The Films We’re Looking Forward To At This Year’s FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL!
Canada’s Fantasia International Film Festival isn’t just one of the best genre festivals; it’s also one of the longer-running events, celebrating 30 years this year. Before the festival kicks off next week on July 16th and concludes on August 2nd, Macabre Daily is once again fortunate to be able to cover this event virtually (although it is a goal to be there in person someday!). In honor and anticipation of this multi-week genre film event, Doaa Magdy, Lowell Greenblatt, Sean O’Connor, and Matt Orozco share the films they can’t wait to see!
“Trauma, Or Monsters All”
Why We’re Excited: Look, I don’t know what a Larry Fessenden monster team-up film looks like. I never thought I’d ever see a Larry Fessenden monster team-up film. But if you’re telling me that Larry Fessenden, the distinguished indie horror mogul and certified director least likely to have a shared cinematic universe, made a movie combining his versions of the vampire, werewolf and Frankenstein stories into one film, I want to know what that looks like right away.
The list includes Jenn Wexler’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF BECKY and The Adams Family’s THE GLORIOUS DEAD.
As a father—hell, as a human being—there are fewer things that I find more frightening than a school shooting.
Every day, I kiss my kids goodbye and send them off to school… and there is this moment, this dark thought, where a voice deep within the darkest corners of my subconscious asks: Is this the day? Will something bad happen to my kids at school?
That we now live in a country where these kinds of questions are common…
Terrifying.
The idea for Just A Hoax came about shortly after Alex Jones’ protracted trial around his false claims that the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting were not real. He is the grim inspiration for this tale, for better or worse. I’ve personally been fascinated with the shock-jock-as-antihero for a while now, ever since watching Eric Bogosian in Talk Radio. I was just a kid during the Morton Downey Jr. heyday, but his bark was still there.
Then came Howard Stern. Then Rush Limbaugh. Then Jones.
Then all hell breaks loose.
I had a chance to explore a bit of this character personality for a scripted podcast series titled Quiet Part Loud, for Monkeypaw and Spotify, cowritten alongside Mac Rogers. That was a riff on the Tucker Carlsons and Bill O’Riellys of the time, but the personality persists. There have been so many voices that draw on an audience’s malleable belief system. To pull them in. To lose oneself. All you need is a magnetic personality behind the microphone to feel the undertow of radio waves.
I wrote the first draft of Just A Hoax in 2022. Here it is, finally seeing the light of day—or hearing it, I guess—in 2026. The scary thing about a story like this is, no matter how much time passes, there is always an articulate cult-like leader ready to exploit the belief systems of an audience. The succumbing of listeners is always prevalent, losing themselves to the words of a megalomaniac. The devotion, the destruction, it’s all there.The more things change, the more they stay the same.
—Clay McLeod Chapman
Marc Senter, Lauren Molina, Matt Rocker, Barbara Crampton, Clay McLeod Chapman, Fessenden, Elliot Frances Flynn
JUST A HOAX written by Clay McLeod Chapman Shock Jock Ted Crenshaw is visited by some unwelcome guests.
director and edit: Larry Fessenden cast: Bill Moseley, Barbara Crampton, Lauren Molina, Marc Senter, Elliot Frances Flynn, Levi Rocker, Phoebe Rocker and Matt Rocker. Produced by Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid along with Rigo Garay and Jordan Gass-Pooré. satellite Recording at Monkeyland Audio in Los Angeles. recording, design and mixing by Matt Rocker at Underground Audio, NYC.
Crenshaw Theme music by Matt Rocker. Tales Theme by Jeff Grace poster art: Brian Level
From the Catalogue The upstate New York town of Talbot Falls has been trying to put the horrific events of two years ago behind it, but that trauma gets stirred up again by the arrival of an outsider. Cassandra Lily-Jackson (THE PITT breakout Laëtitia Hollard) has moved in to work on a book about George Washington Carver, but soon a more immediate subject piques her curiosity. Strange sounds and a scarred man issue forth from the house next door by night, inspiring her to write an article for the local paper speculating about “local monsters.” Turns out, she’s right: Adam (Alex Breaux), a patchwork man created by science, and Charley (Alex Hurt), afflicted with lycanthropy, dwell in that house. And when the article goes viral, it attracts the vampiric Sam (Larry Fessenden), assorted other people from the creatures’ pasts, and the enmity of the residents, who don’t appreciate Talbot Falls’ dark past being dredged up again.
TRAUMA OR, MONSTERS ALL is writer/director/star Fessenden’s long-awaited “monsterverse” movie, bringing together the characters from his previous HABIT (Fantasia 1998), DEPRAVED (Fantasia 2019), and BLACKOUT (Fantasia 2023). As opposed to past Gothic rogues-gallery chillers like HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, this is, as usual for Fessenden, a film very much of the here and now. The filmmaker uses the collision of his tormented creatures as a vehicle to comment on human dysfunction and the breakdown of modern society, in which one person’s expressed opinion can unintentionally trigger a wave of bad feelings and bad deeds. At the same time, TRAUMA is a treat for Fessenden’s longtime fans, who will get to see not only his takes on modern horror archetypes come together, but a whole troupe of past collaborators including Joshua Leonard, James Le Gros, Barbara Crampton, Addison Timlin, John Speredakos and many others. – Michael Gingold
Retreating From The Elephant: The Perpetually Impending Demise of Indie Cinema
Dan Sallitt’s “The Unspeakable Acts.”
by Scout Tafoya
At any given moment, the movie I’m most looking forward to seeing simply doesn’t exist because no one financed it. Right now, it’s the new movie by Amanda Wilder. We are more than 10 years away from “Approaching The Elephant,” the magnificent and sensitive documentary about an alternative school in New Jersey, made by someone who seemed primed to become the heir apparent to Allan King. The trouble? No one with money ever paid to find out just what Amanda Wilder’s career could have been.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve spent the better part of the last three years trying to get a movie financed, and when that didn’t happen, I quite literally begged people for money and came up with just enough cash to shoot it. We still owe many thousands of dollars to different funds, and there’s no post-production budget. If this sounds like a blue ribbon winner at the 8th-grade sob story competition, it most certainly is, but imagine how the rest of the independent film world feels.
I’ve been making micro-budget features since I was 20. Some people tried to do things the hard way, and all they got was this lousy economy and a sudden industry interest in movies by YouTubers. During my years-long odyssey to get my film “Stubborn Beast,” co-directed with my best friend in the world, Tucker Johnson, I called in every favor I had accrued, and when I tell you it wasn’t even close to enough…
The film I’m looking to second of all is the non-existent follow-up to Jennifer Prediger and Jess Weixler’s sharp and surreal “Apartment Troubles,” a comedy that came out of nowhere, the product of two underutilized actresses with a lot to offer beyond the bare facts of their places in the film economy. This hysterical movie struck me as the arrival of a duo capable of anything. Evidently, I was wrong, as no one else but me seemed to rise to this special movie’s defense.
The independent film world is more harsh and worryingly dispirited than it’s been since the 1960s. I was asking people for leads, only to be told time and again that if such things existed, there’d be a much healthier American cinema. Or as Bruce LaBruce memorably let me down easy: “Honey, if I knew someone, I’d be making a movie right now.” And LaBruce is comparatively prolific if not better treated by distributors, certainly in America. It’s a miracle when one of his movies makes it to my television, let alone theaters near me.
The one art theatre in Baltimore needs new projectors and runs mainstream movies to keep the lights dim, and programmers like Eric Allen Hatch and Alex Lei try to keep the cinema flourishing elsewhere. Alex and I took Tony Buba, the legendary (to the initiated) documentarian behind “Lightning Over Braddock,” and it took us both by surprise how much the experience of an 82-year-old experimental Marxist non-fiction director and the 36-year-old version of the same thing were alike.
As Amanda Wilder’s second film doesn’t exist, as “Apartment Troubles 2” seems less than certain, the movie I’m most looking forward to this year, Patrick Wang’s “A. Rimbaud,” I likely won’t see. It’s only playing a handful of theatrical dates, put up almost like concerts. A great artist can no longer rely on regular bookings. With this in mind, I wanted to run down a list of artists whose work struggles to enter the public consciousness, or indeed artists who never made their second film.
Independent cinema gets thrown around at directors who maybe once had to scrounge to get their budgets, like Sean Baker and the now-divided, rightly polarizing Safdie brothers, but they’ve been supported by a pretty serious financial apparatus in the last 15 years. Those directors ought to be subsidizing independent cinema, and to their credit sometimes they do (Baker produced Joanna Arnow’s first feature to his eternal credit), but there is no reason for there to be an ecosystem of people connected by and best defined by wasted potential, and that’s before we tally up “valedictory” figures like Alan Rudolph, John Waters, Billy Woodberry, Julie Dash, Tamara Jenkins, and Larry Fessenden. As with any other industry with insufficient union protections, the infrastructure was made by people who won’t get to enjoy it.
So yes, by all means, feel sorry for me, GOD KNOWS I NEED IT, but I’m at the very bottom of a very long list. The less curious we get about where the money is going, the more we have to settle for not caring what the studio system produces, because there’s only so much funding, only so much oxygen, and only so much room at the top, and that’s without factoring in the people who kick the ladder down when they’ve made it there. Enjoy the next movies you see with no studio financing, no name producer, no major stars, the next truly independent movie you see. It could be your last.
Nathan Grubbs’s COWBOY continues festival run after unspooling at the
2026 Radiance Film Festival in London.
In New Orleans, war veterans Juno and Mo scrape by on small-time heists, selling their loot to a secretive pawn shop owner. When Juno plans a risky horse theft to fund a fresh start,
a rival’s betrayal leads to tragedy and prison. Haunted by his past, he re-enters a woman’s life under a lie, desperate for forgiveness.
written by Chris Sivertson, Jeff Hoffman, Joshua Deitz. produced by Nathan Grubbs, Laura Singleterry and
GEP pal Marc Senter (BLACKOUT, TRAUMA OR; MONSTERS ALL). starring Nathan Grubbs, Alexandra Essoe, Marc Senter, Eddie Steeples and Fessenden.
Keep a lookout for COWBOY as it makes its rounds in the Festival circuit.
GEP Pal Ilya Chaiken (LIBERTY KID, MARGARITA HAPPY HOUR, PRETTY UGLY: THE STORY OF THE LUNACHICKS) rehashes short film, written by & starring Holly Ramos.
Screened at the Sundance Film Festival 2004. Originally commissioned by the 1st Howl East Village Film Festival 2003.
Ana Asensio, director of the GEP award winning MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND (and frequent TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE thespian), returns to the director’s chair with her second feature GOAT GIRL which began its US release at Cinema Village 7/19 with Fessenden hosting the Q&A. Photos by Jimmy Ryan
Goat Girl (Spanish: La niña de la cabra)[1] is a 2025 coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Ana Asensio starring Alessandra González and Juncal Fernández.
The film premiered at the 28th Málaga Film Festival on 18 March 2025 ahead of its 11 April 2025 theatrical release in Spain by Avalon.
Glass Eye Pix is the fierce independent NYC-based production outfit headed by award-winning art-horror auteur Larry Fessenden with the mission of supporting individual voices in the arts. Read more...
