Vulture: 57 Horror Directors on the Scares That Inspired (and Traumatized) Them

Fessenden and other Glass Eye Alumns featured in Vulture List!
Including Jenn Wexler (THE RANGER), Glenn McQuaid (I SELL THE DEAD)
and Adrián García Bogliano (LATE PHASES).

Larry Fessenden, No Telling (1991), Habit (1995), Wendingo (2001), The Last Winter (2006), Beneath (2013), Depraved

When I think of an absolutely seminal movie scare from my youth, the moment that, ahem, jumps to mind is Terence Young’s 1967 film Wait Until Dark. The thriller stars Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman in a New York basement apartment and Alan Arkin in a fantastically sadistic turn as the head of a gang of hoods that terrorize her. The sounds of the city, the music by Henry Mancini, and the colors in the apartment as the set is drenched in golden sunlight when day inexorably surrenders to darkness, all convey an overwhelming sense of mounting dread and claustrophobia. Isolated by her blindness and her absent husband, Hepburn slowly becomes aware that she is being tormented by a ruthless gang that wants something from her she doesn’t even have. When it comes down to the final confrontation between Arkin and Hepburn, our nerves are truly frayed. And then there is a sudden image of Arkin leaping through the dark that takes your breath away. It is one of the great jump scares in film history. I was at an impressionable age when I saw the movie unspooling on 16mm in an old clubhouse by the beach in Cape Cod and have never forgotten it. It is singular, affecting, hard-earned moments like that that made me fall in love with cinema.

Read full fantastic list here.

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