Director Report Card: Larry Fessenden (1995)

2. Habit

As I said earlier, Larry Fessenden began his film career shooting underground movie on video as part of his local, New York City art scene. Most of these shorts were under ten minutes but a few of them were a bit longer. 1981's “A Face in the Crowd” is about an hour long. So is 1989's “Hollow Venus: Diary of a Go-Go Dancer.” One of of these more elaborate early films was 1981's “Habit.” Fessenden must have been fond of this particular short because, a decade later, he would remake “Habit” as a feature film.

Sam is a bit of a mess right now. He's recently split up with his girlfriend, Liza. His father has past away from mysterious circumstances. He's living in a slum apartment in a bad part of New York City and working as a waiter in an even sleazier bar. All of this stress is causing him to grow increasingly dependent on alcohol. It's in this mind frame that he meets Anna, at a Halloween party of a mutual friend. She is mysterious and sexy, immediately hooking up with Sam. The two start a whirlwind relationship. Sam soon notices that Anna likes to bite him and drink his blood during sex. As his grip on sanity starts to slip, he begins to increasingly suspect that Anna is a vampire.

With “No Telling,” Larry Fessenden reinvented the mad scientist premise through the lens of ecological concerns. With “Habit,” he reinterprets another classic horror concept through another socially conscious idea. “Habit” is a vampire movie about addiction. Sam's dependency on booze, drowning out the pain of life, is rather explicitly compared to Anna's need to drink blood. Sam grows increasingly sick as Anna feeds on him more and more, which his friends just assume is a result of his worsening alcoholism. Is he constantly hung over because his blood is getting sucked away a little at a time? Or because he can never put away the bottle? The film itself seems to want to keep this ambiguous, as it ends with the suggestion that Anna might not have existed at all. (Even though the story clearly contradicts that possibility several times, when other people acknowledge her.)

Fessenden is hardly the first person to draw a comparison between vampirism and drug addiction, so “Habit” isn't exactly touching on new ground there. The film is more interesting when read as being about an especially toxic relationship. Sam and Anna leap into a relationship quickly, things getting sexual on the very first date. From there, she's forcing herself into his life as much as possible. She shows up uninvited while he's out with other friends. When visiting the same friends over Thanksgiving, Anna also appears out of the blue. She crashes his dad's funeral. When Sam insists on taking a break, Anna won't take no for an answer. And so, a vampire stalking its prey and a clingy, obsessive relationship become practically indistinguishable from each other.

Yet the vampire is a symbol of something else in “Habit.” Sam is haunted by the past. It's suggested that he never recovered from his mother's death, which occurred when he was only a boy. The more recent death of his emotionally distant, misanthropic father has only drudged up more of those memories. Sam is also having trouble letting go of Liza, the two meeting up for lunch or talking on the phone a few times throughout the film. As if things couldn't be made anymore obvious, Sam's dad was also an archaeologist, someone literally preoccupied with digging up the past. A pivotal moment directly links Anna with that profession. Like the vampire, Sam's past is dead but not quite settled and continues to linger over his present.

As much as “Habit” wants to utilize the vampire as a symbol, it's also refreshingly direct with its movie monster. In its own way, “Habit” plays a lot of the classical vampire tropes totally straight. Anna's bloodsucking is directly linked with sex, the two often occurring at the same time. She also has a bond with wolves. She can't enter a building without being invited. She finds the smell of garlic intolerable. She doesn't like the sun much. She seemingly cast no reflection. The film even hints that she doesn't like running water, when she's forced to step out of the rain. A crucifix is busted out at one point. Like Carmilla, she attempts to seduce men and women alike. Like Dracula, she arrives in the city via boat. Like all vampires, she is a nocturnal visitor, creeping into Sam's bedroom as a shadowy wisp to take his blood in his sleep, the film directly addressing the sleep paralysis origins of the vampire myth. It's pretty cool that “Habit” is so clearly a post-modern deconstruction of the vampire concept but also knows all the traditional rules too.

While “No Telling” was set in the countryside, “Habit” is set in the grimiest parts of New York City. Sam is introduced wandering through the streets of the city, everything around him looking dirty and pest-infested. All the apartments in this film seem to be darkly lit and cluttered up with junk. More than once, we see food rotting away in sinks. At his job in the bar, Sam notices a cockroach twitching and dying on the kitchen floor. “Habit” captures a pretty scuzzy atmosphere and that extends to the movie's sex scenes, which are unapologetic in their graphic content, showing human bodies humping away on floors and roof tops. This approach certainly grounds “Habit” as a gritty tale of addiction and madness amid a decaying modern metropolis.

Having successfully made a scary horror movie with “No Telling,” we already know Larry Fessenden can make a creepy movie. Yet, with “Habit,” you feel him kind of struggling to create a genuine horror film. I mean, yes, obviously this is a horror movie. Its frightening sequences are even pretty effective. Sam has a bizarre nightmare where he runs through the city streets nude, eventually coming to a derelict boat inhabited with mocking ghosts of the people in his life. The best scene is that nighttime visitation from Anna, where she appears as a “Nosferatu”-style shadow or phantasm that creeps above his bed. By the time the final act arrives, where the vampire is breaking into Sam's apartment and he's desperately trying to fight her off, “Habit” even becomes thrilling. Yet some of the quote-unquote scary scenes in the movie draw too much attention to themselves, like that sequence of Sam and Anna being chased by “wolves” – dogs with bike reflector eyes – through the park, which is more silly than scary.

If you didn't already know, now is the time to mention it. In addition to writing, directing, and editing, Larry Fessenden also stars in “Habit.” It's common knowledge now that the director is actually a pretty decent actor. Not blessed with movie star looks, Fessenden has a compellingly eccentric screen presence. He plays Sam as a guy slowly being consumed by his bad habits and his demons, Fessenden doing a good job of portraying someone just barely trying to hold it together. His acting is at its best near the end, when Sam truly starts to crack up and Anna's vampiric intentions begin to close in on him. Fessenden panics on screen well and it helps increases the tension of the last act.

Starring alongside Fessenden is the mysterious Meredith Snaider as Anna. Much like the director, Snaider is also reprising her role from the 1981 original “Habit.” These are her only film roles. Which is surprising, as Snaider is clearly quite talented. She has an eerie sensuality to her that is perfect for playing a vampire. She slithers and creeps in an animal-like fashion, those eyes casting bedroom glances at our hero and, by extension, the audience. That ravenous hunger becomes even more apparent as she bares her fangs more and more, becoming a believably dangerous vampire. She's also funny and fashionable, looking especially sleek in sunglasses and a leather trench coat.

“Habit” does have its flaws though. “No Telling,” though ultimately disturbing, still had a pretentious streak and a somewhat meandering pace. “Habit” only continues these issues. Nearly two hours long, the film's story includes a number of unnecessary detours, such as Sam and a friend going swimming on a beach or going on a long car drive. In fact, those friends are another problem the movie has. Aaron Beall and Patricia Coleman as Nick and Rae come off as fairly obnoxious, artsy-fartsy hipster types. Neither are especially convincing actors and both, but Beall especially, perform their characters in broad and shouting fashions.

Another flaw “Habit” shares with “No Telling” is a bad tendency to explain itself to the audience.  Just like in that movie, the film eventually features a conversation that spells out most of the subtext of what's happening on-screen. While Sam is trying to explain to Nick that Anna is an actual, actual vampire, Nick rebuttals that vampires – people who want to take something from you – are everywhere. Also, that he's drinking too much. Obviously, Larry knows that the audience watching his films must be pretty smart. So why does he feel the need to include such obvious, on-point conversations in his first two features?

”Habit” could quite possibly be considered Larry Fessenden's breakthrough film. While “No Telling” was largely overlooked, now and then, “Habit” would receive quite a few decent notices from critics. It won a couple of festival awards and was even nominated for a few Independent Spirit Awards. (This film also got shown on IFC fairly often, back when that network was still good.) While I think the film lacks the unnerving power of “No Telling,” it is a pretty clever and well made variation on the vampire concept. [Grade: B]