Bringing together a vampire from Habit (1995), a Frankenstein monster from Depraved (2019) and a Wolf Man from Blackout (2023), Trauma Or, Monster All is Larry Fessenden’s House of Frankenstein – or as his vampire character Sam says, getting two films mixed up, his ‘Mad Mad Monster Party’. This Monsterverse is an earned thing, putting to shame the botches which higher-profile IP owners have tried with concepts like ‘Dark Universe’. The writer-director had reasons to essay variations on the classic creatures in his earlier films beyond the monsters being cool and commercial – he recognises that all these archetypes keep coming back because they are always meaningful, tackling universal themes rather than feeding Universal Theme Parks*.
There was something paradoxical in the first stab at this sort of thing, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), in which science fiction and horror literally clash as a man-made monster and the victim of a gypsy curse tear into each other … but Trauma smooths that over by having its gangling Adam (Alex Breaux) and lycanthrope Charley (Alex Hurt) bond over what they share, mostly trauma but also having walked away from the messy climaxes of their first adventures with a lot of unresolved plot threads and supporting characters still looking for them. The binding factor of the film is an article in a local paper by Cassandra (Laëtitia Hollard), a historian/librarian who is struggling with her racial and sexual identity while struggling with a commissioned biography of freed slave agronomist George Washington Carver. Spying Adam and Charley lying low in the house next door in a low-rent part of Talbot Falls, Upstate New York, Cassandra dashes off the ‘monsters among us’ article drawing on published sources on the plots of Depraved and Blackout.
She writes the piece as displacement activity because her big project is weighing heavy and doesn’t realise how it’ll affect the town – bringing back bad memories for the ex-Sheriff (James Le Gros) and witnesses of a werewolf outbreak … and inspiring a small mob of would-be torch-wielding villagers to come looking, along with Charley’s still shattered ex Sharon (Addison Timlin) and Praetorius-like bio entrepreneur Polidori (Joshua Leonard), who have unfinished business with the monsters. Artist Charley, who even does action painting in his werewolf form, has slaughtered his sometime mistress Kate (Barbara Crampton), leaving a mangled, decaying corpse which isn’t found until workmen finally decide to resume fixing her property. Further afield, the article intrigues Sam (Fessenden), who was turned into a vampire in Habit and only now realises there are other breeds of monster out there. He’s aged normally, but can sometimes appear as a Nosferatu-faced fiend (‘we’re basically Dracula,’ he admits), and opts to turn Sharon into a bloodsucker as his way of getting closer to the monster rally.
Fessenden doesn’t stress the state of the nation aspect, though an aside about a librarian who has to let Cassandra go because she doesn’t have the spare energy for another fight what with folks trying to shut her down over children’s books is pointed and there’s a sense that the Universal monster most relevant to America 2026 is the torch-wielding mob out to stake, burn, riddle with silver bullets or dismember anyone who undermines their masculinity or self-worth. When the mob and the monsters converge, Cassandra is in danger from both – not least because she’s started a relationship with a Talbot Falls girl (Aitana Doyle). The finale litters a lawn with corpses but leaves a single monster on the loose. Fessenden has spoken of this as a culmination, but after House of Frankenstein came House of Dracula … even Mad Monster Party had a sequel. Trauma plays best if you’ve done a certain amount of homework first – not just watching the three specific films it draws together but Fessenden’s other major works (Wendigo and The Last Winter especially) and a scattering of the source texts. It’s possibly not a ‘new readers start here’ film, with the monster characters essentially giving ‘what we’ve been up to since our story ended’ bytes and the weight of the drama falling on Hollard, who is appealing and complicated as Cassandra, a prophet who knows all too well where this is going.
*I’ve a personal reason to fucking hate these – ask me about it sometime.