The Last Winter doesn’t really fall under the rubric of films I normally write about on the Underground Film Journal, but I’m a really big Larry Fessenden fan. I think his NYC vampire epic, Habit (1997), is a horror masterpiece and his previous feature, Wendigo (2002), is a really amazing, understated and under-appreciated monster film. Although, just talking about the creatures in Fessenden’s films is to miss what makes them so entertaining. A Larry Fessenden movie is much less about the monsters and more about the psychological tortures of his main characters. His scripts are very character-rich and, if you took out the horror aspect, they’d still be engaging dramas.

Knowing that, I still watched the trailer for The Last Winter at the site Bloody Disgusting — a good horror movie site for those of you into that kind of thing — and for the first minute or so I thought, “Why am I watching this on a site called Bloody Disgusting?” But, of course, like a typical Fessenden movie, the trailer sets up the psychological motivations of his characters before the horror starts to kick in. While the film’s location may bring up connections to John Carpenter’s The Thing, I think The Last Winter is more like a ghost story than a gross-out monster fest. This also may be the first horror flick about global warming. Fessenden is an environmentally-conscious filmmaker, having written Low Impact Filmmaking: A Practical Guide to Environmentally Sound Film & Video Production.

The Last Winter doesn’t have an official release date yet, but the site says Sept. 2007, which I hope it comes out then. It’s always a long time between Fessenden’s films, and I’m looking forward to it. The film is written and directed by Larry Fessenden, co-written with Robert Leaver and stars Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton, Kevin Corrigan and Jamie Harrold.

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