Trauma or, Monsters All (2026)

***½/****
starring Laëtitia Hollard, Aitana Doyle, Addison Timlin, James Le Gros
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw There’s an immediacy to Larry Fessenden’s films, a lack of any intermediary between his characters and the viewer that can be exquisitely uncomfortable. Stories told through peepholes, they can feel like plays performed in a small venue, an intimate encounter ever threatening to spill over into the crowd. Credit his immersive, often suffocating sound design, an expertise demonstrated lately in his radio side project, “Tales from Beyond the Pale.” (I first saw Fessenden’s Habit on VHS, and the audio on its recent 4K upgrade is a revelation.) Credit also, of course, his sober, mature scripts, which deal with childhood, memory, and fear through the prism of fully formed, imperfect characters trapped in the amber of trauma that can’t be exorcised. For Fessenden, horror exists at the place where the visceral intersects with the philosophical–where the meat meets the mind. What happens to one when the other begins to develop fissures? When hairline cracks develop and let the sadness in? Consider the little boy (Erik Per Sullivan) in Fessenden’s masterful Wendigo, who learns one terrible winter that the shadow at the bottom of the stairs sometimes sees you even if you leap quietly, so quietly, across the top, where the light from the entryway paints a white square like a lepidopterist’s frame. Fessenden’s films are all variations on that species of terror, that variety of loneliness: its beginnings and endings and the long half-life in between, where fear metastasizes in unpredictable ways. He is a poet of the hard truth that being by yourself is the essential human condition.

Comprising a loose trilogy of riffs on Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man, respectively, Fessenden’s Habit, Depraved, and Blackout understand the Universal Monsters pantheon as metaphors renewed for the generation that resurrects them and as modern archetypes that seem always to speak more eloquently in shorthand than in complete sentences. The vampire movie as a parable for addiction? Sure–but in Fessenden’s hands, the addiction is to destructive behaviours in toxic interpersonal relationships that erode self-esteem and social guardrails. I kept thinking of the character of Jack Torrance in The Shining when considering Habit‘s vampire, Sam (played by Fessenden himself). Both are alcoholics whose helplessness to their thirst results in the disintegration of their lives. When compared against the fevered, hunted eroticism in Fessenden’s work, what emerges is a sense that hunger (consummation) is the engine driving it. Fessenden’s carnality reminds of Abel Ferrara’s: smothering as much as smouldering; inescapably, scatalogically biological. I think there’s a relationship here, too, to David Cronenberg’s insectile communions; both Cronenberg and Fessenden approach fucking by documenting the human body functioning as a machine. The flesh is only wet meat, an insensate circuit of impulses and responses that carries within it a grey palimpsest pretending at art and philosophy. Cronenberg’s mad scientist Seth Brundle must “teach” his computer about the flesh to stop it from turning apes inside out. Fessenden’s films are the lessons learned. Literally so, in the case of one of his Frankenstein riffs, Depraved, which, like his werewolf film Blackout, begins with a couple enthusiastically in flagrante delicto, grounding this trilogy, Ken Russell-like, in the pros and cons of priapism.

Fessenden’s trilogy is coloured by melancholy and nostalgia. What I’m saying is that revisiting it upon the premiere of Fessenden’s latest at the Overlook Film Festival, Trauma or, Monsters All, proved a remarkable experience here in my dotage. Trauma or, Monsters All is, Douglas Adams-like, the fourth film in his monsters trilogy–a mash-up in the tradition of Ghost of Frankenstein or House of Dracula in which the aforementioned Sam, the Frankenstein’s monster of Depraved, Adam (Alex Breaux), and Blackout‘s werewolf, Charley (Alex Hurt), converge in the fictional Talbot Falls (christened in tribute to Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man, Larry Talbot). They’re drawn there by an article the conspicuously named Cassandra (Laëtitia Hollard) wrote for her college newspaper about the possibility that Talbot Falls’ recent run of bad luck is due to an infestation of cryptids. Adam and Charley already live there out of loneliness, while Sam is drawn there because if there are more outcast creatures like him lurking about somewhere, then that’s where he wants to be. It’s a film about middle-aged men in crisis, marooned from loved ones and isolated in oubliettes constructed of their terrible deeds and unresolvable regret. It’s heartbreaking by itself, but taken with the three earlier films, it looks very much like a masterpiece.

Trauma opens on a black screen, over which we hear a man talking about starting over after a string of disappointments. His friends are kind. They say supportive things about brand-new days and the promise of uncharted territory. When we finally see this man leaving the bar, he looks apprehensive but resolved. He walks to the parking lot. Lights a cigarette. And a monster kills him. This is Fessenden’s way with horror, real horror: the horror of hope; the horror of a life that will likely end in pain, and bring pain to those who will miss you. Horror is the root of religion, which offers a placebo for chaos that can feel capricious. Horror is realizing that you’re not beginning the rest of your life today. And what if you’re alone? What if, through no real fault of yours, you’re by yourself as the sand pools in the bottom of the glass? What if it was your fault, in a way, because you couldn’t control your rage of difference and dislocation?

Cassandra is working on a book about George Washington Carver, who you probably know, if you know of him at all, as the Black scientist who used peanuts in various applications. She wants to change how Carver is remembered. The task is frustrating: she feels like she keeps having the same conversations, fixing misconceptions, trainspotting microaggressions. You know, no one is accomplished enough to be remembered. No level of fame makes you immortal. In your lifetime, if you are unfortunate enough to live a long time, you will see the culture you have known your entire life become alien and strange. It is horror. Charley confronts Cassandra. He has to move on because of Cassandra’s article, and he’s furious, and wounded. He’s found a friend and a protector in Adam, who accepts him for who he is. Charley spends his time painting. He’s happy. He wants to be left alone. He tells Adam that he’s moving out, and Adam is destroyed. Charley visits the woman, Kate (Barbara Crampton), with whom he’s had an affair, but not as a lover: as a wolf. Charley’s storyline is like an episode of the extraordinary television series “The Incredible Hulk”, where a man loses control and must flee to a new place to begin again. And again. And again. This is Fessenden’s lycanthropy–a stand-in for masculinity and how we do a terrible job of teaching our young men to handle frustration. We do a terrible job of preparing anyone for grief. Charley only has violence to communicate, and Fessenden makes sure we see the atrocity of murder and then the ugly indignity of death. Crampton is one of the most beautiful people in horror, inside and out. It’s Fessenden’s emotional intelligence that causes him to identify her as someone it’s painful to see betrayed. As the song warns, you always hurt the one you love. If you’re a man, alas, sometimes you love them so much you kill them.

All of this leaves Cassandra targeted by the good people of Talbot Falls for digging up stories they’d rather stay buried. They’re an unpleasant bunch of drunkards and hypocrites involved in their own sagas of denial and self-medication; Talbot Falls is Small Town America circa 2026. There’s nothing special about it. It’s dying. We’re all dying. Cassandra’s best friend is pretty Sharon (Aitana Doyle). One night, while trying to get a good look at Cassandra’s weird next-door neighbours, they share a sweet kiss. They don’t want to put a label on it. Cassandra has arrived at a delicate crossroads in her life. She’s finding her voice and discovering that the power that comes with it is double-edged. She’s exploring her sexuality and realizing she needs to take it slow. This is where regrets are formed. Left to fester, regret turns into trauma. It’s a terminal cancer or a fungal bloom. There’s a point at which you can no longer treat it. Trauma or, Monsters All is wisdom in all its multifoliate uselessness and horror. Fessenden is at the stage of his career now where he’s the elder statesman: the dispenser of advice, the creator of a body of work he’s stitched together here into a sad monster, shambling, sentient, alive…and beautiful. So beautiful. And brutal. Life is like that. I’m glad to be alive. I’m glad this film is, too.