INDIE HORROR’S SECRET SEVEN
The Most Influential Horror Leaders You’ve Never Heard Of
In a crowded industry that sometimes rewards the loudest over the best, these seven leaders behind some of the most influential work of the decade have been quietly determining the direction of independent horror.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW INDIE HORROR’S MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE COULD remain largely a secret, you first have to understand the nature of indie horror today.
Our current era and all its frenetic noise and new-legends-born-daily has its origins in the indie filmmaking explosion of the late 2000s (specifically November, 2008 – the month the Canon 5D Mark II was released and the fuse was lit).
At that moment, two ingredients combined to become the accelerant that would blow a fan-sized hole in the wall that Hollywood studios had built around filmmaking. First, DSLR cinema-look cameras became inexpensive enough for enterprising indie filmmakers to buy, learn to use and shoot on. And second, internet video hosting on YouTube and later Vimeo democratized sharing indie films with a worldwide audience – especially shorts.
Suddenly, a generation of aspiring filmmakers who’d grown up on VCR horror had access to make and show their own homegrown scary movies. And make them they did: In the resulting new frontier, a massive community/industry grew at a speed we’ve never seen before. Aspiring filmmakers become actual filmmakers. Weekend filmmaking contests cropped up around the world, generating tens of thousands of films. To screen all the new content, the number of film festivals doubled, doubled and doubled again. Horror outlets were started by the dozen to cover them. And social media shared and re-shared it all.
In that crowded Wild West, getting the attention of an audience became a game of “who-has-the-best-gimmick?” Hell: an entire sub-genre of horror was created, where an aging horror star is brought in for a half-day shoot, then lands on the poster as bait to horror lovers, who’d maybe see her or him in the opening scene, or hear them as voiceover.
Finding an angle in the noise was everything – too often even more important than finding a great story, or pushing the genre.
But if you listen closely to that roar, you can single out a handful of voices who have been steering indie horror, and lifting up their colleagues, in ways that are making a lasting difference in the content we see, and in the culture of horror overall.
We at Cinema Runner set out to identify the unsung leaders who have the most influence on the true indie horror community – non-studio, usually non-distributed horror made with sweat equity and brought directly to the fans. To complement our own research, we polled two dozen horror filmmakers, fans, festivals and critics to ask: who do you look up to for the direction of indie horror? (Some, to protect relationships, chose to remain anonymous.)
What will follow each day this week is an examination of what we found in the major indie horror categories: conventions, film festivals, short films, feature films and horror media…
MOST INFLUENTIAL FEATURE FILMMAKERS
Bandit Motion Pictures – Scott Schirmer, Brian Williams
“Indiana is now the epicenter of indie horror feature filmmaking, and that’s entirely because of Bandit [Motion Pictures].”
– Film critic
A unique voice and a dedication to genre continued to be rewarded in this category, with our sources repeatedly identifying Bandit Motion Pictures as notable not just for its consistent quality, but for telling stories that expand the definition of “horror” – and also for fully embracing a combination of crowd funding and self-distribution as the new production system in indie horror.
Scott Schirmer (pictured at the top) established himself as a name to watch with the lauded horror feature Found and the movie-within-the-movie follow-up, Headless. Separately but coincidentally, Brian Williams (pictured above) produced his own first feature, Time to Kill, starring his wife and must-have indie scream queen Ellie Church. After charging onto the scene with acclaim, they found one another and formed Bandit Motion Pictures to create Harvest Lake, their first co-production.
They’ve since produced at a breakneck pace, premiering the identity/cannibal-horror Plank Face and just wrapping shooting on a new sex-romp space comedy, Space Babes From Outer Space. Their films are screened and awarded at fests, bought up by fans and cheered at conventions.
“Maybe the prime example of the creativity and excitement independent horror boasts is Bandit Motion Pictures,” said Gruesome Magazine in its Spring 2017 edition. “As their company moniker suggests, Scott and Brian are forging their own path, on their terms. If all filmmakers adopted similar ethos, we’d be spoiled for choice.”
Their success is as much about their business commitment and innovation as it is about their films. They collaborate intimately, sharing duties, swapping the director’s chair and writing responsibilities from film to film, and keeping the work in the family, often casting Church to anchor the casts. And they work fast and cheap, with a clear eye on the end result with Blu-ray preorders and Kickstarters planned to coordinate with each premiere.
For creating unique horror stories grounded in vision and craft, blazing a trail for other filmmakers in self-distribution, and collaborating by sharing roles, Bandit Motion Pictures was noted repeatedly as both likely the most successful – and the most influential – true indie horror feature makers working today.
Also receiving votes: Tommy Faircloth and Robert Hampton, Horse Creek Productions (Family Possessions); Jimmy Bickert, Big World Pictures (Frankenstein Created Bikers)
