philosophy and like that

Glass Eye Pix
fierce independent cinema since 1985

2009

Glass Eye Pix (“one of the indie scene’s most productive and longest-running companies” —Filmmaker magazine) is the fiercely independent NYC-based production outfit headed by art-horror auteur Larry Fessenden (THE LAST WINTER, WENDIGO, HABIT, NBC's Fear Itself). Fessenden (winner of the 2009 Golden Hammer Award) has operated the company since 1985, with the mission of supporting individual voices in the arts.

Fessenden's company has produced numerous critically acclaimed films in and out of the horror genre, including 2009's WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt), THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (Ti West), SATAN HATES YOU (James McKenney) and 2008’s LIBERTY KID (Ilya Chaiken).

Glass Eye Pix's low budget horror banner, Scareflix, was designed to exploit hungry new talent and inspire resourceful filmmakers to produce quality work through seat-of-the-pants ingenuity. Lean budgeted auteur-driven pulp pictures that nurture emerging talents of the genre, Scareflix offer faces both familiar and new in chilling tales that celebrate the diversity of the horror movie-- from creature features to tales of psychological dread. Glenn McQuaid’s gently macabre I SELL THE DEAD is the sixth Scareflick in the series that began in 2004— a series already populated with killer bats, Robot wars, ghost stories, psychedelic brain melts, sniper rampages, grave robbers and zombies— in the films THE ROOST and TRIGGER MAN (Ti West), THE OFF SEASON and AUTOMATONS (James Felix McKenney), and I CAN SEE YOU and THE VIEWER by Graham Reznick.

2010 will witness the release of three new Scareflix produced by Fessenden and partners Peter Phok and Brent Kunkle in collaboration with Dark Sky Films. The movies, BITTER FEAST (Joe Maggio), STAKE LAND (Jim Mickle) and HYPOTHERMIA (James Felix McKenney), continue the Glass Eye Pix mission to haunt audiences' dreams with boldly original work.

ORIGINAL POST from 1993 (updated in 1999)

Glass Eye Pix is a production company set up in 1985 by Larry Fessenden to get independent projects off the ground, and it is the family of people associated with those projects.
Glass Eye Pix has been instrumental in various aspects of production from developement to distribution on recent features including HABIT (Fessenden), THE DELTA (Ira Sachs), RIVER OF GRASS (Kelly Reichardt) and NO TELLING (Fessenden).

There are four major principles at work at Glass Eye Pix:

That process and collaboration in filmmaking constitute a microcosm of life and socio-political interaction. To do good work in a collaborative process with fairness and finesse is an accomplishment and an end in itself.

That movies don't have to cost alot. Resoursefullness breathes life into the process and the product and frees us from the tyranny of commercialism.

Personal cinema is stimulating and exploitable if the audience is open, and the work truthful.

Just as a work is comprised of an accumulation of choices, an artist is defined by a body of work: The choices of projects over time tell a thematic story about the artist's point of view.

photos top to bottom:
Fessenden shooting Experienced Movers with a Beta II Portapack (1984)
Shooting Hollow Venus in 16mm (1986)
Framing up a shot for No Telling in super 16mm (1990)