WENDIGO

WENDIGO
By M. Jarvis

Larry Fessenden’s creepy indie thriller came out roughly six years ago but I didn’t get around to seeing it until now. It was definitely as cool as I had hoped it would be.

Wendigo tells the story of Kim (Patricia Clarkson) and George (Jake Weber) and their son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan) who go out into the snowy back country to spend a weekend away from the rat race. Unfortunately, their trip gets off to a bad start after George accidentally hits and injures a deer with his car. Before he has time to absorb what has just happened, a trio of hunters emerges from the woods and is not happy to discover their prized hunting target has been damaged to a point where it has one antler too few or something like that. Lead hunter OTIS is not amused and has a threatening exchange with George.

Trying to put the unsettling matter behind them, George and family go and get settled in at the house they are renting. On a trip into town to go to the store, Miles meets an old man who tells him the fearsome legend of the Wendigo. He gives Miles a figurine of the beast and then disappears before Miles can show him to his mom.

Soon afterwards, things start to go wrong. While out sledding, George is shot and Miles has an encounter with the Wendigo before becoming unconscious. Hours later, Kim finds them both and they rush George to hospital. Meanwhile, a cop goes to fetch Otis who is the main suspect in the shooting. Otis kills the cop and takes off.

Back at the hospital, Miles sneaks in the operating room to check on is dad. Miles witnesses a frightening vision/transformation of his father and faints. Soon afterwards, Otis is menaced by the angry spirit of the Wendigo.

Writer/Director Fessenden does a great job of making a horror film which doesn’t revolve around cheap noise scares or cgi goonery. If anything, it’s old school. The pacing is somewhat slow and deliberate early on. The director seems to be saying (according to the documentary on the DVD) that he wanted to make a REAL looking film that just happened to be about a vengeful deer/man spirit. With the exception of a very fake looking deer in the car crash sequence, everything looked pretty cool. Anything dodgy blows by so fast that it isn’t much of a problem by low budget standards anyway. The weird tree deer-man puppetry is creepy and effective.

Wendigo was supposedly inspired by a story told to director Fessenden when he was in the third grade. Apparently it spooked him so much that he became obsessed with the legend. Eventually the product of his obsession was made into this film. While the film’s low budget-ness occasionally can make it seem a little hokey, the film won me over with its wintry scary atmosphere. I’m a sucker for ghost stories in a winter setting. They are few and far between. I think in a way the low budget indie feel of the film sort of worked in its favor. It was able to be strange and unexplained where in a more Hollywood film, everything would have to be spelled out. And I suppose everyone in the cast would be from the O.C. or Gossip Girl. There may have been some better Wendigo effects but I like this film just the way it is…a weird, strangely paced bit of indie horror weirdness. We should have more films like this and less of the “made for Sci-Fi Channel starring convention circuit actors who are in one scene nonsense” that usually passes for indie horror.