Career
Fessenden regards the old Universal Monsters as a substantial influence for him. As an actor, screenwriter, director and film editor, he has worked, in addition to feature films, on such television projects as the NBC horror anthology Fear Itself (2008), directing the episode "Skin and Bones". He wrote the screenplay of Orphanage (2007) with Guillermo del Toro, an English-language remake of El Orfanato.
Fessenden has worked as a mentor to young directors, such as Jim Mickle and Ti West. He has been a producer on projects including Ilya Chaiken's Liberty Kid (2007), Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008), James McKenney's Satan Hates You (2010), West's The House of the Devil (2009) and The Innkeepers (2011), Joe Maggio's The Last Rites of Joe May (2011), and Rick Alverson's The Comedy (2012). Under his low-budget horror banner ScareFlix, Fessenden has produced films including West's The Roost (2005) and Trigger Man (2007), Glenn McQuaid's I Sell the Dead (2008), Maggio's Bitter Feast (2010), and Mickle's Stake Land (2010). More recently he has produced for prolific horror auteur Mickey Keating with Darling (2015) and Psychopaths (2017).
As a character actor, Fessenden has appeared in numerous films, including Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Ti West's X (uncredited) and MaXXXine (2024), Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory (2000), Brad Anderson's Session 9 (2001) and Vanishing on 7th Street (2010), Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die (2019) and Broken Flowers (2005), Neil Jordan's The Brave One (2007), McQuaid's I Sell the Dead (2008) for which he won best actor at the Slamdance Film Festival; Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008), Mickle's Mulberry Street (2006) and Stake Land (2010), Joe Swanberg's All the Light in the Sky (2011), and Ted Geoghegan's We Are Still Here and Brooklyn 45 (2023). Fessenden also starred in the Sundance Film Festival picture River of Grass (1994), which was Reichardt's debut feature, and Margarita Happy Hour (2001) directed by Chaiken. He has appeared on television in Louie, The Strain, and as himself in National Geographic's Brain Games.
In 2010, Fessenden partnered with Glenn McQuaid to launch Tales from Beyond the Pale, a series of macabre audio dramas now available as a 47 episode podcast. In 2011, he released his third rock album with the band Just Desserts, an on-going partnership with songwriter Tom Laverack. In 2012, he executive produced and was interviewed in the documentary Birth of the Living Dead, which examines the legacy of Night of the Living Dead. In 2016, he produced, acted, and served as cinematographer in his son Jack's feature debut, Stray Bullets. The same year also saw Fessenden release a book titled Sudden Storm, A Wendigo Reader.
Fessenden has also established a strong presence in the video game world. In 2015, he and Graham Reznick collaborated on writing the video game Until Dawn. Fessenden also played the role of a mysterious stranger armed with a flamethrower in the game itself. The game earned positive reviews and would go on to receive the "Original Property" award in the 2016 BAFTA Games Awards. Fessenden and Reznick also set a Guinness World Record for "Longest script for a graphic adventure videogame," with their script reaching 1,000 pages. The two writers would team up again in 2016 to develop a spin-off game known as Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, and later in 2018 for the Until Dawn prequel, The Inpatient.
Fessenden has run the company Glass Eye Pix since 1985 with the mission of "supporting individual voices in the arts." Glass Eye Pix continues to nurture young talent, most recently producing the debut features of Robert Mocker (Like Me, starring Addison Timlin and Fessenden), Ana Asensio (Most Beautiful Island), and Jenn Wexler (The Ranger).
Fessenden's Frankenstein-themed feature, Depraved, which he wrote, directed, edited and produced, was released on Friday the 13th of September, 2019 through IFC Midnight.
His werewolf film Blackout premiered at the 27th International Fantasia Film Festival in July 2023.
Fessenden's next feature, Trauma or, Monsters All, brings together characters from three of his earlier films: Habit, Depraved, and Blackout. The film had its world premiere at the Overlook Film Festival in April 2026 and subsequently screened at the Fantasia International Film Festival and FrightFest.
