Fessenden

The script by Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman is based on a PlayStation game written by filmmakers Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick, who took inspiration from movies like “Evil Dead” and “Poltergeist.”

But since Charley is the protagonist of a Larry Fessenden horror film, “Blackout,” he’s also been waking up half-naked in the woods and some of the splotches on his torn clothes are clearly blood.

Fessenden has long been a cult-horror mainstay as producer, director, writer and actor.

With his new film, set in sleepy upstate New York, Fessenden is in werewolf territory first prowled by Lon Chaney Jr. in 1941’s “The Wolf Man” and expressed here as a beastly torment affecting both its lead character and a divided America.

But there’s the inconvenient hypocrisy of his own nocturnal havoc to deal with, which is where Fessenden’s update — more talky than bloody, and still plenty bloody — carves out its own moral seriousness about the monsters inside all of us.