The 25 greatest indie horror films

Herschell Gordon Lewis attained notoriety as the “Godfather of Gore” with 1963’s “Blood Feast”, but he made his sadistic masterpiece the following year with this “Brigadoon” riff. 100 years after Union soldiers destroyed the Southern town of Pleasant Valley, its residents come back to life to torture and kill a group of touring Northerners. Lewis trafficks in the hoariest of hick stereotypes, which makes you feel like you’re watching the most demented episode of “Petticoat Junction”. The film’s not really a comment on anything. It’s just an excuse to gross out the audience, and it accomplishes this with remarkable efficacy.

Summer camp slashers were all the rage in the early 1980s thanks to “Friday the 13th”, and most of them were pale retreads of Sean Cunningham’s blockbuster (which was no great shakes to begin with). Robert Hiltzik’s low-budget “Sleepaway Camp” appears to be more of the same at first, but it gets progressively weirder until it hits you with a shocking twist that forces you to reevaluate the entire movie. It’s a bold move that’s inspired some terrific writing of late (pro and con). Whether it’s brilliantly subversive or deeply insensitive, there’s no way a studio would’ve ever let a movie like this go before cameras.

Though Oren Peli’s ghost-camera sensation was retooled a tad when Paramount bought it in 2007 (to the tune of $200,000), the fact that a film shot for $15,000 drew a major studio’s attention merits its inclusion here. It’s a simple premise: when a couple believes a demon has invaded their house, they set up a camera to record their bedroom while they sleep at night. The gimmick worked like gangbusters. “Paranormal Activity” became the most profitable movie of the time, spawning a franchise that produced its seventh installment this year.

It’s as gnarly as it sounds, but maybe less disturbing than you’d expect. Abel Ferrara’s second feature plunges the viewer into the rundown New York City of the 1970s, where a struggling artist (Ferrara) is driven to murder by the external pressures of rent and other people (especially the avant-garde rock band that distracts him from painting his masterpiece). Ferrara doesn’t skimp on the gore, but he approaches the nascent slasher genre with a dark sense of humor, which takes a little bit of the edge off. It lacks the focus of his best work, but the visceral energy that would give us classics like “Bad Lieutenant”, “King of New York” and “Body Snatchers” pulsates throughout. 

This dirtbag riff on Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” was doubly disturbing at the time because no one had a sense of Wes Craven as a filmmaker. The film’s rapē-revenge narrative and barely competent technical craftsmanship made it feel like the work of a sadist at best, a blossoming psychopath at worst (and the tone-deaf comic relief featuring two bumbling deputies didn’t help). Critics (save for Roger Ebert) and audiences were repulsed, but the raw aesthetic perfectly captures the spiritual desolation of the early ‘70s. Craven was pushing boundaries. He used horror as a blunt instrument - not in a grand Guignol fashion a la Herschell Gordon Lewis, but as a means of scarring the audience’s psyche. When the brutality of the world sets foot in your living room, who’s to say we won’t meet it in kind?

Peter Jackson’s first film took four years to complete, and while it did receive backing from the New Zealand Film Commission near the end of production, it was a shoestring enterprise for the majority of its shoot. No one came out of this lunatic blend of horror and sci-fi thinking Jackson was going to be the next George Lucas, but anyone who’d spend almost half a decade making something this relentlessly silly had to be taken seriously - by cinephiles, if not law enforcement.

Shin'ichirō Ueda’s bonkers horror-comedy about zombies invading the shooting of a low-budget zombie flick makes more than the most of its meager $25,000 budget. Like many movies on this list, it’s a debut feature that feels stuffed with a decade or two of ideas; Ueda’s not about to waste his opportunity with half-measures, and, aside from a somewhat labored second act, he keeps the audience buzzing.

This criminally underseen 1976 thriller plays a bit like an early slasher with its emphasis on inventive deaths, but it’s got much more on its mind than pleasing gorehounds. It starts out as a revenge film wherein an unpopular high school student takes down his enemies one by one. But once the bullies are out of the way, the power vacuum must be filled, and so the tormented become the tormentors. This is the deathly serious precursor to “Heathers”. It’s a shame writer-director Rene Daalder didn’t make more features.

Guillermo del Toro’s debut feature offers an inventive spin on the vampire genre in which the “Cronos Device” - a gold-encrusted scarab beetle with sharp metal legs - pierces the user's skin, draws out their blood, and injects a fluid that instills in them a renewed vigor. Cinema is rife with cautionary tales of eternal life, but the young del Toro’s deft blend of humor and fatalism knocks the audience for a loop. The filmmaker’s meticulously designed contraptions are, as usual, a feast for the eyes and mind.

Larry Cohen was the king of narrative hooks, and he dreamt up with a doozy with this horror/sci-fi flick about seemingly normal people committing random acts of murder because, you guessed it, god told them to. Cohen shot guerilla-style on the streets of Manhattan, which allows him to capture the city at its sleazy ‘70s peak/nadir. The film’s grimy, procedural realism clashes beautifully with its cosmic elements. If only more filmmakers took gonzo risks like this.

Frank Henenlotter’s grindhouse classic is at once a gore-soaked classic and a touching tale of brotherly love. Made in early-1980s New York City for the low, low price of $35,000, the film depicts the travails of Duane and his formerly conjoined, hideously deformed twin Bilal; they’re none-too-happy about being separated, so they’re tracking down and killing the doctors who performed the procedure. But when Duane falls in love with a doctor’s assistant, Bilal flies into a jealous rage, and, well, ghastly things occur. Henenlotter’s sincere approach to this material may draw giggles from the uninitiated, but for monster movie aficionados, “Basket Case” belongs in the subgenre’s pantheon.

Herk Harvey’s only feature film feels like a nightmare downloaded directly from the subconscious to celluloid. The twist is heavily telegraphed, which encourages viewers to give themselves over to this bizarre, black-and-white transmission that unfolds at an uncertain, wholly unpredictable pace (back by an organ score that you can never un-hear). The young woman protagonist drifts through the story, trying to make sense of her life in the new town to which she’s relocated after surviving a serious car accident. Everything is off. She’s off. Again, the narrative is less important than the mood, which is unshakable. Harvey used every cent of his $33,000 budget to give audiences a movie they never knew they needed.

Though “Phantasm” ultimately became an enjoyable horror-comedy DTV franchise for Universal, it kicked off as a terrifying horror-fantasy with one foot in reality and another in the kind of deeply layered nightmare you can’t seem to escape. Something sinister is afoot at the Morningside Cemetery, and it involves hooded dwarfs, lethal silver orbs, and one very creepy Tall Man (the great Angus Scrimm). Writer-director Don Coscarelli raised money from his family and local business people to bring this singular horror film to life. It’s a thoughtful meditation on grief that contains two or three of the most effective jump scares in film history.

Religious paranoia 17th century New England gets a deliciously new spin in Robert Eggers’s sensational first film. The disappearance of a young boy sets off accusations of witchcraft against his older sister, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), who was charged with watching him. Eggers’s painstaking recreation of the period pulls you in, while his spellbinding imagery and mastery of mood drives you to panic. This may be an arthouse version of the ‘60s/’70s Witchfinder movies, but it’s executed with consummate skill and intelligence.

Wes Craven’s follow-up to “Last House on the Left” is another endurance test in which a normal American family is reduced to savagery, but this time it’s a matter of survival instead of revenge, which makes it slightly more… palatable? Craven’s technique is still a far cry from the assuredness of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (or the flat-out mastery of “Scream”), but, again, this jaggedness works in his favor. When a family of mutant cannibals traps and toys with the vacationing Carters in the Nevada desert, we’re stunned by the ruthlessness with which Craven dispatches seemingly decent people. Though Michael Barryman’s Pluto became an iconic horror figure, the lousy sequel snuffed out any chance at a franchise (though Alexandre Aja’s 2006 remake plays incredibly rough for a studio horror flick).

The ultimate indie-horror success story. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez hit the Maryland woods for a little over a week, racked up a surfeit of footage with three actors, and shaped it into a found-footage classic that launched a thousand, largely awful imitators. The key here is commitment to the bit: actors Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard sell every second of their performances; no one with the exception of Marilyn Burns has ever looked more scared on-screen than these three. The rest is a miraculous feat of editing for which Myrick and Sánchez deserve an honorary Oscar.

Lovecraftian horror was very much in style throughout the 1980s (notably with Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” movies and John Carpenter’s “The Thing”), but it took Stuart Gordon’s cheeky adaptation of the “Herbert West-Reanimator” to thrust the author back into the spotlight. Stuart Gordon packed his debut film with enough blood and viscera to draw an X rating from the MPAA and enough caustically dark humor to earn raves from mainstream film critics. Jeffrey Combs is brilliantly unhinged in the title role of a mad scientist who’s developed a serum that brings the dead back to life. There are just a few kinks that need ironing out first, and lots of people die horrible deaths (and get brought back to life) in the process.

One of the best films of the 21st century fuses the widescreen suburban horror of John Carpenter’s “Halloween” to the sexual dread of, well, pick a ‘70s David Cronenberg movie (save for “Fast Company”). David Robert Mitchell’s film hooks you with the notion of a sexually transmitted curse plaguing a community of teenagers, one that will stalk and kill the carrier unless they have sex with someone else. Only it’s not that simple. Mitchell is less concerned with the rules of his concept and more interested in exploring the sense of mortality that comes with losing one’s innocence. He’s also a master at scaring the bejeezus out of the audience.

The quintessential “spam in a cabin” flick. In 1980, Sam Raimi scraped together $90,000 to make a supernatural horror film crammed with wild makeup fx and nutty stop-motion animation. The premise, a group of college friends accidentally awaken the forces of evil while on vacation in rural Tennessee, is basically an excuse for Raimi to show off his considerable filmmaking chops (demented dutch angles, dizzying push-ins, and all that good stuff). By the time the film found its cult following, Raimi had to make the Dino De Laurentiis-financed sequel to take the stink off his disastrous sophomore feature, “Crimewave”.

David Lynch was so determined to finish “Eraserhead” on his own terms that he picked up a paper route to help finance his sui generis masterpiece. Though the film failed to catch fire during its initial release, Lynch’s bleak vision of a man eking out a thankless living in a dying city (tending to a hideously deformed child) turned into a cult sensation, landing the director his first studio feature (“The Elephant Man”) and establishing him as American cinema’s most arrestingly original voice. Had he compromised in any significant way, the loss to the art form would be incalculable.

Still one of the most profitable independent movies of all time, John Carpenter’s scare machine kicked off the slasher craze, which badly hobbled the horror genre for almost a decade. But think about “Halloween” in terms of how it was experienced in 1978. People were floored by the opening scene’s twist, and unnerved by the film’s autumnal Midwest setting (shot in and around Los Angeles). Carpenter’s widescreen compositions and deliberate pace invited viewers to scan the frame for signs of the boogeyman. He could be anywhere. And, in the end, he couldn’t be killed. Forty-three years ago, moviegoers didn’t walk out clamoring for a sequel; they simply went back for one more trip through “The Night He Came Home”. Absent the savagery of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or the wanton gore of “Dawn of the Dead”, “Halloween” was also the perfect date-night horror movie. It works emphatically on every level.

“Night of the Living Dead”, “Dawn of the Dead” and “Day of the Dead” are three of the grimmest, goriest, and greatest horror movies ever made, and while it’s frustrating that Romero had to scramble to finance them, his rough ride at the Hollywood studios suggests we got the best versions. Each film tackles thorny societal issues, but never at the expense of spinning a compelling narrative. These are smart, complex films that also happen to contain copious amounts of viscera and torn flesh. What more could you want from a movie?

The strange, sorrowful power of George A. Romero’s “Martin” is derived from its ambiguity: we’re never certain if its young protagonist is an actual, centuries-old vampire or a profoundly screwed-up kid. Martin is convinced of the former, as is his devout Catholic cousin, Tateh, who houses him, but Romero stokes our doubts by depicting the usual telltale signs (e.g. no reflection in the mirror, an aversion to holy water and garlic) as pure hogwash. The lonely Martin becomes a local talk radio sensation as “The Count”, and he continues to somewhat ineptly prey on women to slake his thirst for blood (if he’s been doing this for centuries, you’d think he’d be far more skilled at procuring his food). Martin is some kind of monster, one who alternately appalls and fascinates us.

John McNaughton’s naturalistic character study of a serial killer is about as grim as it gets. Michael Rooker is dead-eyed perfection as a drifter who kills strangers not for kicks or revenge, but out of primal necessity. It’s what he was put on this planet to do. Henry hooks up with an old prison buddy in Chicago, and the pair go on a killing spree that gets complicated by the presence of his friend’s good-hearted sister. But there’s no redemption or transformation to be found here. It will all end in murder, with Henry moving on down the road to find his next victim(s).

Tobe Hooper’s classic is every bit as terrifying today as it was forty-seven years ago. People will tell you it’s one of the most violent films they’ve ever seen, but the movie eschews gratuitous gore; the worst bits happen offscreen, leaving the viewer to imagine the unimaginable. The cannibalistic rednecks versus longhairs is unmistakably a Vietnam metaphor, but it syncs up well with our current Red State/Blue State cold civil war.