By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Now you can own totems of the folkloric creature that has become a regular in the New York auteur’s work.
Glass Eye Pix has announced the release of a limited run of a trio of Wendigo figures, representing the antlered beast as seen in Fessenden’s feature films WENDIGO and THE LAST WINTER and the comic book THE WENDIGO OF MANITOU VALLEY. Each hand-crafted figure was sculpted and cast by his longtime collaborator James Felix McKenney (director of AUTOMATONS, HYPOTHERMIA and SATAN HATES YOU), and is packaged in a reusable plastic sleeve with full-color card art by Sarah Bereza and Brahm Revel.
“The Wendigo is a mythical creature introduced to me by a second grade teacher telling spooky stories to his class,” Fessenden says. “I later learned it was from Algonquian folklore: a potent myth with warnings about cannibalism, rapacious hunger, madness and manifest destiny. Those implications, and the unknowable way in which the specter looked, led me to a lifetime preoccupation with capturing its essence in the movies WENDIGO, THE LAST WINTER, [and his FEAR ITSELF episode] SKIN AND BONES; the video game UNTIL DAWN; the unproduced kids’ TV series MANITOU VALLEY; the comic books WENDIGO and THE WENDIGO OF MANITOU VALLEY; a book of Wendigo essays and images called SUDDEN STORM; and even a Wendigo vinyl kit. But I still haven’t captured the allusive power of this potent specter and maybe that is why it continues to haunt my imagination. Here, I want to acknowledge the many artisans who have helped me try. Maybe a Wendigo toy will break this fever…but I’ve come to doubt it.”
The trio of figures can now be ordered for $40 each plus shipping and handling, or $110 for all three, at the Glass Eye Pix website.
