The best, the most influential, the cult treasures of American Horror. Theyre often independents, from the ingenuity of Corman and the radical atmosphere of Romero right up through the woods of Burkittsville and David Robert Mitchells haunting sexually transmitted curse. Ceative freedom and DIY passion is integral to crafting whats bold, new and confrontational. This 4th of July weekend, I conducted a brief survey of the voices on Shock, to find out their own favorites in American Independent Horror.
Below, youll find Holiday Weekend picks from Shock regulars Matt Barone, Brett Gallman, Max Evry, Jacob Q. Knight, Alison Nastasi, Spencer Perry, Matt Serafini and Alexandra West.
As for my own pick, Im a bit terrible at playing favorites, but my choices lie somewhere between affection for Cormans own The Fall of the House of Usherboth an independent and utterly gorgeous production and the first of the filmmakers influential and successful Poe cycleand my amazement at the long shadow of Romeros groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead. Of course, the utter weirdness of films like Carnival of Souls and Messiah of Evil must vie for a spot, as well. More recently, I believe films like It Follows and Jim Mickles We Are What We Are, both indies as well as very much American in feeling, deserve discussion. Thats not to mention the stunning A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, reflective of the countrys multinational voice.
Enjoy your 4th of July and drop in with your own picks of the best in American Independent Horror, below!
American Independent Horror
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American Independent Horror #1
Matt Barone: Session 9
There aren’t many horror films that genuinely scare me every single time I watch them. The Shining was, at one time, one of those few consistently unsettling movies, but by its millionth or so re-airing on basic cable, Kubrick’s masterwork’s fright force has dwindled. Brad Anderson’s Session 9, however, has benefited from its under-the-radar nature. Its scariness remains intact because it’s so rarely unpacked. There’s no Room 237—or, rather, Mary Hobbes’ Room—out there to deconstruct Session 9. And because of that, it’s, to me, much scarier. Both deal with the loss of sanity in closed quarters, with Session 9’s fictional specifics revolving around four asbestos clean-up workers who sink deeper into a psychotic nightmare while renovating the real-life Danvers State Mental Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts. But only Session 9 has me, no joke, shivering a bit even while writing this.
Anderson, who also co-wrote the script, uses an endlessly disorienting sound design and a tightly concealed whodunit narrative to give viewers the same kind of imbalanced mental claustrophobia that Session 9’s characters, particularly main guy Gordon (Peter Mullan), experience, and that sensation never lets up. The entire movie feels like Jack Torrance’s slow walk toward Room 237’s naked-old-hag-occupied bathroom. One character obsessively listens to old audio case files of a particularly disturbed but now-deceased patient named Mary Hobbes, and Hobbes’ multiple personalities’ distinct voices are each uniquely creepy in ways that few other movies’ sound devices have achieved. She’s pure never-sleep-again fuel, an antagonist who’s not physically there but dominates every frame and every square-inch of the Danvers; Anderson expertly doles out slow-motion glimpses of her insidious side-eyed profiles and patiently builds up to her worst schizo-personality, Simon, who speaks in a ghoulishly measured drawl that sounds like a chopped-and-screwed Vincent Price.
Session 9 ends with an exceptionally written Simon quote that’s both ingenious and bone-chillingly bleak. The line seeps into your head, leaves you marveling at the film’s airtight twist/reveal and makes The Shining’s 1921 party photo capper seem softer than a pile of spilled Calumet baking soda.
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American Independent Horror #2
Max Evry: Alone in the Dark
The directorial debut of Jack Sholder.(Nightmare on Elm Street 2) was also the maiden voyage for New Line Cinema's nascent horror-centric output of the '80s, and you can tell from the opening surreal nightmare sequence that the filmmakers weren't satisfied making a run-of the-mill hack-and-slash. The nutty power trio of Martin Landau, Jack Palance and Donald Pleasence make for some of the gnarliest escaped mental patients this side of the cuckoo's nest (Pleasence is actually their doctor, not that you can tell). The more deranged they act, the more the film seeks to subvert our genre expectations and the way we perceive the mentally ill, diagnosed or undiagnosed. While some of it doesn't make much sense—a news report at a critical moment in the final act is nothing short of full-on deus ex-machina—the final scene between Palance and a stoner girl (Janet Schneider) at a punk rock show is one of the most hauntingly exhilarating moments in any film, ever.
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American Independent Horror #3
Brett Gallman: Blood Feast
The history of American horror has been marked by studios exploiting and co-opting independent movements. It comes as no surprise, then, that the country’s mainstream splatter output was anticipated decades earlier by a sleaze raconteur working on the outermost fringes of the drive-in circuit. Having already produced and directed a number of nudie flicks that pushed the boundaries of sex and eroticism, Herschell Gordon Lewis took the next logical step by exploiting gratuitous violence in Blood Feast, America’s first pure splatter effort. Armed with a $20,000 budget and a willingness to completely shock audiences, Lewis transforms his adopted home state of Florida into a low-rent Grand Guignol, where explicit virgin sacrifices conducted by sham caterer Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold considered to be the original machete-wielding madmen) trump other filmmaking elements.
The acting here is amateurish, the camerawork static, and the synth score a warbling, droning affair—and yet, it hardly matters, not when Lewis’s signature crimson splash accompanies ghastly images of severed tongues and gouged eyeballs. Despite his own insistence that the kitschy Blood Feast was not to be taken seriously, Lewis nonetheless found an artistry in graphic violence that would recur for decades, and his truly independent, handcrafted aesthetic foreshadowed both the immediate regional filmmaking of the drive-in era and the homemade horrors that would be shot on home video years later.
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American Independent Horror #4
Jacob Q. Knight: Phantom of the Paradise
Brian De Palma heard The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” being used as muzak in an elevator and got really pissed off. To the still budding auteur, it was unfathomable how any company could pervert such beautiful art into innocuous nonsense, readymade to score a gaggle of businessmen on their way to whatever lame lunch meeting was set to eat up another hour of their miserable existences; an ear worm for a red X on the calendar, bringing them all closer to their inevitable demise.
Fed up with having his original ideas tossed back to him by those same unimaginative suits at pitch meetings around Hollywood, De Palma teamed with producer Edward Pressman and real estate mogul Gustave Berne to raise $1.5 million. That money was used to fund the ultimate rock opera; a careening bullet of pop art perfection that doubled as a shredding “fuck the world” middle finger to anyone who thought they could package the essence of rock ‘n’ roll and sell it to the masses in disposable background ditties. Phantom of the Paradise is De Palma going cinematically full tilt in a fashion he hadn’t yet unleashed during his career; an embracement of the Godardian satire featured in his early Robert De Niro screwball romps, hitched to a then-unfamiliar genre wagon that feels just as influenced by Andy Warhol as it does Robert Weine, and then filtered through a decade of cocaine binges, to the point that “drug real” and “real real” are indistinguishable from one another.
We’re lost in the funhouse that is De Palma’s brain, all while Swan, Paul Williams’ Phil Spector meets Satan Himself record producer, rescores the same song over and over, remolding it into a Top 40 sonic journey through two decades of radio ready stylings. Interspersed throughout are flashes of genuine beauty so heart-swellingly lovely that they could’ve only come from an artist who genuinely understands life's rare occurrences of creative epiphany. The moment two singers’ voices intertwine to create a perfect harmony; that certain something a gold ear hears in a hit song; the thrill of a thunderous stage performance – De Palma replaces the scare set pieces normally found in horror with musical explosions, aimed at capturing these fleeting instances of inspiration that set the world on fire for those involved. This is what rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to feel like; an injection of high octane insanity run amuck in the service of pure artistic innovation. Embrace it, or get the fuck out of its way. De Palma will not be denied.
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American Independent Horror #5
Alison Nastasi: Session 9
When microscopic asbestos fibers are released into the air, they invade the body with every breath and manifest as disease deep inside the lobes of our lungs. It’s an invisible agent, an illusion, that quietly destroys from within. Brad Anderson’s Session 9, following an asbestos abatement crew in an abandoned hospital, takes a page from the book of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There is relatively little violence, but the claustrophobic terror is ever present, even though Anderson relies on what we don’t see more than that which is brought to light. A palpable aural nightmare, Session 9’s mysteries are frightening — but it’s the prospect of losing one’s mind that gnaws at us throughout the film.
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American Independent Horror #6
Spencer Perry: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
From the opening minutes of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, you know that you’re not stepping into a happy place. The whizzing of camera flashes dulls your senses while images of rotten flesh and gnarled teeth pop in front of you. It’s Hooper’s imagery that makes the film so iconic too. No frame is wasted and any that were removed from the context of the film and presented as a single image would still be striking as a portrait (for any number of reasons). Let’s not forget the fact that Texas Chain Saw is firmly entrenched in its American roots. From the Texas setting to its road trip motif and the continuous radio broadcasts about grisly murders, the film remains relevant and a classic because it is not all that different from reality. You can’t have a July 4th get-together without some barbecue.
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American Independent Horror #7
Matt Serafini: Phantasm
Phantasm perfectly captures the spirit of youthful paranoia. Kids can find unexplainable horror lurking in every shadow, and in this case it doesn’t matter if it’s the sterile and echoing halls of the Morningside Mortuary, or the more hospitable décor of a fortuneteller’s parlor. That’s the beauty of Don Coscarelli’s 1979 masterpiece—the Tall Man and his minions aren’t bound by logical rules, possessing the ability to strike anywhere, and in any way. The sequels would predictably focus on Phantasm’s most marketable aspects (killer spheres and the Tall Man’s quips), but it’s how they came together here that forged its legacy. Its underlying sadness isn’t explored as often as it should be, either. For all the surreal imagery and gotcha moments, Phantasm is more importantly the story of a young boy trying to rationalize the death of his older brother. This context rewards the film in repeat viewings, making it creepy but also profoundly relatable.
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American Independent Horror #8
Alexandra West: The Blair Witch Project
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's The Blair Witch Project is easily my favorite American indie horror film. It's not only a supremely terrifying film, but also incredibly inventive and iconic. It's one of the few films that continues to shake me to my core each time.
It's also important to note how successful and unique their marketing campaign was. From a fake website to the television special, The Blair Witch Project controlled the narrative of the missing film students from day one. Even if you never saw The Blair Witch Project, you definitely knew about it. It's a film that's simple premise, focus on American folklore and fear created not only the best found footage horror film but also one of the best horror films.
