Director Report Card: Larry Fessenden (1991)

I have been following Larry Fessenden's career since the early 2000s and have watched something interesting happen. For a long time, Fessenden was the indie-iest of indie horror directors, releasing obscure, highly intelligent, but defiantly artistic genre pictures every few years. Around 2004, Fessenden's Glass Eye Pix production company started to produce movies from other filmmakers, many of which gained healthy buzz in their own right. Fessenden also started appearing in these films in supporting roles, launching what has become a pretty decent career as a character actor. He's even branched out into video games. So here we have the unexpected case of a prominent director who is probably better known for his role as mentor and on-camera personality.

Yet its Fessenden's creepy and insightful horror movies that have kept me coming back. I've been wanting to do this Report Card for a while and, with his latest feature coming out today, I figured now was a good time to do this. I figured this would be a good way to ease into Halloween.

1. No Telling

Larry Fessenden's career would emerge out of the New York art scene, lending a political punk rock ethos and an artistic sensibility to his work. He would start with a number of a short films, some pushing towards an hour in length. His technical first feature film was a two-hour long stage play adaptation from 1985 entitled “Experienced Movers.” Most of this stuff doesn't' seem to be available for viewing, not even on the weirder corners of the internet. Which means Fessenden's more-or-less first directorial credit is 1991's “No Telling,” which would establish him as a horror director with a particular bent all his own.

Lillian, a painter, and her husband Geoffrey, a scientist, move out to the country. They purchase a farm house, where Lillian will have plenty of room to work on her art while the spacious basement will provide Geoffrey with a good sized lab, to work on his experimental transplant research. The two are attempting to conceive a child. Yet Lillian is soon catching the eye of Alex, a local scientist who is concerned about the effect pesticides and chemicals are having on the environment and the near-by farm life. And that's when animals begin to disappear, as Geoffrey becomes increasingly obsessed with achieving his goal and leaves any sense of humanity behind...

“No Telling” was released in some markets as “The Frankenstein Complex.” While a somewhat misleading title – no stitched-together corpses are reanimated in this film – it does point towards the classical horror tropes Fessenden is working with. “No Telling” is a gritty, realistic update of the mad scientist premise, grounding it in our modern world. Gregory isn't a cackling madman but a pragmatic freelancer determined to sell his breakthroughs to the industrial science market. “No Telling” is blatantly focused on the ecological ramifications of unchecked science, driven by capitalism. A near-by farmer is probably developing cancer from a lifetime of exposure to pesticides, which the big company is still trying to sell him more of. Cows are dying mysteriously in the fields do to similar chemicals. Which does not make the classic horror premise any less effective, as its now more plausible than it ever was before.

Fessenden, in particular, focuses in on the plight of animals in our modern world. In the very first scene, Geoffrey runs over a deer with his car, startling Lillian awake from a dream. Later on, the camera lingers on the dead body of the deer, flies clinging to its lifeless form. The camera similarly fixates on the corpse of the cow in the field, Lilian eventually choosing to paint the image. There's a stark, detached sense of horror to these moments that peaks when Geoffrey starts to fill his laboratory with test animals. Fessenden's camera slowly pans across the basement and the white mice and rabbits, their bodies cut open and bloodied innards exposed. It is unsurprising to read that Fessenden was an animal rights activist before “No Telling” was released. An abject sense of horror at the abuse humans inflict on innocent animals directs most of the film.

In fact, the political passions that drove Fessenden to make “No Telling” are not exactly subtly incorporated into the story. The film comes across as didactic at times. There's a long sequence in the middle of the film where Geoffrey and Lillian invite Alex and a friend to dinner at their house. The three end up getting into an argument about whether the rights of animals outweigh the importance of continued scientific advancement. (The group is eating a roasted chicken at the time, the camera lingering on the bones and torn flesh of the dead animal.) In other words, Fessenden is laying out the film's themes bluntly and directly in this moment, which probably wasn't entirely necessary. “No Telling” isn't anti-science but it doesn't support the advancement of science at the expense of living things. And Fessenden pretty clearly agrees with this.

This scene is also when the cracks in Lillian and Geoffrey's relationship start to show. In a likely homage to another classic of eco-horror, “Long Weekend,” “No Telling” is also about a marriage falling apart. Lillian and Geoffrey want to have a kid together, causing an “It's Alive”-style fear of fetuses being mutated by chemicals in the air to emerge. Increasingly, this can't help but come off as a last ditch effort to save a flat-lining marriage. It's not that Geoffrey's obsession with his work is pushing him apart from his wife. It simply reveals what a creepy asshole he's always been, Lillian realizing she can no longer trust this man. It is certainly an interesting choice for a film about the environment being thrown off-course to link itself with a story about a a relationship also dying.

And just like “Long Weekend,” “No Telling” is a horror movie that mines a discomfort with the wild world even as its spreading an ecological message. Lilian and Geoffrey are from the city, with Lillian never spending much time outside the urban location. From the minute they arrive in the countryside – hitting that deer, Lillian having strange nightmares – there's a sense of unease in the air. The farmhouse is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded at night by darkness and the woods. While the characters never directly comment on being unnerved by the sudden isolation, “No Telling” obviously plays off that feeling for its horror movie atmosphere.

Helping along that feeling of freaky isolation is Fessenden's highly stylized and occasionally very creepy direction. There's an intimacy to “No Telling's” visual design. The camera often slides in and out of the character's faces or bodies, recalling the point-of-view of a prowling animal. This is made totally intentional when the camera actually assumes an animal's point-of-view, showing a raccoon getting its foot caught in a trap in the middle of the night, the screen flashing red when the actual violence takes place. The constant movement of Fessenden's camera often creates a disquieting feeling, such as in a late-in-the-film nightmare Lillian has, dripping with discomfort over the potential of having a child with this man.

“No Telling” is not the usual type of horror movie. Nobody dies in it. No human are ever in much physical danger. The supernatural is never present. And, yet, the film is incredibly intense and unnerving. There's a quiet unease running throughout the entire movie, a feeling that something horrible is going to happen. As Geoffrey's clear disregard for the well being of animals grows and grows, “No Telling” gets more intense. There's a key sequence where a beloved family pet, the dog of a near-by household, is caught in one of Geoffrey's traps. The bleeding, hurt animal is shoved into the back of his truck just as Alex and his friend appear, forcing Geoffrey to act like everything is going normally. The audience is aware that the hurt dog is near-by and could be discovered easily, causing the tension to keep rising and rising.

That tension continues to escalate throughout “No Telling” until its climax, which I can only describe as hugely upsetting. After a painfully extended sequence, where Geoffrey drags a stubborn calf through a field, “No Telling” lurches towards its primary and most horrifying image. Tom Laverack's climbing musical score, which always manages to make me feel sick to my stomach, drives away as “No Telling” slowly reveals the Frankensteinian creature its been building towards the entire time. Partially shown through shaky hand-held cam-corder footage, it's a dog and a calf cut in half and crudely stapled together. It's not a flawless special effect, looking like the obvious puppet it is.

Yet there's something singularly disturbing about this image. The hybrid animal is grotesque, its spine and parts of its internal muscles visible. Like something out of a horrific animal testing lab, electronic gizmos have been obscenely shoved into its flesh. Yet as repulsive as this creature is, it's also undeniably pathetic. Is stumbles across the ground in the most awkward fashion possible, the crudeness of the puppet actually working in the film's favor. It's something that shouldn't be alive, that shouldn't exist, and is dying just as quickly as it's been brought into this world. The complete disgust every character – except for Geoffrey – reacts with to this “scientific advancement” is utterly justified. In-between the intensity of the music, the intimacy of Fessenden's direction, and the unnerving quality of the creation itself, in its closing minutes, “No Telling” becomes among the most disturbing horror movies I've ever seen.

Being a low budget, independent production, “No Telling” does not have any recognizable actors in it. Some of the performances are better than others. Stephen Ramsey – who would go on to bit parts in better known movies – plays Geoffrey as a charming man who slowly reveals a cold, calculating side. Ramsey isn't always a strong enough performer to overcome the somewhat stiff dialogue of the script but he does make Geoffrey a chilling villain. Miriam Healy-Louie – this is her sole screen credit – can't totally disguise her Irish accent as Lillian. Her performance sometimes veers towards the somewhat stiff, even if she's able to make the audience relate to the complex feelings her character is going through. David Van Tieghem – who also contributed to the film's score and has a few other credits of note – is probably the most confident performance as Alex. Many of the supporting parts in the film seem to be played by non-professionals.

I can't recall how I first heard of “No Telling,” reading about it somewhere on the internet. I first saw it on IFC, back when that network still showed actual independent films. At the time, a beloved family pet and the first dog I ever loved had died only a few weeks earlier. This caused the ending of “No Telling” to hit me like a ton of bricks. That last act was so disturbing to me that I still remember it clearly, even though I hadn't seen the movie in probably twelve years. While its slow and ponderous at times, “No telling” has lost none of that power to unnerve. There is something singularly powerful about Fessenden's low budget “Frankenstein” riff. [Grade: A-]