Film4 Frightfest 2011 - Total Film Icon with Larry Fessenden and the Horror Panel Discussion

 

This years Total Film Icon interview was director/producer/actor Larry Fessenden. Never heard of him? Neither had I. But after hearing him talk, I’ll soon be searching for his four feature films No Telling, Habit, Wendigo and The Last Winter.

He spoke of his passion for movies, his hatred of remakes and nasty franchises like Saw as well as the trials and tribulations he had when attempting to get films made, especially his remake of The Orphanage. Issues such as Del Toro’s insistence on building sets and Kate Winslet pulling out as she didn’t want to play another depressing character resulted in him losing the project and judging by his passion and excitement in describing how he would have done things, its both our loss and his. He described his role as a producer as ‘to protect the director’s agenda and fight against the executives who normally have pea-sized brains’. We would later see this in action in Ti West’s The Innkeepers, a film Fessenden produced.

This talk was followed by a horror panel discussion with Larry, Ti West (The House of the Devil), Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2), Adam Green (Hatchet) and Lucky McGee (The Woman) and his producer on The Woman, Adam van den Houten. The crux of the conversation was the sorry state that American horror is in due to the endless conveyor belt of studio led remakes, sequels and prequels. Green expressed his anger at fans that pay money to see the trash only to then slag it off when they could be supporting independent visions. He also told a story about a producer who put forward the idea of ‘a scary stove’ when he was in charge of Cabin Fever 2, a job that eventually fell in the lap of Ti West. West also expressed his dismay at how he was treated in the post-production of that film as well as telling the Frightfesters to use social media to spread the right messages about what should be scaring us at the cinema. Lucky McGee put forward the idea of rather than commissioning sequels and remaking classics, the studios should re-mastering and re-release them. An idea that went down well in Screen 1.

Perhaps the most surprising part of the talk was Total Film interviewer Jamie Graham admitting the greatest regret of his career was not walking out of a Michael Bay interview when Bay told him ‘Have you seen the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre? It really doesn’t hold up well’. A remark that is likely to see Bay lynched if he ever dared to come near any Frightfest event in the future.