Trauma Or, Monsters All

Three years ago, Larry Fessenden told me that he wanted to make a film which brough together all the monsters – the troubled creatures who inhabited his previous films Habit, Blackout and Depraved. But how does one tell a story like that in an age of monsters? None of these individuals seems like a serious threat in comparison to what we see on the news every day. On the flip side of that, many of us have experienced being called monsters ourselves, or even being ‘monstered’, as it is now called, by (traditional or social) media. The subtitle of this film, ‘Monsters All’, implies that it’s difficult, today, to make clear distinctions. With that in mind, how should we treat one another?

“My parents say they named me Cassandra because it’s not what you know but how you communicate it,” says the film’s young heroine (Laetitia Holland). But she makes a mistake. She’s trying to write a history book about the botanist George Washington Carver, but struggling to apply herself, and when she learns something of the history of Talbot Falls, the small town in which she has secreted herself, she’s drawn to its most sensational elements. Why do these seem to have been forgotten. What do people mean when they refer to the ‘werewolf incident’ just a couple of years ago? Possessed of good research and writing skills but with none of the caution young journalists are taught, she rushes to put facts together and publish an attention-getting story in the local paper. She’s not an unkind person, but it doesn’t occur to her to wonder what the consequences might be.

At the outset, Fessenden said that he intended to make this film less melancholy. He hasn’t entirely succeeded, though it would be hard to create anything quite as heartbreaking as Depraved. Here, as in that film, the soul of the story belongs to Alex Breaux as Adam, one of the silver screen’s most compelling versions of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s living next door to Cassandra in a run down part of time where rent is cheap and landlords pay little attention to the state of their properties. That’s ideal when your roommate is a werewolf – Blackout’s tormented artist Charley (Alex Hurt) – and he’s chained up and screaming in the basement for three days each full moon. Their system has been working – enabling both of them to remain safe and (mostly) avoid violence – but Cassandra’s article changes everything.

It attracts more than just local attention. An old acquaintance of Adam’s comes looking for him, whilst a certain vampire from the big city (played by Fessenden himself) decides to take a trip in the hopes of meeting people as unusual as himself. Of course, he can’t resist having a snack along the way, and the complexity of the situation rapidly gets out of control. There’s enough going on here for a whole soap opera, but Fessenden knows what he’s doing and avoids getting distracted, creating clear emotional through lines which keep viewers focused on what matters.

We spend most of the film with Cassandra and Abigail (Aitana Doyle), a young woman she meets through her part time job in the local library and quickly forms a bond with. There’s something about Doyle that is reminiscent of the young Laura Dern circa Blue Velvet, and her boyfriend and his pals remind one rather of Sandy’s equivalent in that film, presenting a different sort of threat, full of the potential for mundane, ill-considered violence, yet utterly out of their depth within the larger narrative.

There is a similar tone to Trauma, which reflects its title’s etymological roots in dream. Characters who belong to a fairy tale or folkloric world struggle to contain themselves in flesh, edged out by the existence of mere mortals who, despite their vulnerability, forever push them to the edges of the narrative. We may all be monsters in somebody’s eyes, but not all of us know what it is to exist perpetually on the outside. What does such a person owe to the rest of the world? Is it better to embrace that status, to live out one’s full monstrous potential? Is it the effort to cling on to humanity that hurts? Fessenden’s character suggests that empathy needs to be actively practiced if we are to hold onto it.

As in Lynch’s work, there is also comedy here. A monster mash-up is, after all, quite a silly idea. Situated alongside the pathos of characters like Adam, it has a wonderful deadpan quality. The small absurdities of everyday life are heightened by the supernatural context. One cannot help but feel for local lawyer Kate (Barbara Crampton), who, after three years, still hasn’t succeeded in getting the home improvements finished which were underway in the last film. The local pastor gently expresses concern at the drinking habits of his memory-haunted parishioners, but knocks back a fair bit of liquor himself. At the climax, of course, there are more monster-specific forms of silliness. Bring a werewolf, a Frankenstieinian monster and vampires together and there will inevitably be a raising of the stakes.

In all their preposterousness and poignancy, Fessenden’s monster movie – which premiered a Overlook 2026 - does not seem inappropriate in today’s world. In fact, it seems like an unusually sane response. Fiction is one of many ways through which we might explore better ways of communicating with one another, lest we unleash too easily the monsters from the id. Faced with all this fury, and knowing that some at least are condemned to keep on living through it, one might remember the words of Kurt Vonnegut: God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

Reviewed on: 12 Apr 2026