Trauma Or, Monsters All opens today, November 4, at the IFC Center in New York, and it is the film Larry Fessenden has been building toward since the mid 1990s. The independent horror director has spent three decades remaking the classic movie monsters one at a time. Here he puts all of them in the same small town and watches what the neighbors do.
The film comes from Glass Eye Pix, the New York production company Fessenden runs, and is released by Dark Sky Films, the distributor that put out The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers.
Trauma Or, Monsters All trailer
Dark Sky's synopsis sets it up simply. Cassandra comes to the upstate town of Talbot Falls to write a book on George Washington Carver and takes a day job at the library, where she befriends a local named Agnes. Then she writes an article for the local paper about the town's dark history and asks a question nobody wanted asked out loud: are there monsters among them? Speculation turns into conflict as a werewolf, a vampire and a Frankenstein creation step into the light, and the town's buried trauma comes with them.
The Fessenden monsterverse, in order
Glass Eye Pix now files four films under what it calls the Fessenden Monsterverse, running from 1996 to 2026, and the new one only makes full sense against the other three.
- Habit, shot on 16 millimeter film, follows Sam, a drunk, grieving New Yorker drawn into addiction and madness by a mysterious woman named Anna.
- Depraved (2019) is his Frankenstein: Henry, a field surgeon living with post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in the Middle East, builds a man out of body parts in a makeshift lab in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
- Blackout is the werewolf film, about a fine arts painter convinced he is the thing tearing up a small American town under the full moon.
- Trauma Or, Monsters All (2026, 119 minutes) brings the three together.
The trick, by Fessenden's own account on the IFC Center page, was to step outside the monsters entirely. "The concept was to take the monsters we've come to know intimately from three previous films and to observe them from the outside," he says. "So I chose a new protagonist." He calls the result his meditation on identity politics and adds that his movies "have become a chronicle of American dysfunction as seen through the lens of gothic horror."
Trauma Or, Monsters All cast
Laëtitia Hollard and Aitana Doyle lead the film. Around them is a cast full of Glass Eye Pix regulars: Addison Timlin, Alex Hurt, Alex Breaux, John Speredakos, Cody Kostro, Marc Senter, Micheál Neeson, Joseph Castillo-Midyett, Rigo Garay and Fessenden himself, with Barbara Crampton as Kate, plus Joshua Leonard and James Le Gros. Several of them carry over from Depraved and Blackout, which is part of the fun. It was shot on an Arri Alexa digital cinema camera.
Before its opening it played the Fantasia International Film Festival, The Overlook Film Festival, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival and Nightmare in the Ozarks.
Trauma Or, Monsters All release date and where to watch
The film opened in select theaters on November 4, 2026, starting with the IFC Center in New York. Fessenden is doing a question and answer session after the 7:00 PM shows on November 4 and November 5, and the theater lists further daily showtimes through November 11, including open captioned screenings.
The opening sits inside an IFC Center tribute to Glass Eye Pix, running October 28 to November 10, that also programs Habit, Stake Land, The Innkeepers, I Sell the Dead, The Last Winter on 35 millimeter film, Depraved and Blackout. Dark Sky has not posted streaming or on demand dates on its own page yet, so check the official film page for new cities and home release news.
If you want more horror off the beaten path, our Halloween movie night guide and our look at Dead Howling are good next stops, and dated releases like this one land on our Incoming page.
