Larry Fessenden is searching for life after death in clip from SXSW horror film Brooklyn 45
In writer-director Ted Geoghegan's horror-thriller Brooklyn 45, a handful of pals meet at the New York house of Larry Fessenden's Lieutenant Colonel Clive 'Hock' Hockstatter for what turns out to be an evening of revelations and supernatural terror.
"Brooklyn 45 is set several months after the end of World War II," says Geoghegan of the film, which premieres at Austin's SXSW Festival on March 12. "A group of battle-hardened, old friends get together in the Brooklyn brownstone of their colonel, who has suffered a monumental loss upon coming home from the war. They sit down for cocktails, those cocktails very quickly turn into an impromptu séance, and the s--- hits the fan. They find themselves haunted by the metaphoric and literal ghosts of their pasts."
Shudder Larry Fessenden in 'Brooklyn 45'
In addition to indie-horror icon Fessenden, the friends are played by Ron E. Rains, Ezra Buzzington, Mad About You actress Anne Ramsay, and Jeremy Holm, who portrays Major Archibald Stanton.
"I'd been a fan of Jeremy Holm since I saw him in Jenn Wexler's The Ranger, and I really was excited about him playing Archie in the film," says Geoghegan. "It's a very different role for him. Archie is a gay man who is open about his sexuality with his friends but with no one else because that was, unfortunately, how things were back then. We start to discover that he is hiding far more than his sexuality. Jeremy delivered in spades."
Shudder 'Brooklyn 45'
The cast is completed by Kristina Klebe, whose credits include Rob Zombie's Halloween. She plays a German neighbor of Fessenden's character.
"Kristina Klebe is someone that I have been friends with for almost 20 years, and I'd always hoped to find a project that we could work on together," says Geoghegan, who previously directed the 2015 ghost tale We Are Still Here and the 2017 period action-horror film Mohawk. "I can't imagine anyone else playing the role, especially considering the fact that Kristina is a German-American and this character is a German person living in America, dealing with what it's like post-war to be someone whose branded such an outsider."
Brooklyn 45 began as a joke Geoghegan would make while touring the festival circuit with We Are Still Here, which also featured Fessenden.
"There's a séance scene between Larry Fessenden and Andrew Sensenig, both of whom are middle-aged men," says Geoghegan of the earlier film. "Audience members, again and again, said, it's so neat to see middle-aged people doing a séance and watching what they believe to be real just come crashing down around them at that age. By the time you hit your 40s or 50s or 60s, you're pretty set in your beliefs, and so to have those beliefs challenged or completely changed in the middle of your life is just such a huge thing. I jokingly would tell people, 'Oh, well, if you like that séance scene that much, don't worry, my next movie is just going to be a séance!' I ended up doing Mohawk next, which is wildly different from a single-room séance movie, but I kept coming back to the idea."
Shudder 'Brooklyn 45'
Geoghegan recruited his veteran father, Michael, to ensure he was realistically depicting the film's military characters.
"I started writing the screenplay, and I had reached the end of the first act," he says. "I knew what the second and third acts were going to be, but I could not jump through the hoops to get from point A to point B; I just couldn't figure it out. On a whim, I sent the first act to my father [who] is a quadriplegic U.S. airforce veteran. He read it, and he had a million thoughts. He told me, look, this guy would never say this; this character never would have been in this battle. He gave me a ton of notes, and when I came back to the script, I immediately knew where it was supposed to go."
Geoghegan continued to consult with his father as he worked on the screenplay, ultimately finishing the script four years ago, just ahead of his father's unexpected death.
"My dad and I, we sent the script back and forth six or seven times," says the director. "I sent it back to him in January of 2019, and he read it and called me up, and he was like, 'Hey, man, we did it, this is the script; I can't wait to see this thing. We hung up the phone, and he died the next day. It was the last conversation I ever had with my father."
Shudder 'Brooklyn 45' director Ted Geoghegan
With finance provided by the streaming service Shudder, Geoghegan shot Brooklyn 45 at the end of 2021, not in New York, but in Elgin, IL., because of a favorable tax credit situation.
"It was emotionally taxing day-to-day, hearing actors speak lines that I had spent so much time working on with my father," he says. "Ultimately, I ended up dedicating the film to him. Even though I, much like the character of Clive Hockstatter, rather question the existence of the afterlife, I can say that I am proud of the film that we ended up making together. If my father were here today, I have no doubt that he would have been very proud of it as well."
Exclusively watch a clip from Brooklyn 45 and see a photo of Fessenden in the film above.
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