When Adam (Alex Breaux), the Frankensteinian monster from 2019’s Depraved, turned up at the very end of 2023’s werewolf film Blackout, encountering the lycanthropic Charley (Alex Hurt), it was an exciting tease for fans of Larry Fessenden’s uniquely personal horror cinema. It promised a meeting of the monsters akin to Universal’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, but what has emerged is more akin to the monster mash House of Frankenstein.
Trauma or, Monsters All, which was just announced as an international premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, brings Adam and Charley together with Sam, the vampire played by Fessenden himself in his 1997 cult favorite Habit.
FANGORIA is on the scene while Fessenden shoots some key moments for Trauma in a house not far from his home in upstate New York. This is the dwelling place of Adam and Charley, once again played by Breaux (pictured below, hinting at the pronunciation of his name) and Hurt, respectively.
The arrival of an unwelcome figure from Adam’s past, Polidori (Joshua Leonard, also reprising his Depraved role), precipitates a violent confrontation, which Fessenden is filming with his usual combination of swift efficiency and attention to detail, both physical and personal.
During a break in the shoot, Fessenden explains the storyline that brings his trio of frightening figures together. “A girl named Cassandra [The Pitt breakout star Laëtitia Hollard] comes to a small upstate town, which happens to be Talbot Falls from Blackout. She starts seeing this strange activity at the house next door, and she becomes convinced that these are the monsters from these various upstate stories. There was a werewolf killed in a jail, there was a Frankenstein story where a guy was thrown off a balcony and the house burned.
“A local newspaper publishes her observations about what she’s seen through the window in an opinion piece, just saying, ‘There’s something weird in this place, and the town won’t admit it,’” Fessenden continues. “It’s put on the web—and Sam, who’s been a vampire for 30 years now and hasn’t a lot to do, sees this and thinks, ‘Oh my God, there are other monsters?’ So he comes up just to make mischief.
“The whole town is suffering from trauma from all these incidents in the past. So the movie is everything from a commentary on newspapers and social media to a Hitchcock setup like Rear Window. And as usual for me, it’s really about a whole bunch of characters who are having a difficult time getting along.”
Two residents who are trying hard to get along and keep their monstrous identities hidden from the people around them are Alex and Charley. “The allegory I see in this is that we’re kind of like two recovering addicts,” Breaux says. “We’re in recovery together, and we’re sort of each other’s keeper. Actually, I would say I’m more the wolfman’s keeper than vice versa. When we meet Adam, he has internalized the fate of an outcast, so he has maybe some acceptance toward it instead of rage and anger, which is the place where Charley still lives. So I think Frankenstein is trying to teach the wolfman something here.”
Hurt goes into further detail about Charley’s tormented character, and how it’s expressed in the new werewolf makeup by Fessenden regulars Brian Spears (pictured below, applying prosthetics to Hurt) and Peter Gerner. “Charley’s got all this grief he’s going through, and he has never been able to face his feelings and digest what he’s going through. And because of that, he can’t fully see another person. He does get that this other guy, Adam, understands him, and feels a connection there. It’s his only connection at this point. But there’s something pulling him toward wanting to just let the werewolf out.
“The concept is that as Charley is living with this demon, it’s getting stronger and taking over,” Hurt continues. “And it’s told very visually. Last time around [in Blackout], our wolfman was pretty simple. It was like, they put some nails on me, there was a mask and Brian painted me to hell. But it was also, ‘We’re going to use your body. You’re going to create this monster with your physicality.’ This time around, we have a body suit, and the mask is larger. There’s so much more going on.”
That includes return appearances by a number of other actors reprising their roles from Blackout, including Addison Timlin, James Le Gros, John Speredakos, Cody Kostro, Marc Senter, Rigo Garay, Joseph Castillo-Midyett, and Barbara Crampton. Two more familiar New York genre faces, Toby Poser (Hellbender, Mother of Flies) and Emily Bennett (Alone With You, Blood Shine), have parts as well. And at the center of it all are Cassandra and Agnes (Aitana Doyle), the local girl Cassandra sparks with.
“This is a sequel to my other movies, so there are a lot of callbacks,” Fessenden says, “and certainly people who’ve seen those films will be amused. I don’t know if it brings in a new audience, though we do have the two leads who are younger, which is great. It’s fun being an old-timer, with them correcting me on the language in the script. I love all that.”
He elaborates on Hollard and Doyle’s roles: “Cassandra is African-American, so she’s got her history and her feelings of alienation in this town. And then Agnes is kind of the hot girl everybody likes—she’s got such a great vibe—but she also feels like an outsider, and she and Cassandra find a kinship. Of course, in my movies, everyone feels like an outsider. That’s really my mission: to point out that we all feel alone, but that’s just life’s experience. And it’s nice to have these two characters portraying that idea instead of it always being the monsters. The point is, we all feel like monsters sometimes.”
Even with all the emotional ideas his film explores, Fessenden says it will also deliver on the horrific side. Blackout was the filmmaker’s bloodiest outing yet, and as for whether Trauma or, Monsters All follows suit, he notes, “I don’t fetishize it in terms of, like, heads being cut off, but there’s a lot of mayhem. Quite honestly, my vision is very dark, even though my movies are slightly comedic. They’re about human foibles, so that’s funny, and also, there’s something absurd about the situation, where there’s really a wolfman and a Frankenstein-like monster, and then there’s a vampire. That just comes from my love of this stuff. But in the end, it’s a tragedy because of what happens, what we do to each other, and how we relate, or don’t—how we can’t get along. We’ll see about the blood count. The body count is high, though.”
