A man falls into an affair that leaves him weaker every morning, and he keeps coming back for more.

HABIT (1995) follows Sam, a part-time bar manager in the East Village, drowning his father’s death and a bad breakup in bottle after bottle. At a Halloween party he meets Anna, a woman who appears out of nowhere and vanishes just as easily. Their affair turns physical and strange fast, full of biting and blood, and Sam keeps drinking through the warning signs even as his body wastes away.

Larry Fessenden wrote, directed, edited, and stars as Sam, playing his own unraveling with a nakedness few horror filmmakers risk. Meredith Snaider plays Anna, never fully explained, maybe a vampire, maybe a delusion summoned by grief and alcohol. The film refuses to settle the question, and that refusal is the point. Snaider had played the same role in Fessenden’s original version of the story and has never appeared in anything else.

Fessenden had first told this story as a shot-on-video project at NYU around 1981 and spent the better part of fourteen years circling back to it. The feature cost about fifty thousand dollars to get in the can, shot on 16mm through his own Glass Eye Pix and self-distributed city by city. It won him the IFP Someone to Watch Award in 1997 and became the work that defined his career. It formed a loose trilogy with his No Telling and Wendigo.