Entertainment

MONSTER MAN

As a kid on the Upper East Side, Larry Fessenden was fascinated by 1930s horror flicks like “Frankenstein” and “The Invisible Man.”

“I wanted to stay home and watch them. I had great sympathy for the monsters in general. These movies really touched me,” Fessenden said over coffee and pancakes at Leshko’s on Avenue A.

Now a denizen of the East Village, Fessenden has written and directed three horror films of his own, “No Telling” (1991), “Habit” (1997) and “Wendigo” (2001).

It is the last of those movies, which opened this weekend at Film Forum in Manhattan, that brings Fessenden and Cine File together.

Shot in upstate New York – in the area where Fessenden, his wife and their 2-year-old son have a country house – “Wendigo” follows a city family whose vacation ends tragically after a redneck hunter takes a perverse interest in them.

The movie, which gets its title from a creature in Native American myth that is half-man and half-deer, stars Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber as husband and wife and Erik Per Sullivan, of TV’s “Malcolm in the Middle,” as their young son.

The 38-year-old Fessenden, who studied film at NYU, has been turning out quirky, low-budget movies for 20 years. He even had a show on cable-access TV.

“In the ’80s I made a lot of movies, but I never cleared the rights for the music and so on, so they are somewhat undistributable,” he said. “It was a whole decade of hard work, fire and brimstone, but the movies remain underground.”

This multitalented guy also has numerous acting roles on his résumé, including the lead in his own “Habit” and a cokehead in Martin Scorsese’s underrated “Bringing Out the Dead.” Working with Scorsese, Fessenden said, was “a dream.”

Up next for Fessenden is a sequel to “Wendigo,” but he’d “love to break out of the [horror] genre” with, perhaps, a comedy or a musical.

What would he do if Hollywood beckoned?

“I’d take the call,” Fessenden answered.

But with conditions.

“I’d ask if there is anything at all I can bring to it [a studio movie] that will make it stand apart, and am I going to be allowed to do anything that interests me. You can have an explosion, but make it count.

“It’s the excesses of Hollywood that I’m not interested in. And that includes the budgets. I don’t think they have to be that high. It all feels really indulgent – like a big Enron.”

Post film editor V.A. Musetto can bee-mailed at vam@nypost.com.