Larry Fessenden, Brooklyn Horror, and More

Here's the Friday, October 13, edition of the Certified Forgotten newsletter.

Spooky friends,

It’s official: we’re chatting with Larry Fessenden at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival this weekend! And you can get your tickets for free here.

We’ve known that Fessenden was the guest for a while, but with the SAG-AFTRA strike still ongoing, we wanted to wait until the last possible second before we finalized his movie selection. We didn’t get his first selection — the downside of being an incredibly prolific actor as well as a writer, director, and producer — but we’re pumped to talk about Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way To Die instead.

So much of the work that Fessenden did in the film industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s paved the way for the low-budget horror renaissance of the past decade. Film critic Amy Nicholson wrote about ‘mumblegore’ back in 2013 — unsurprisingly, the same year that A Horrible Way To Die was released — and when it comes time to write the history of modern horror, mumblegore will undoubtedly be one of the seminal filmmaking movements.

And we get to talk about all of that (and more!) with Larry Fucking Fessenden. That’s pretty cool.

---

Published This Week

Shared Anxiety in She Dies Tomorrow by Celia Mattison

Every month, we choose two articles to send to our wonderful contributing editor Christine Makepeace. I’ve worked with Christine for damn near 20 years — she was my first professional editor back when she ran Paracinema Magazine, may it rest in peace — and she often helps us work through some of our biases or blind spots as two white dudes (in addition to being a killer editor). Her feedback on this essay? “Love it.” She’s right, of course.

Overlord Is Still a Nazi-Killing Good Time by Andrea Thompson

Nazi horror movies are always something of a mixed bag. For every Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead, there are a half-dozen Frankenstein’s Army-esque exploitation films that feature gnarly creature design and little else. But what you almost never see is a major studio put real money — and even real-er talent — behind a Nazi movie. Andrea is absolutely correct here: Overlord looks great and is cathartic as hell.

---

Coming Soon To Patreon

Earlier this year, we launched Film School From Hell for our Patreons. We often joke on the podcast that there are Monagle movies and Donato movies and never twain the two shall meet, but Film School From Hell is our attempt to bridge that gap a little bit. Each month, Donato picks a movie solidly in his camp — gritty slashers, exploitation films, low-budget comedies, other things I tend to avoid — with the goal of getting me to love a horror movie well outside my comfort zone.

This month’s title is Simon Rumley’s Red White & Blue, a self-described “revenge thriller” from 2010. It seems like a mean little piece of no-budget filmmaking, and I will admit that I’m excited to see Austin, Texas, up on the big screen. The essay will drop next week, so subscribe today at only $6 a month to gain access to this and other Film School From Hell essays (including Stay Alive and Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead).