Director Report Card: Larry Fessenden (2001)

3. Wendigo

“Wendigo” is the first Larry Fessenden movie I had ever heard of. The movie came out on DVD around the time when I was first beginning to pay attention to movies, horror in particular. As I was aware of the mythological concept of the wendigo – I read Marvel comics as a kid, after all – the film's title really stuck out to me. It was also one of my earliest exposure to a truly divisive movie. Horror fans seemed to react to “Wendigo” in a love-it-or-hate-it fashion, with the movie earning some raves but also plenty of drubs too. When I finally got around to seeing the movie a few years later, I understood this reaction. “Wendigo” shows Fessenden's style evolving in more extreme directions.

Married couple Kim and George are heading up to a vacation home in the Catskills Mountain, their young son Miles accompanying them. While driving up a wintry road, they strike a deer with their car. The buck was being chased by a hunter named Otis. When he sees that the animal's rack has been damaged in the collision, he becomes angry. After the family arrives at the cabin, they soon discovers that Otis may still be harassing them. Miles, meanwhile, continues to be haunted by the image of the dying deer. While in town, an old Indian shaman hands him a small statue of a wendigo, a monster from Algonquian mythology. As danger soon closes in, Miles suspects the wendigo is stalking him and his family.

As with “No Telling” and “Habit,” “Wendigo” shows Larry Fessenden putting his own riff on a well-worn horror concept. The movie squarely belongs to the story type of urbanites venturing from the city to the countryside, only to be tormented by depraved locals. The film is set far too north to be a true example of redneck horror but Fessenden still draws a sharp societal line between his refined, intellectual protagonists and his shit-kicking antagonists. This is not the only horror cliches “Wendigo” is riffing on. The film also features a mysterious shop clerk who wasn't there before and isn't there afterwards. The film opens with the shot of a Wolf Man action figure and “Wendigo” is sort of a werewolf movie, as its about man's beastly side showing through his human appearance.

“No Telling” certainly got some mileage out of the isolation of its country setting. “Wendigo” pushes that element even further. The film is set in the snowy forest. We frequently hear the chilly wind blowing through the sparse tree tops. Mysterious footsteps are spotted in the freshly fallen snow. Snow willows up into the air, creating white clouds. A forest at night can be spooky enough. When you cover it in snow and ice, that sense of isolation is only increased. The film only increases this by continually violating the safety of the family's vacation home. We see bullet holes punched in glasses, a hole drilled in the wall. Everywhere Kim and George goes, the creeping winter – and the very human monsters it contains – threaten to get inside.

As his first two features made apparent, Larry Fessenden movies are never just about the monster movie premises they proclaim to feature. They are usually making some deeper point. From its opening act of violence, “Wendigo” is clearly a polemic against multiple types of toxic masculinity. Otis the hunter is extremely angry with George for stealing the act of killing a deer, murdering an innocent animal, from him. He proceeds to belittle and passive-aggressively harasses the intellectual, artistic George. Otis is also obsessed with firearms, carrying guns of multiple types with him everywhere. He uses his bullets to pierce George and Kim's winter home, and eventually decides their "crimes" – disrupting his ritual of macho bloodshed, of bloody self-actualization – must be punished with death.

If the primary threat inside “Wendigo” is explicitly male, it's also explicitly white. “Wendigo” is another movie from a white filmmaker, about a white family being attacked by a creature from Native American mythology. There's even a moment where a wise old Indian informs a little white kid about the titular entity. Yet Fessenden is at least partially aware of the uncomfortable disconnect here. The small village was built upon another community, when the area was flooded for an artificial lake. The same way all of this land, this country, was built upon Native societies. As in “No Telling,” Fessenden zeroes in on animals being abused by people. The hunting of deer are depicted as cruel, senseless. Later, we see a horde of dead, skinned rabbits. The wendigo is later depicted as deer-like, seemingly getting revenge on those that killed the deer in the opening scene. So the Native American spirit is a deer, just like those senselessly killed by men who are trying to prove their own fragile masculinity. In other words, the deer become symbols of the displaced, hunted Native population, striking back at the imperialistic invaders that have intruded in their country.

Unless, of course, I'm reading way too much into it. Because Fessenden puts his own spin on the legendary wendigo. Like too many storytellers, Fessenden reduces the Algonquian spirit of cannibalism to a generic Native American monster. The unending hunger of the wendigo is mentioned only in passing, Fessenden focusing more on the creature's shape-shifting abilities. The spirit's association with winter and the cold is floating around inside the movie but never made explicit. Instead, Fessenden makes the Wendigo both tree-like and deer-like, a weird pop culture connotation that emerged somewhere along the line that has nothing to do with actual descriptions of the wendigo. Though at least Fessenden didn't just make the monster a furry, Bigfoot thing.

Despite not having much to do with the mythological wendigo” there is something elemental about the film's treatment of its monster. There's no attempt to rationalize or explain the creature. The wendigo exists apart from humanity. Though we can guess at them, its exact motives remain mysterious and impossible to decipher. Why does it act as attacker sometimes and protector other times, threatening Miles and his father in one scene before seemingly destroying Otis on the boy's behalf? We simply do not know. Maybe that's just sloppy writing or maybe Fessenden was intentionally invoking an otherworldly threat. Either way, “Wendigo's” approach to its titular monster is certainly more interesting than most movies about mythological ideas, that attempt to explain the spiritual with the scientific.

Whatever his more ornate intentions were, Fessenden definitely wanted “Wendigo” to be a scary movie. The occasionally flashy or showy camera and editing techniques he showed in his first two features come on even stronger here. There's some distracting handheld camera work in the earlier scenes, especially those devoted to deer lingering near the snow-choked roads. The film wants to create an atmosphere of freaky dread. It does this with a number of artsy visuals. Shots of the house's interior rotated jaggedly around the building, like snapshots. At one point, the camera zooms in and freeze-frames on Miles' eye. Static-y images are overlaid atop each other. Moments like these draw a little too much attention to themselves.

If “Wendigo” has its big problem, that's one of them. Though the film desperately wants to be scary, it simply is not. The low budget is a determent there. There are two physical manifestations of the wendigo: A rough approximation of a deer-headed man made from interlocking tree branches, referred to in the credits as “Twiggy,” and the were-deer monster that appears in the last act. None of these are convincing special effects. But I'm not sure either would be scary even if the effects were better. Both are simply goofy designs. The way Fessenden presents the latter monster in particular, often via jerky, rock video style editing, doesn't disguise the essential silliness of the design. A similar shot of a dead deer jerking to life or a twitching man leaping off the operating table and screaming even veers towards unintentional laughter.

While his parents get top billing, Miles truly is the protagonist of “Wendigo.” That's another reason the film begins by focusing in on his toys. The movie is largely told from a child's perspective. We see his nightmares, which are among the film's more effective surreal moments. The threat of loosing his parents, every child's greatest fear, is what drives much of the movie's tension. Miles is played by Erik Per Sullivan, best known to a generation of TV watchers as Dewey on “Malcolm in the Middle.” Funnily enough, Sullivan maintains the same delivery he perfected as Dewey here, a very spacey kid that is oddly observant of the world around him. Which actually works pretty well for “Wendigo.”

“Wendigo” stars Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber, among the most well-known performers Fessenden had worked with up to this point. Weber's George is a deeply neurotic character, insecure about his profession as a photographer for advertisement. Yet he has decent chemistry with Sullivan as his son, making the emotional center of the film more believable. Clarkson is even better as Kim, an intelligent woman who is usually under control except when situations push her too far. The two also share a surprisingly graphic love scene, which I'm sure serves some greater purpose in Fessenden's filmic thesis.

I don't think “Wendigo” is as scary or ultimately involving as Fessenden's previous two features. However, it is certainly an interesting horror movie. It's got some spooky atmosphere and a head full of fascinating ideas, even if the whole never quite hangs together. It would appear to be the director's most well-known film, most likely because he was somehow the first director to actually make a movie entitled after the well-known mythological monster. (Though that didn't matter much to audiences, as Wikipedia drolly describes the film as “not a major box office attraction.”) It won't appeal to everyone but adventurous horror fans should give it a chance. [Grade: B]