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Larry Fessenden in Habit. Image courtesy Glass Eye Pix.In Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), Michelle Williams’ road-tripping heroine has a harrowing nighttime encounter with a derelict played by Larry Fessenden—a witty bit of casting calling back to the latter’s starring role in Reichardt’s 1994 debut, River of Grass. There, a leaner, lankily handsome Fessenden essayed an Everglades variation on Martin Sheen, except that instead of a charismatic crackshot, his character Lee is a hopeless fuckup who can’t handle his borrowed gun; in a genre full of wrong men on the run for murders they never committed, he may be the only one who failed to hit the target in the first place. It’s possible to imagine that Fessenden’s unnamed, unmoored character in Wendy and Lucy is Lee fifteen years later, still on the outside looking in and relocated to the Pacific Northwest. Even if not,...

Scream Factory and IFC Midnight have paired up to present an inspired disc set for The Larry Fessenden Collection, an assortment of four of the director’s most notable genre films. Migrating between a number of notable projects as a character actor (he usually appears as some peripheral, grizzled weirdo, showing up in titles by Scorsese, Neil Jordan, and Kelly Reichardt, amongst others), he’s also a noted producer, editor, screenwriter, and cinematographer. But Fessenden’s made his most striking impression with a growing body of genre oriented independent directorial efforts. Usually prizing strong characterization amidst situations of mounting dread, Fessenden seems fascinated with testing the strengths and inherent weaknesses of mankind, and it’s probably easiest to label his filmography as environmental horror.

Out of Fessenden’s own production company Glass Eye Pix, 1991’s No Telling (or the Frankenstein Complex) melds motifs of Mary Shelley’s famed mad scientist with modern animal experimentation.