambrose (Nick Damichi) talk about the evil that men do while describing the act of killing innocent children.

The transformation from human to monster is ripe for so much fertile metaphorical relationships; the most obvious one here is the transformation from youth to old age heightened by the fact that the film is set in an old age retirement community. I also particularly liked the father/son relationship, which opened up the idea that as sons, we all become our fathers, as much as we fight the urge; at times, we all feel that matted, nasty smelling hair poking out, or at least clawing to get out. Likewise, we are willing to shoot ourselves in the foot in order to kill that evil beast. Hats off to low-budget horror masterminds Larry Fessenden and Brent Kunkle at Glass Eye Pix, who manage to make creatures and effects feel more real than any mega-budget CGI extravaganza on I am sure what is a nano-percentage of the typical Hollywood budget. This is one film that I hope gets into every megaplex. It’s elevated the werewolf film to a whole other level.

Our friends at FEARnet are hosting a BENEATH sweepstakes where you can win a Blu-Ray Prize Pack from Scream Factory featuring “Beneath”, “The Island” and the original classic “Piranha”

Enter here.

Fessenden’s BENEATH hits Blu-ray and DVD March 25.

Actor Jake Weber, speaking on a podcast for the hit show THE FOLLOWING with GEP pal Rob Galluzzo and FOLLOWING writer/producer Scott Reynolds, says WENDIGO is “my favorite film that I’ve ever been in.”

Check out the podcast here (S2/EP9) and hear Weber’s thoughts on WENDIGO at the 39 minute mark. Weber also speaks about the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake and an upcoming project reuniting him with WENDIGO’s Patricia Clarkson.

TWITCH Film publishes interview with Fessenden on the occasion of the release of BENEATH.

From the post:

Interviewing Larry Fassenden was a real treat. When Hollywood is plaguing the horror genre with remakes, 15 unwanted sequels and anything to make a quick 60 million bucks, this guy has been in front of and behind the camera in numerous independent projects, helping to keep the original idea alive. He’s also made some time to act alongside Bill Murray and get a credit in a Martin Scorsese movie.

I caught up with Fassenden to talk about his latest directing outing, Beneath, about a bunch of punk ass teens up shit creek without paddles. But that’s the least of their problems — there’s a giant fish with razor sharp teeth and an appetite for 12 swimming around them just aching for one (or all) of them to fall in the water.

He also spills his guts on his love for all things horror, and gives us a little taste of what to expect for his segment in the upcoming ABCs of Death 2.

Check out the full interview at Twitch Films.

BENEATH hits Blu-ray/DVD March 25th via Scream Factory.

From DreadCentral.com:

“Veteran horror contributor and all-around cool guy Larry Fessenden has a lot of acting, directing and producing credits to his name. But he’s never worked with anything quite like he did on Beneath. Fessenden recently sat down with Dread Central to talk about his new film.

First he gave us a brief synopsis of what viewers can expect when they hitch their anchor to Beneath. “It’s a stylish little horror film about six teenagers stuck in a rowboat with a malevolent force under the water trying to get them,” Fessenden said.

“It’s a movie about the decisions they make to get out of the dilemma, and they’re not all pretty decisions.”

Check out the full interview on Dread Central.

BENEATH hits Blu-ray/DVD March 25th via Scream Factory.