My notes on Blackout (2023), which opens today in US cinemas and on digital platforms.
Writer-director Larry Fessenden has been ticking off distinctive takes on major horror themes since The Frankenstein Complex, but previously tended to dwell on the wendigo as a way of doing a werewolf story (notably, in Wendigo). But he’s been working up to something more traditional for a while, doing a first draft of this as an episode of his audio series Tales From Beyond the Pale (in which he played the werewolf) and now expanding the situation in a film that’s a) a small-town state of the nation summary, b) a character study of an alcoholic artist, c) a quirky crime investigation and d) an old-fashioned man-beast on the prowl picture.
The setting is Talbot Falls, and troubled Charley Barrett (Alex Hurt) turns into a bipedal, torn-shirt, mouthful-of-fangs hairy prowler very much on the model of Universal Pictures’ Wolf Man (and not the one with Benicio del Toro, either) with none of your CGI big dogs. The son of a late lawyer (played in photos by the actor’s real father, William Hurt) who was in league with local big shot Jack Hammond (Marshall Bell), Charley is an amiable, obviously talented decent guy – but even before he got turned, he had issues. He’s found out his father and Hammond were involved in shady deals which have affected the community, which has wrecked his relationship with Hammond’s daughter Sharon (Addison Timlin). While Charley has a lawyer (Barbara Crampton) sorting through the files, Hammond uses the mutilation murders to stir up ill-will against a hispanic workforce he has imported to undercut locals in the building of a posh estate, Hilltop Heights, which might well be literally poisoning the town. Miguel (Rigo Garay), spokesman for the incomers, is also the only witness who says he saw a monster attack a young couple in the woods – and Hammond keeps nagging the cops (Ella Rae Peck, Joseph Castillo-Midyett) to arrest Miguel on no evidence, while local barflies (repped by Kevin Corrigan) are perpetually on the point of turning into a version of the old Universal torch-bearing mob.
Fessenden loves old horror movies and is unashamed of their tropes, but always finds ways of melding the material with the way America is going right now … the angry mobs stirred up by self-serving town blowhards have been a part of the monster movie since Frankenstein (1931) but the sense of manufactured division and frustration is all too contemporary (though there’s also sometimes a feel of the ‘social issues’ dramas Rod Serling wrote before he got to the Twilight Zine and discovered allegory). Like Larry Cohen, Fessenden seems incapable of writing a fill-in character. Everyone in his films feels real, has screen weight and seems like someone you could hang a whole movie on (which gives the death toll impact – you always have a moment of shock that someone you were warming up to or wanted to see more of is just suddenly gone). Tiny moments like the Sheriff realising why one dead guy has a picture of the other dead guy on his phone or Sharon’s slight irritation with the guy (Joe Swanberg) she’s got together with as a replacement for Charley are telling, sweet and sad. Fessenden is as well-known now as an actor in other people’s films – honestly, if you can get through any genre film festival without seeing him more than once you’re picking the wrong screens – and always makes space in his own films for niceties of performance, often bringing back players to elevate virtual bit roles (here, we get welcome returns from James le Gros and John Speredakos, who were leads in earlier Fessenflicks).
Also like Larry Cohen, Fessenden has the skills to make suspenseful, shocking horror cinema but often finds that isn’t what most engages him about the material. In the (crowded) canon of modern werewolf films, Blackout jostles with Late Phases, Wolves, Werewolves Within, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, I am Lisa, WolfCop, Wer, Howl, Eight for Silver and Kommunion – it’s among the most traditional of these in terms of the rules of monsterdom (and even the look of the monster, designed by Brian Spears) but least conventional in its storytelling, with necessities like the monster’s origin (which is shown) less important than the odd moments as human connections are made or missed and the portrait of a backwoods town in trouble. In the end, it’s haunting rather than horrific. NB: though the title is apt, it’s been used so often before that this particular Blackout might get shuffled down the algorithm, so be sure to seek it out.
Discussion
No comments yet.