Note: For as much as I enjoy horror movies, I haven't seen any of this year's releases. It's cheaper to catch 'em at the end of the year, and anyway, most horror movies that release wide are pretty dismal. You know what was good from this year? The Lego Movie and Snowpiercer. I can't get that snowpiercing out of my head. It's like someone shoved Animal Farm into the bus from Speed.
11. Larry Fessenden
(Habit, The Last Winter, Beneath)
Life seems arbitrary and scary, consciousness seems subjective and tenuous. I like the horror genre because it invites the audience to see the world the way I see it: populated by demons, real and imagined.
Where to Start?
Habit (1997)
One of the fun ironies of horror is that so many creatives use the genre as a way to ask interesting questions - questions more reputable genres might not bother with. Let's face it, few romance pictures or family dramas come with commentary devoted to social decay or the illusion of perception. But that's how things go with Larry Fessenden, the writer/director responsible for thoughtful indie exercises like Habit and Wendigo. Given his passion for horror-as-social-essay in his own work, it's no surprise that he's the most vocal commentator on George Romero retrospective Birth of the Living Dead.
Romero was the guy, after all, who made his zombies into allegories for revolution and gluttonous consumerism. Fessenden's The Last Winter, a snowbound supernatural thriller, takes a story about prehistoric ghosts (yep) and fashions it into a discomforting look at the USA's appetite for oil. Subtle in mood, if not in its core idea (Ron Perlman sounds like a member of the Bush/Cheney cabinet), The Last Winter succeeds in its atmosphere, and its thematic interest is genius. Let's face it: oil is literally the remnants of ancient plants and animals, and when humans turn it into pollution, and that pollution hastens the destruction of our own habitats - well, isn't that the ghosts of the past achieving some kind of revenge?
The Last Winter is his most political work, but his previous two films challenge their supernatural stories. Habit asks if its central antagonist is a deranged sex bomb or a vampiric seductress, but it wisely never quite answers the question. Wendigo suggests that its Native American spirit might exist only in the imagination of young or mentally weak, in people who need illusions to make sense of reality's cruelty. That film struggled some with its final-act monster, a manifestation of the wendigo that looked more confusing than imposing. (The Last Winter also faltered with end-of-film special effects that felt too literal and weightless.)
Fessenden's more recent works, however, subtract these headier ideas for more cruel, straightforward horror. His Fear Itself episode "Skin and Bones" succeeds mostly as a showpiece for the brilliant, eerie actor Doug Jones (a.k.a our generation's Lon Chaney). He plays a man who returns from the wilderness and forces his wife into cannibalism. And TV movie Beneath, a Jaws-meets-Lifeboat trifle, is kind enough to make its teenagers burgeoning sociopaths and opt for a big dumb fish puppet over a big dumb computer effect. That film was mostly dismissed, not without some reason - a film needs a lot of contrivance to strand six kids on a boat in a small lake. Maybe the problem isn't that the film is bad, but that, like its giant catfish of death, Fessenden's most interesting when he's got more to chew on.
Side-note: credit also goes to Fessenden for founding Glass Eye Pix, which helped start the careers of Ti West (The House of the Devil) and Jim Mickle (Stake Land). Fessenden's currently supervising the first English feature of this list's #14, Adrian Garcia Bogliano.
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