If this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival has an unofficial poster boy, it’s the New York–based writer-director Larry Fessenden, who may not be a household name (even in houses with a subscription), but who is nevertheless the most gifted American horror auteur to emerge since the g(l)ory days of John Carpenter and George Romero. Fessenden’s specialty lies in putting a highly contemporary and sociopolitical spin on the most immortal horror-fantasy myths: In (1991), he used the architecture of Mary Shelley’s to comment on animal testing and the morality of science; in the Independent Spirit Award–winning (1997), vampirism functioned as a metaphor for the alienation of modern life in the big city; and in (2001), the eponymous creature was a werewolflike Native American spirit, but the more destructive force was the clash between civilized man and his primal, animalistic nature. Much the same holds true for Fessenden’s latest, , in which the employees of a U.
S. oil company embark on a top-secret Alaskan drilling project that will bring “energy independence” to the American people while wreaking irreparable havoc on the delicate environment of the Arctic tundra. Until, that is, some unseen, primordial force bubbles up from the ground along with the black gold, infecting everyone and everything with which it comes into contact.
Could it be the spirit of the Wendigo come back to haunt again? Perhaps. But as usual in a Fessenden film, in mankind is its own worst enemy.
Call it the first green horror picture — punctuated by ample doses of red. In between directing his own films and acting in others (recently, he could be seen sucker-punching Bill Murray in a memorable scene from ), Fessenden has amassed a prolific career as an indie-film producer, including River of Grass (the 1994 debut feature of director Kelly Reichardt) and two new works that screen alongside in LAFF. In the first, writer-director Ilya Chaiken’s sensitively drawn , two food-service workers at New York’s Liberty Island — fast-talking hustler Tico (Kareem Savinon) and wide-eyed dreamer Derrick (Al Thompson) — find the job opportunities scarce after they’re laid off in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Recruiters of both the military and criminal-life variety soon appear, as the story ventures into that familiar territory of urban youths waylaid by ghetto realities. The strong performances and Chaiken’s vivid NYC locations, however, lend the film unexpected resonance. reconceived as a horror movie is the simplest way to describe , the stunning sophomore feature by 26-year-old writer-director Ti West, whose Fessenden-produced vampire-bat epic earned a brief local release back in 2005.
Working from the purportedly true story of three buddies on a Delaware hunting trip attacked by an unseen sniper, West fashions an uncommonly naturalistic terror tale in which the emphasis on landscape and the gradual passage of time have less to do with cut-and-run splatter-cinema hallmarks like Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave than with the work of experimental filmmakers like Michael Snow and Chantal Akerman. Rife with intentional echoes of the 9/11 attacks and unintentional ones of the Virginia Tech shootings, denies its audience conventional narrative satisfactions while creating an almost unbearable atmosphere of voyeurism and random violence, right up to a final scene that teases us with resolution only to devolve into yet another enigma. Who’s gunning whom in ?
The point is that it scarcely matters in a world where everyday life is a deadly contact sport. screens Fri., June 22, at 9:30 p.
m. at the Majestic Crest and Sun., June 24, at 2 p.
m. at the Mann Festival; screens Sat., June 23, at 7:45 p.
m. at the Landmark Regent and Mon., June 25, at 7:30 p.
m.
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