Blackout (2023)
Directed & Written by Larry Fessenden
Starring Alex Hurt, Marshall Bell, Joseph Castillo-Midyett, Kevin Corrigan, Barbara Crampton, Rigo Garay, & James Le Gros.

Horror

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SOME SPOILERS!!!
Turn thine eyes away,
lest ye be spoiled.

Larry Fessenden has been making monster movies for the past 30 years, bringing his love of the Universal Monsters into the present, from the Frankenstein-like No Telling (1991), to the vampire film Habit (1997), to a more direct take on Frankenstein with 2019’s Depraved. And now, premiering at Fantasia 2023, Blackout is Fessenden’s own vision of a modern-day Wolf Man. In Talbot Falls—named in homage to Larry Talbot, the main character of 1941’s The Wolf Man (played by Lon Chaney Jr.)—there have recently been brutal murders at the hands of some kind of creature, but one of the town’s developers keeps trying to pin it on an immigrant who works for him. An artist called Charley (Alex Hurt) knows more than he lets on because it seems that every full moon he goes through extraordinary changes that he doesn’t quite remember the next day when he wakes covered in blood.

Fessenden has always recognised the allegorical potential of monsters, just like many of the original and classic Gothic authors. Blackout works perfectly as a werewolf movie without having to read any deeper, yet if you do go deeper there’s a lot happening centred on the conscious, and unconscious, damage straight white men cause in the lives of women, people of colour, and queer people. Charley, even being a well-meaning person, doesn’t understand how much destruction he’s caused until it’s too late, and by then he’s damaged nearly every single person who still cares about him. In reality, straight white men, on a global scale, have caused untold damage, and, in Western society, we’ve only just started to seriously address it over the past handful of years. The problem is, it’s hard for a beast to see the error of its ways because it’s blinded by the instincts that were bred into it, and there is no doubt about it: like in Blackout, men are beasts.
On an individual level, Blackout parallels the werewolf curse to alcoholism, as the first time we witness Charley’s transformation it comes as a result of drinking. On a societal level, Fessenden’s werewolf represents many traumatised men, too ingrained with toxic masculine values to go to therapy and blindly obsessed with the issues they have with their fathers/the legacies of their fathers. Charley’s so wrapped up in trying to figure out if his father was a good or a bad man, or worrying that he doesn’t have his “father‘s balls,” he winds up forgetting to worry about what sort of man he is, and the issues with his father, as well as his mother who left when he was young, become repressed emotions that he takes out on the rest of the world.
The werewolf curse in Blackout symbolises those bottled up male emotions that toxic masculinity doesn’t allow out, so they transform into a beast and explode from beneath Charley’s skin. In one scene, Charley talks to a priest who’s known him all his life and was friends with his father. The priest can see Charley’s pain barely contained beneath the surface: “It‘s okay to acknowledge trauma.” But Charley, like the typical macho male, brushes this off, believing his emotional pain is merely caused by the regular circumstances of life, unwilling to admit he’s been wounded. Everyone can see how tortured Charley is, to the point Miguel remarks: “You got the haunt in you.” No matter how many people try to help Charley, he continues to lock his emotions away, and they never fail to boil over, affecting those around him in shocking ways.

There’s no coincidence that Fessenden depicts Charley as a werewolf killing a couple the police reveal were gay and eventually attacking his ex-wife. Women and gay men have suffered at the hands/values of straight white men and the hegemonies of masculinity and heteronormativity. Charley’s werewolf killings reflect the damage of real men in the world, which often affects those most vulnerable or marginalised in society. The bloody icing on the terrible cake is when Earl (Motell Gyn Foster), a friend of Charley’s genuinely trying to help with his werewolf issues, winds up getting shot by a local cop. This is one of the most significant, devastating pieces of collateral damage in Charley’s werewolf wake: the mistakes and violence of a white man comes violently to bear on a Black man, and the fact it’s at the hands of police is even more relevant in America today than ever. Yet another bit of sad collateral damage in Charley’s life is Miguel (Rigo Garay), the Mexican immigrant whom the local developer is trying to have arrested for the murders. Charley, though trying to look after Miguel in some shape or form, is the reason Miguel is nearly torn to shreds by the locals. Because of Charley’s actions, a Mexican man is falsely accused of a horrific crime, and a Black man is shot to death by police. This might be a werewolf movie, but it’s awful close to real life.

Blackout is ultimately about the price others pay when straight white men refuse to deal with their traumas and daddy issues; or any emotional issues at all. In Fessenden’s film, men will literally become a werewolf and murder people instead of going to therapy. The werewolf has long been a metaphorical vessel for beastly urges inside because the transformation and the violence fit so well with the idea of repression. The beast inside Fessenden’s werewolf is that of toxic masculinity and its refusal to deal seriously with trauma.
Like the men who point outward at the world with rage, those who blame others (and often an Other, whether racial, sexual, gendered, etc) for the dissatisfaction in their lives, Charley is so eager to find a scapegoat for everything that’s wrong in his life that he leaves a trail of shattered life behind him wherever he goes. The saddest part of it all is that we can see Charley wants to do good: he tries to help his town, and tries to mitigate the damage he’s deflected accidentally onto Miguel. But, just as it is in real life, wanting to do good doesn’t matter if you, even inadvertently, still harm others. Charley’s the fictional reflection of many straight white men who consider themselves good men yet continue to do harm and make things worse in their communities. And there are simply too many of them; we’ll never have enough silver bullets.