Wendigo
Larry Fessenden · 2001 · 91 minutes
Nov. 13 · Regal 1 · 10:00 p.m.
A Manhattan family steals a weekend away at a friend’s country farmhouse. But a fluke accident sets off a chain of events that alters their lives forever and conjures up the ferocious spirit of the Wendigo, a Native American myth made manifest in Miles’s imagination.
Programmer’s Note
“I always say that I’m afraid of everything and I want audiences to see the world like I do.” – Larry Fessenden
In the classic horror tradition of The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Deliverance, Wendigo opens with a journey, both literal and metaphoric, from the safety and comfort of home to a more sublime and psychologically unstable wilderness. Here, a Manhattan couple—commercial photographer George (Jake Weber) and psychotherapist Kim (Patricia Clarkson)—throw their dreamy, doe-eyed son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan) into the backseat of a station wagon and head north for a quick getaway in the Catskills. While navigating an icy road, they hit a buck that is being pursued by a group of hostile back-woods hunters, precipitating a chain of chilling and possibly supernatural events.
Dave Kehr, a film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, once compared Larry Fessenden’s work to what John Cassevetes might have produced if he’d been at Universal Studios in the 1930s. A fixture of the American independent film scene for more than four decades, Fessenden is an actor, writer, producer, and director whose hundreds of credits include roles in films by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch. Much more often, his collaborators are working on the margins. His production company, Glass Eye Pix—tagline “fierce independent media since 1985”—has been attached to dozens of features, shorts, and video games, including movies by Rick Alverson, Ti West, and Ira Sachs.
Notably, Fessenden also helped shepherd Kelly Reichardt’s first feature, River of Grass (1994), and went on to produce several of her later films, Wendy & Lucy (2008), Night Moves (2013), and Certain Women (2016). While Fessenden is best known as a horror auteur, his work feels like a part of Reichardt’s expanded cinematic universe, a recognizably real world populated by recognizably real people. As critic Adam Nayman has written of Wendigo, “there’s a shot of a pair of boots in a hospital hallway waiting to be filled that’s as gut-punching and powerful as any of Spielberg’s child’s-eye perspectives on the adult world.”
American Regional Cinema Competition juror Madeline Whittle will introduce the film. She recently presented the theatrical premiere of the Wendigo restoration at Lincoln Center as part of her Scary Movies series. Special thanks to Maddie for helping us arrange this rare screening.
Larry Fessenden started experimenting with video and super8 after he was expelled from school. In 1980 he made several short films including A Face in the Crowd (1981), which helped him get a place at NYU, where the first version of Habit (1997) was made. Fessenden acted in Habit and in No Telling (1991) and then he went on to act in several films by other directors, before his international breakthrough with Wendigo (2001), the third and final part of his horror trilogy. Fessenden also acted in Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).