Fessenden and the Late-Great Mark Margolis at the BENEATH wrap party.

We at Tales HQ fondly remember Mark performing “Caper” from Season 2
of Tales From Beyond the Pale, live at Dixon Place, NYC, Oct 10 2012.

Revisit CAPER on the Tales From Beyond the Pale Podcast HERE

… Where the Audience Completely Missed the Point

By Tyler Geis

Horror loves to put up a mirror to society and show us the darker side of what is really going on in the world.
…

The argument could be made that most horror filmmakers are just activists who can’t get money for their documentaries, so they turn to the genre and speak of the horrors of the world in the form of monsters and fictional serial killers. There’s always social commentary in horror, and here’s a list of films that you may have missed the overall point of with what they’re really trying to say.

The Last Winter (2006) 

Indie horror film royalty, Larry Fessenden, directed this 2006 sci-fi horror film that holds timely themes today as the debate on climate change begins to reach an all-time high. In The Last Winter, An environmentalist (James Le Gros) is sent to evaluate the impact of an oil drilling company in the Arctic. He clashes with the man in charge (Ron Perlman) over the job being done.

Eventually, strange events begin to swirl around them. As the crew finds themselves isolated from the rest of the world, they find that they are trapped in the middle of Mother Nature’s wrath. Its message is there but can be deemed subtle; if the Earth doesn’t want us here, it may find a way to get rid of us.

Read full List

THE SACRIFICE GAME, the new film by GEP alumn Jenn Wexler (THE RANGER) will premiere tonight at Fantasia Festival.

Starring Mena Massoud, Olivia Scott Welch, Chloë Levine, Madison Baines, Georgia Acken, Derek Johns, Laurent Pitre.

In a girl’s Catholic school in the ’70s, a couple of lonely misfit girls, Samantha and Clara, must spend their Christmas break in their near-deserted school with a young teacher named Rose. As they hunker down for quiet times and turkey, a group of marauding killers set on unleashing supernatural evil find themselves at the school’s gates. They force their way in, bringing mayhem, madness, and gore as they torment the innocent girls and remaining staff, but little do they know there are other forces at play, and the nastiness they inflict is just the tip of the iceberg.

Get your tix HERE

“Fessenden’s best, most freighted work since Wendigo.”

Blackout is a werewolf film in which the werewolf, Charley (Alex Hurt), “loses control” now and again, as he calls it, blacking out for a bit only to wake up bruised, bloody, and naked, covered in bits and pieces that are not his own. He has dreams of flight, and of violence, and rather than deal with his malady in a substantive way, he drifts from place to place, avoiding attachments–though because he’s charming and good-looking, attachments tend to find him anyway. I like the in-jokiness of the film’s pivotal location, “Talbot Falls” (Larry Talbot being the name of Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man), and I love how Fessenden structures his movie as a series of doomed-feeling conversations between friends, family, and old lovers helpless to save one another from the demons afflicting them. It’s the best film about mourning a person you love before they’re dead since Rob Zombie’s extraordinary Lords of Salem.

Hurt has a bit of father William Hurt’s eccentricity. He’s gangly, unconventional-looking, a little off in his delivery; watch him in a conversation with spooked local Miguel (Rigo Garay), who tells him that he’s seen a wolf man running around, murdering naked women in gorgeous Bernie Wrightson tableaux-by-headlight, and been reassured it’s just “Mexican superstition.” But, Miguel protests, the wolf man is a white man’s myth, not a Mexican one. Charley knows he’s talking about him, so he smiles a bit too wide and, in an unnerving editorial flourish, holds it for a beat too long. Charley is a complex, ambivalent antihero, horrified by what he becomes–an alter ego he tries to suppress with alcohol–but also amused by the fear he causes and more than a little drunk on his power over the small community that has rejected him and is now falling into insolvency before the economic catastrophes ravaging the connective tissues of the United States. Blackout is a laconic nightmare fueled by the madness of our social unknitting. It’s Fessenden’s best, most freighted work since Wendigo. We’re all wolves, we’re all Little Red Riding Hoods, and there aren’t any more trails through the woods. It’s all woods–and it’s dark as fuck out there.

3.5 / 4 stars

by Walter Chaw at Film Freak Central. Reviewed with Vincent Must Die

THE SHARK IS BROKEN features Ian Shaw as his father Robert Shaw in a play about the making of JAWS. Fessenden will be there on opening night!

Directed by Olivier Award winner Guy Masterson, co-written by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, and inspired by Robert Shaw’s experience playing Quint on the notorious shoot, THE SHARK IS BROKEN celebrates movie history and peeks at the choppy waters behind Hollywood’s first blockbuster.

Read more at THE SHARK IS BROKEN

“Fantasia 2023 gets Fessenden at his best with BLACKOUT.”
—Liz Whittemore, Reel News Daily

“one of the most intelligent and interesting
werewolf movies of the twenty-first century.”
—Craig Ian Mann, OurCulture

“Not to be missed…
BLACKOUT is a fantastic film.
The story is solid, the characters are well-realized
and believable and the werewolf moments are positively brutal.”
—Emily Von Seele, Daily Dead

“deceptively unstructured, unspooling like a yarn shared
with strangers at a country inn…
thoughtful and deeply humane, whilst retaining that sense of otherness
essential to folkloric tales. It’s a film which will haunt you.”
—Jennie Kermode, Eye For Film

“a veritable, funny, sometimes sluggish yet poignant slice of life
with a violent and bloody horror twist.”
—Megan Navarro, Bloody Disgusting

“Hurt delivers an effectively introspective performance
that does at times remind us of his father’s soulful depth.
The creature effects are top-notch…
it’s impossible not to enjoy the stellar cast of supporting players…”
—Jared Mobarak, The Film Stage

“The power in the visuals and pure storytelling is undeniable”
—Alan French, sunshinestatecineplex.com

“a layered, introspective narrative…
a mirror held up to society, revealing the beasts
lurking within our collective conscience.”
—Chris Jones, Overly Honest Movie Reviews

“Fessenden uses the wolfman as a vehicle to explore
interpersonal relationships, social exclusion, ecological fallout,
and the pursuit of capitalistic gains over human compassion.”
—Douglas Davidson, elementsmadness.com

Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, Habit, Depraved) is back with a new werewolf horror movie titled Blackout, and Bloody Disgusting has some exclusive first-look imagery to share today.

Check out the images below and read on for everything you need to know…

Blackout marks the second pairing of Glass Eye Pix, the New York production shingle headed by Fessenden, and Yellow Veil Pictures, having previously collaborated successfully on world sales for Fessenden’s 2019 Depraved, which was released by IFC Midnight in the US.

The film follows small town artist Charley (Alex Hurt), a tortured man whose drinking binges blur with his sneaking suspicion that he might likely be a werewolf. He distances himself from those he loves and sinks deeper into solitude, his flashes of memory of his nighttime grisly acts manifested through his artwork

Blackout is the third film in Fessenden’s monster trilogy, following Habit (vampires) and Depraved (Frankenstein). This film continues his theme of critiquing the monster inside all people (and using excellent practical effects to boot). In addition to Hurt, cast includes Addison Timlin, James LeGros, Kevin Corrigan, Barbara Crampton, Joe Swanberg and many others.

Winner of the 1997 Someone to Watch Spirit Award, New York-based filmmaker and actor Larry Fessenden is the founder and CEO of Glass Eye Pix, celebrated for producing Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass (1994) and Wendy and Lucy (2003); Ti West’s first four features —The Roost (2005), Trigger Man (2007), House of the Devil (2009), and The Inkeepers (2011)— and dozens of other acclaimed and award-winning indie films. In addition to his Monsterverse films, he’s written and directed the psychological horror Wendigo (2001) with Patricia Clarkson, and the Ron Perlman led The Last Winter (2006), contributed to ABCs of Death 2 (2014), and appeared in over 100 films, including most recently Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon.

Blackout is produced by Fessenden, long-time collaborator and filmmaker James Felix McKenney, indie veteran Chris Ingvordsen, and Co-Produced by newcomer Gaby Leyner. 

Says Fessenden: “I am interested in finding new truths in the classic monster tropes of my youth. The essence of each creature dictates the milieu of the film, and of course, the werewolf is both out of control and regretful so that duality shaped my story. I am excited to work with Yellow Veil again, they understand my filmmaking and have been fierce advocates.”

Read full article HERE