​Subjective Reality: Larry Fessenden on Crumb Catcher, Blackout, and Glass Eye Pix

As the founder of Glass Eye Pix, writer-director Larry Fessenden has spent nearly four decades carving out a fiercely independent niche in American cinema—not only for himself, but also for the array of talented artists whose careers he’s supported through his storied New York film studio.  Since “No Telling,” his first feature on film, Fessenden has plumbed the depths of human psychology and interrogated our relationship to the natural world within chilling, atmospheric horror features. To that end, “No Telling,” sold internationally as “The Frankenstein Complex,” smuggled critiques of big pharma and animal testing into the body of a monster movie. “Habit” came next, its vampirism-as-disease allegory suffusing a despairing tale of alcohol dependency and urban decay in mid-1990s New York.  In “Wendigo,” a family vacationing upstate encounters a Native American legend, Fessenden depicting family tragedy through a child’s eyes; in “The Last Winter,” an oil drilling crew succumbs to unstoppable forces in the Alaskan wilderness; and in “Depraved,” an Iraq war medic processes trauma by stitching together a man from body parts in a Brooklyn loft. Fessenden’s latest, the werewolf feature “Blackout,” is equally grisly and engaged, weighing civic responsibility and addiction issues alongside lycanthropic carnage.  Though Fessenden founded Glass Eye to copyright his own films, it’s since expanded into an artists’ collective of sorts. Kelly Reichardt made “River of Grass,” her debut feature, with Fessenden starring, editing, and producing; he also produced “Wendy and Lucy” and executive-produced “Night Moves” and “Certain Women.” Ti West saw “Habit” in high school and kept asking about Fessenden while taking a class taught by Reichardt at the School of Visual Arts in New York. On her reference, West interned at Glass Eye; Feessenden produced his debut, “The Roost,” and others, up through “The House of the Devil.” For directors like Jim Mickle (“Stake Land”), Glenn McQuaid (“I Sell the Dead”), and James Felix McKenney (“Automatons”), Fessenden’s production banner has similarly been a safe haven from which to start.  “I don’t even know what Glass Eye Pix is,” Fessenden confesses during a recent visit to Chicago in support of “Crumb Catcher,” the studio’s latest (out on VOD today via Doppelgänger Releasing). “It’s a place where filmmakers can come if I feel they have this spark of looking to use the genre to tell something personal, honest, and authentic. But that doesn’t mean there are any rules.”   The feature debut of Chris Skotchdopole, who shares story credit with Fessenden and lead actor Rigo Garay, “Crumb Catcher” centers two newlyweds, Leah (Ella Rae Peck) and Shane (Garay), who travel to a remote estate in upstate New York for their honeymoon, only for two uninvited guests (John Speredakos and Lorraine Farris) to plunge the getaway into a bizarre, uncomfortable ordeal. A chaotic, high-speed collision of psychodrama and perverse tragicomedy, Skotchdopole’s debut reflects his past decade spent working under Fessenden at Glass Eye Pix in more ways than one.  Last month, Fessenden, Skotchdopole, Garay, and producer Chadd Harbold traveled to Chicago’s Music Box Theatre to introduce a screening of “Crumb Catcher” and participate in a post-film Q&A. Fessenden sat down that evening to discuss his own oeuvre and secret to nurturing the next wave of indie-horror iconoclasts. This interview has been edited and condensed. You have a history with Chicago. “Habit” premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1995, which resulted in some strong early reviews and encouragement as you shopped the film to distributors. What do you remember about that experience, and what role it played in getting the film released?  We made “Habit” with five crew members, including myself and the DP. Two kids took the train to New York to start their careers, and one was from Chicago: Jay Silver, the assistant cameraman. When we came to be in the Chicago International Film Festival, it was sweet. He was back in his hometown. I just remember what a great town it was. I love jazz. I love music. FACETS came into the story of “Habit” a year later. But the truth is, I’d already had some of my videos distributed there, really homemade videos, and they were on the video shelf under Indie Film. I was always aware of Chicago as more supportive than my own hometown of New York City. We played “Habit” at the festival, and we got a blurb from Roger Ebert that said the film was pretty cool. You could live and breathe off that quote for a long time. [Eds. note: Ebert expanded on the blurb in question, which praised Habit as a “strong, bleak film,” with a full review upon the film’s release.]  A year later, Charles Coleman from FACETS called me, and he asked, “What’s going on with that vampire movie?” I said, “Well, I never could sell it. I don’t know quite what went wrong.” Abel Ferrara’s “The Addiction” and Michael Almereyda’s “Nadja” had both go