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 HORROR BRAND
HorrorHound – Jason Hignite
“You still see filmmakers, really established people, post pictures of reviews of their film in HorrorHound Magazine. It’s still considered ‘making it’ when you get that review.”
– Filmmaker
In the ultra-competitive world of horror brands and their media outlets, there’s a constant struggle for relevant information, scoops and connections to filmmakers. But the race for eyeballs doesn’t always translate into influence. That’s reserved for brands that are grounded in sincere love for the genre and its fans, and with deep connections to the world of horror filmmaking. In what was the tightest race to call in our research, HorrorHound, the grand dame of horror brands, stood out for the way it continues to guide tastes across its multiple channels and around the world.
Part of the reason fans and filmmakers we spoke with highlighted HorrorHound is because it began first as a trusted magazine, with a convention following later as living expression of the brand fans could experience for a weekend. That magazine, started in 2005 by Nathan Hanneman, Jeremy Sheldo and Aaron Crowell, continues to be published today, even as other major horror outlets’ publications are shutting down or going online-only.
Two years later the team founded their HorrorHound Weekend convention in Indianapolis, which as grown into a traveling, multi-city fests drawing upward of 50,000 guests at a given show. Those conventions, and the magazine before them, are distinguished in the indie horror arena by their deep connection to “major” studio horror – the TV shows fans are watching, the movies they’re going to, the collectibles they’re hunting down. Horror Hound, better than anyone else, is able to bring indie horror fans inside the major horror experience by bringing that experience to them.
One of the biggest draws of the HorrorHound Weekend – often requiring its own, separate building – is the HorrorHound Weekend Film Festival, run by Film Festivals Director Jason Hignite, who came up repeatedly in our conversations. Hignite has established himself as a career starter, including giving Tostevin (our most influential shorts filmmaker) his start with a best short award in 2013. The festival was given NUVO Magazine’s Cultural Vision Trailblazer Award last year for its support of independent filmmakers.
For delivering a trusted brand and insider experience across its multiple channels – magazine, live events and its online outlets – we’ve identified HorrorHound as today’s most influential indie horror brand.
Also receiving votes: Fangoria; Tom Holland’s Terror Time; iHorror;
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