It’s not everyday you find yourself smoking a joint with Jack Nicholson.
Then again, Larry Fessenden—whose unsettling resemblance to the “The Shining” star elicits greetings of “Hey, Jack” when he goes to the liquor store—hasn’t lived an everyday life. So when he found himself in the East Village as a twenty-something actor, writer, and director, at a party across the street from the Public Theater in the 1980s, it didn’t seem out of place to look across the room and see Nicholson. Or to saunter over and join the smoke-filled circle where the movie legend was holding court.
“He probably didn’t even notice me,” Fessenden said with a self-effacing laugh. The two didn’t talk, just inhaled and passed left. But Nicholson’s presence, there in that East Village abode, and in some of Hollywood’s most iconic films, had a lasting effect on Fessenden and shaped his own career. “I have been able to intuit Nicholson, in a way,” he says.
Around Halloween, when the veil between the living and the dead is supposed to be at its thinnest, few artists embody the soul of the genre quite like Larry Fessenden. For more than 40 years, the writer, director, actor, and producer has been exploring what frightens, and unites us, turning horror into a vessel for empathy and existential reflection. He is currently starring in Ben Leonberg’s “Good Boy,” a supernatural horror film released earlier this month, continuing that tradition with a supernatural horror story told from the perspective of a family dog.
Fessenden’s career is equal parts indie film icon and Hollywood Zelig, minus the conformity and overwhelming need for approval. He has acted in nearly 100 films and appeared in works by or with Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Murray, Steve Buscemi, Neil Jordan, Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Tom Waits, Patricia Clarkson, Christian Bale, Jake Weber, Adam Driver and Brad Anderson, to name a few. He has had roles in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Bringing Out the Dead,” “Animal Factory,” and “I Sell the Dead, for which he was awarded best actor at the 2008 Slamdance Festival in Park City, Utah.” Longtime Jarmusch producer, Carter Logan, calls Fessenden “a national treasure.”
Despite his resume and the admiration of his peers, you might not recognize his name. He launched his independent film company, Glass Eye Pix, in 1985, and has been quietly shaping modern horror ever since. The contradiction of his ubiquity in the film industry and his seeming existence on its fringes is one that he seems to relish.
“I have always felt like an outsider,” Fessenden said. “Sometimes you’re an extra, sometimes you’re the king.”
At 62, Fessenden splits his time between an East Village apartment and an old bed-and-breakfast in West Shokan that he and his wife, filmmaker Beck Underwood, converted into a home in the 1990s. His receding hairline punctuates a wild coif reminiscent of 1980s Mickey Rourke, and when he laughs—a lot—his most memorable feature, a missing front tooth, flashes into view. He lost it during an attempted mugging in 1985 and never replaced it. In conversation, he veers from contemplative to contorted, like a less-cartoonish version of Christopher Lloyd’s Doc in “Back to the Future.”
“People judge me because of it,” he said. “But I keep it like that to remind people that they are just disparaging someone who is different. And we are all outsiders in some way.”
Understanding the Monster
Fessenden’s work as a writer, director, and producer typically falls within the horror genre. His 1997 film “Habit,” features a femme fatale who turns out to be a vampire. In 2001’s “Wendigo,” which he shot at his West Shokan home and throughout Olive, an evil spirit of Native American folklore serves as the unexpected villain. But despite those obvious supernatural trappings, Fessenden’s films—he has written, directed or produced more than 50 titles, including the video game “Until Dawn”—possess a poignance and human longing that defies the cliche of traditional slasher films. Fessenden says that’s how it should be.
“I make horror movies that aren’t scary, they are just sad,” he said. “This loneliness is what we all find ourselves in. I appreciate a creaking branch or the howl of a wolf. A sense of tenderness. I don’t lean into the gore.”
“Horror is just a response to the chaos and dread of life,” he added. “It’s an expression of the feeling of angst, a preoccupation with death, which we all share. It asks the questions, ‘Why am I alive? Why am I being rejected by society?’”
With a sense of pride, Fessenden said that he is a “cardboard cutout of my generation,” weaned on black and white TV, monster toys, monster magazines, and a relentless diet of Universal Monsters. He speaks in religious tones about “Dracula” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and cites “Frankenstein” as the perfect example of the complexity that turned him onto the motif.
“When you say the name Frankenstein, the mind conjures this image. Very spare. It’s a great work of punk rock,” he said. “But there is also that feeling of outsiderness, an instinct to understand the monster. Horror is an incredibly potent genre.”
It is also a genre that has been around for as long as humans have made art. Fessenden doesn’t see this as coincidence, but a reaction to real-life human suffering.
“Go back to Beowulf and Greek myths. There have always been monsters and demons. They represent anxieties,” Fessenden said. “People saw real horrors in the real world during World War II. Godzilla comes from the aftermath of the atom bomb. “Night of the Living Dead” has the essence of Vietnam in it because there is no moral structure.”
If that last part sounds a bit political, it is. Fessenden rails against the destructive effects of religion, social media, and “raging narcissism.” He said our current political landscape is like “living in a horror movie.” Yet he believes that the genre itself is strangely apolitical, maybe even unifying.
“The reality is ghosts actually do live in our world,” he continues. “We are all haunted by events that happen in our lives. There is no amount of political unrest that could overshadow the genre.”
The Specter of Family
Fessenden grew up in New York City, the son of a banker who painted landscapes and read philosopher Immanuel Kant, and a homemaker mother who, his father liked to say, could have been a CEO in another era. They took him to the opera and the theater, nurturing his early fascination with the allure of art and imagination.
His father died two years ago, and his mother passed away earlier this month. The memory of those relationships, and the idea of family itself, continues to shape his work.
“My movies are haunted by the father-son relationship,” he said. “That signifies to me the philosophies we pass on to our children.”
He and his wife, filmmaker Beck Underwood, met through mutual friends in the gritty, art-soaked East Village of the 1980s. At the time, she was working as an art director in advertising, but the two soon began making films together. Underwood specializes in stop-motion animation, and her new film, The Lure of Ponies, debuted this month at the Woodstock Film Festival. Like Fessenden’s work, her films explore what she calls the “creepy yet poignant” nature of objects—particularly dolls and toys—through themes of loss, longing, and meaning. It’s easy to see what drew them together.
“I like that Larry is kind of a Renaissance man,” Underwood said. “He didn’t just wax poetic. He would roll his sleeves up and make something.”
As parents, they’ve passed their love of cinema to their son, Jack, 25, who has followed in their footsteps. His 2021 film “Foxhole” examines the horrors and futility of war.
When Jack was eight, he had his first paid gig on a movie set, helping his mother with design for “I Sell the Dead.” He said he didn’t watch any of his father’s films until he turned 21.
“My dad’s work has this idea of humanity,” Jack said, quickly joking that he lifted the phrase straight from the title of MoMA’s 2022 retrospective, “Oh, the Humanity,” which honored his father’s work. “It’s what he passed on to me.”
Fessenden said raising his son was “probably the favorite thing about my life.”
So it’s little surprise that, despite his rugged look and taste for the macabre, his favorite film of all time is “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
He says he, Underwood and Jack would watch the Frank Capra classic each holiday season. The film, of course, is brimming with themes that have inspired Fessenden: father-son expectations, loneliness, and the search for a greater purpose. He is so moved by the film that he gets teary when discussing it.
“I’m a sensitive person. Sensitive to the gift that life is,” he said. “What interests me is our search for meaning. Because at any moment, you could be hit by a bus.”
Jim Rich is a senior reporter for The Overlook. You can reach him at jim@theoverlooknews.com.