Larry Fessenden—founder of the downtown production outfit Glass Eye Pix, and the city’s reigning maestro of uncompromising, fiercely independent genre fare—returns to Scary Movies for a 25th anniversary celebration of the landmark 2001 chiller that might be his most influential work to date.

Erik Per Sullivan stars as Miles, the watchful 10-year-old son of photographer George (Jack Webster) and therapist Kim (Patricia Clarkson), whose life is irrevocably altered in the course of a snowbound upstate vacation. Driving through icy woods to a borrowed cabin, the close-knit family of Manhattanites are rattled when their car hits and injures a deer, attracting the ire of three local hunters who’d been tracking it for sport and profit. As his parents struggle to establish a fragile peace with their disgruntled neighbors, young Miles takes an interest in the story of the Wendigo, a voracious shapeshifter from Native American mythology. This sequence of events sets the stage for a formative encounter with vengeful nature and the elemental—yet indelibly human—mechanics of violence, unfolding across a wintry Catskills landscape that Fessenden’s 16mm camerawork infuses with an otherworldly glow. An IFC Films release.

4K restoration from the original 16mm camera negative by Vinegar Syndrome.