Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 14, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Despite rumors of its demise, the quality independent horror film has proven itself alive and well in the past year, if sometimes difficult to find. 2001 saw a strong crop of low-budget horror features, both foreign and domestic, come to light, and a high-water mark has been set early in 2002 with Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo. If many genre films that approach its quality follow in the next 10 months, it’s going to be a hell of a year.
The New York-based Fessenden made an underground name for himself with his previous feature, the downtown vampire film Habit, but the skill for character-based horror he demonstrated there truly finds full flower in Wendigo. Literally leaving Habit’s urban milieu behind, the new movie follows a city family—commercial photographer George (Jake Weber), his psychiatrist wife Kim (Patricia Clarkson) and their young son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan)—as they drive to a vacation at a farmhouse in wintry upstate New York. Before they even reach the place, their peaceful plans go awry, as George hits a deer that runs in front of their car.
Right from this point, Fessenden presents a scenario in which already upsetting situations can have even direr consequences, setting the stage for further unease to come. The deer George hit was being tracked by a group of hunters led by the antagonistic Otis (John Speredakos), who is none too happy to see his quarry felled and its prized antlers damaged. A confrontation ensues, and while he averts further violence, George winds up humiliated in front of his wife and son; prone to typical childhood fears about monsters, Miles is further unsettled by the encounter. Later, during a visit to a local store, he meets a Native American elder who tells him of the Wendigo, a creature that lives in the surrounding forests. The man gives Miles a Wendigo totem to protect him—but as the film goes on, Miles will learn that mythical terrors can be no match for those of the real world.
With its grainy look (the film was shot on Super-16), woodsy setting and generally “quiet” approach to horror—not to mention its indie roots—Wendigo will inevitably be compared to The Blair Witch Project. But beyond the surface, the movies are very different; Blair gained its power from the improvisatory nature of its drama, while Wendigo is carefully and quite assuredly composed. And the desperate, ragged quality of Blair’s images is worlds apart from Terry Stacey’s rich Wendigo cinematography. The stark ominousness of the overcast, snowy days gives way to deep, threatening darkness when night falls, shot through with hues of fire and blood. In many scenes, particularly one at the hunters’ shack, Fessenden and Stacey conjure up a true sense of visceral threat—and are even able to incorporate visual tricks like pixillation and a 360-degree freeze-frame without breaking the mood.
One of Fessenden’s achievements is that he’s able to evoke a sense of rural menace without condescending to the region or its people; nor does his depiction of the citified George stoop to obvious yuppie clichés. That’s a tribute to the director’s talent for creating very specific people and eliciting strong performances from his actors, with Weber and Clarkson lending nuance to their husband-and-wife characters, Sullivan just terrific as their observant, sensitive son and Speredakos genuinely menacing as the hunter with a grudge. The simple human interaction between these characters carries the story for a long while before the supernatural elements become pronounced, and Fessenden even leaves the fact of the Wendigo’s existence up to debate, with questions of its reality tantalizingly unanswered. Is the monster real, or just a legend that Miles seizes upon to deal with his own fears? Or, as the climactic scenes suggest, does it not only exist, but actually respond to the emotions of one who, like Miles, is conscious of its presence?
This is not to suggest that Wendigo is some kind of existential exercise, but rather that there are plenty of ideas underpinning its haunting, moving and ultimately quite chilling story. The movie completes what Fessenden calls a trilogy updating classic monster themes, following Habit and his previous feature, the Frankensteinian No Telling. Wendigo is his take on the werewolf myth, one that reworks the old themes without ever being self-conscious about it—and firmly establishes Fessenden as a first-class genre filmmaker. It will be fascinating to see where his uniquely personal vision takes him next.
