Larry Fessenden Twists Classic Horror Tropes To Reflect His Own Modern Concerns

Larry Fessenden, through his production company Glass Eye Pix, shepherded many low-budget, independent horror films into the world. For decades, as he’s done this, he’s also carved out his own career as a writer/director (and actor – he turns up as one of the radio performers in the epilogue to Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon) of unique, emotional, often political horror movies.

One aspect of Fessenden’s films that distinguishes them from most of what’s done in the genre these days is the way he takes classic horror ideas, and tropes, from literature and cinema, and with all respect to what came before him, twists them so they reflect his own modern concerns. The first of his features to use this approach is his fifth, Habit from 1995. Starring Fessenden as Sam, an alcoholic waiter in New York, and Meredith Snaider as Anna, the mysterious women he obsesses over, Habit (streaming on AMC+) is Fessenden’s take on a vampire movie. Using the slow submission to the power of the vampire’s bite as a metaphor for alcohol addiction, Fessenden – giving a very good performance here, as does Snaider – never overplays Sam’s alcoholism, until, that is, Anna’s undead poison starts to grind him down, making him increasingly blank and stumbling, which his friends, naturally, chalk up to his drinking. But crucially, for all that, Habit remains a legitimate vampire film – Fessenden isn’t playing, he doesn’t think he’s above the genre. He’s just taking it seriously, which is a rare enough thing.

Fessenden’s next film to use this classic/modern perspective was Beneath (streaming on Shout Factory), from 2013. This is Fessenden’s “lake monster” movie and was not, for once, written by him. The screenwriters were Tony Daniel and Brian D. Smith, and the film itself has shades of both Jaws and Stephen King’s classic short story “The Raft” (as well as that story’s film adaptation, as part of Michael Gornick and George Romero’s Creepshow 2). In contrast to other Fessenden films, which tend to be filled with emotion and a kind of melancholy, or bittersweet, hope, or at least sense of justice, Beneath is a cruel, deeply cynical film. Six friends, about to depart for college, travel to a kind of tucked away lake, not frequented by tourists. They take a boat out on the water, and are soon attacked by a giant, meat-eating fish. In the course of this assault, they lose their oars, and therefore can’t row back to shore. So they’re stuck. What follows is a complete moral breakdown on the part of three of the four young men, the death of one of the young women, and the desperate attempts by the remaining woman, Kitty (Bonnie Dennison) to keep everyone’s consciences intact.

Which she fails to do. It’s important, though, that this remaining woman is no angel. A fair amount of the tension between the characters comes from the revelation that she’s cheated on her boyfriend (Chris Conroy) with his brother (Johnny Orsini), but she also tries to keep everyone from choosing a friend to sacrifice to the fish so that they might live. But here, Fessenden and his screenwriters, show no mercy, and underline a kind of immoral toxicity that rises to the surface in three of the men (two of whom, played by Griffin Newman and Orsini, are truly hateful), and how that can overwhelm any attempts by Kitty to keep their ethics in check.

Fessenden’s most explicit melding of classic horror with present day sensibilities came with his next film, Depraved (streaming on AMC+), from 2019. This, to me, is Fessenden’s masterpiece. In his version of the Frankenstein story, Henry (David Call), an Army medic suffering from PTSD, finds a way to revive the recently dead (if they’re dead too long, even a matter of hours, then it’s no dice).The result of his ill-advised scientific ambition is a reanimated corpse Henry dubs “Adam” (Alex Breaux). As Adam re-learns the basics of life, history, and science from Henry, we learn about Henry’s relationship with Polidori, the man with the money behind Henry’s project, and the one of the two who sees nothing but dollar signs when this scientific miracle goes public.

The viewer knows early on who Adam was – or who his brain belonged to – before his random murder, but gradually we learn how and why Adam got where he is now. As does Adam, and what he learns enrages him. Already, and through no fault of his own, Adam is violently unstable, and by the end of Depraved he’s on a rampage. That his horrific existence is the fault of greedy men, and men of science who have no sense of the terrible nature of their ambitions, is too much for Adam to handle. The innocent die with the guilty, as they did in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel. Rarely have the concerns of 200 years in the past felt so relevant in the present day.

Finally, in 2023, Fessenden released Blackout (streaming on Tubi). This is his werewolf movie, and, as most werewolf movies do, it concerns itself with the secret bestial nature of mankind – specifically, of men. In the film, Alex Hurt plays Charley, an alcoholic who received his lycanthropic curse before the film begins. Again, Fessenden uses an age-old supernatural horror idea as a stand-in for alcohol abuse, and the out of control behavior it can lead to. Charley is so far gone that when we meet him, he already wants to die, in order to protect loved ones, and innocent strangers, he might hurt, or kill, when he changes into a werewolf. As in Habit, Fessenden uses horror to tell a story of tragedy, and to make a film that is as much a straight drama as it is a horror film. Blackout also addresses bigotry against immigrants, when a local businessman tries to pin the responsibility of a rash of murders sweeping through the small town where Blackout is set, on a migrant contractor.

So, like Depraved before it, ancient horror finds a home among the greed, selfishness, carelessness, and basic human indecency of the world around us today. For Larry Fessenden, nothing ever changes. Horror is everywhere, and eternal.

Bill Ryan has also written for The Bulwark, RogerEbert.com, and Oscilloscope Laboratories Musings blog. You can read his deep archive of film and literary criticism at his blog The Kind of Face You Hate, and you can find him on Twitter: @faceyouhate