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5 Most Unusual Independent Horror Movies of 2016
2016 was a great year for fans of independent horror movies. It takes a lot of work to find the really good stuff in a sea of the same, no-budget zombie and slasher movies, but it’s worth it for the adventurous cinephile. The independent horror landscape is the best place to find the weirdest and wildest movies: these filmmakers don’t have big budgets or studios behind them, but their hard work and passion to make movies on their own terms results in films that are truly unlike anything else. If you’re looking to start diving in to indie horror, here are 5 of the most unusual independent horror movies released in 2016.
Weresquito: Nazi Hunter
Since 2006, Minnesota-based filmmaker Christopher R. Mihm has released a new feature-length film every year. Each one is made in an earnest attempt to replicate the look and feel of the 1950s sci-fi/horror films Mihm enjoyed watching as a kid with his father. This year’s movie is much darker than any of his previous films, and it comes after his most kid-friendly film yet (2015’s Danny Johnson Saves the World). Weresquito: Nazi Hunter is the story of an American soldier who has returned to the States from Germany after WWII. A horrific Nazi experiment causes him to turn into a man-sized “weresquito” at the sight of blood, and he’s on a quest for vengeance against the Nazi scientists who were responsible. Shot as always in “period appropriate” black & white, Weresquito: Nazi Hunter is another wonder of low-budget filmmaking. It may not be the best entry point into the “Mihmiverse”–the name his fans have given the world of his films–but it gives viewers a pretty good idea of what to expect on their adventures there. The film is available on DVD directly from Mihm’s website Saint Euphoria.
Diana
Writer/director Scout Tafoya is a prolific film critic and video essayist, but he also somehow found time to release three films in 2016. House of Little Deaths is an epic 2.5-hour drama about a group of young women living and working in brothel in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I Am No Bird is an intimate modern twist on Jane Eyre, and Diana is something else entirely. Tafoya focuses on tiny details in the life of the titular protagonist played by Alexandra Maiorino, a young woman who spends some of her spare time killing and eating people. It’s shot largely in looming, lingering close-up, set to a synth score that makes it feel like what one might imagine would result from a collaboration between Michael Mann, Chantal Akerman, and Jess Franco. This is a horror movie more interested in the mundane details of the world in which its title character lives–architecture, city lights, construction traffic, leaky pipes, etc.–than in typical lurid exploitation. It’s a confounding and compelling take on familiar genre territory, and a film that gets better as it simmers in the memory. Diana is available through Vimeo VOD.
When Black Birds Fly
Any independent filmmaker wears a number of hats on a production, but Jimmy ScreamerClauz wears damn near all of them, and at the same time. ScreamerClauz creates nightmarish animated films, working almost entirely alone other than his voice cast and incorporating some music (although he does some of that, too). His previous feature-length film, 2012’s Where the Dead Go to Die, is a genuinely disturbing anthology of stories dealing with subjects no live-action film would dare. When Black Birds Fly is his second feature-length film, and while ScreamerClauz dials back the real-life horrors of his first film in favor of a more fantastic imaginary world, he amps up the insane visuals exponentially. This is also a lot less serious than his previous film, with moments of effective black comedy in the midst of creating a detailed universe and mythology. More than anything else, though, this is an impressively dense assault on the senses. ScreamerClauz uses CG animation to its maximum potential, creating images that would be literally impossible to realize in any other medium. When Black Birds Fly is available in various limited edition formats directly from the filmmaker, on Amazon VOD, and on DVD from MVD Entertainment.
CarousHELL
In some ways, CarousHELL is a traditional slasher film: there’s a killer, a bunch of dumb young people victims, and buckets of blood. In at least one very important way, though, it’s highly untraditional: the killer is a carousel unicorn named Duke who is tired of kids riding him all day long and finally snaps, leaving the carousel to go on a killing spree. CarousHELL is a horror comedy that’s nearly as gory as it is absurd, which is saying quite a lot. Despite the low-budget, director Steve Rudzinski and his team at Silver Spotlight Films pack this movie out with some impressively gruesome practical effects to accompany Duke’s murderous one-liners. In addition to inventive kills, the film delivers a sex scene for the ages between Duke and a young woman with a unicorn fetish played by indie horror star Haley Jay Madison, whose work has often been a highlight of films by indie directors like Henrique Couto and Dustin Wayde Mills. She also played a victim in Arthur Cullipher’s Headless, which provides a nice segue into the final film on this list. CarousHELL is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Silver Spotlight Films.
Harvest Lake
Scott Schirmer made a big splash on the indie horror festival circuit with his debut feature Found in 2012, and its film-within-a-film Headless proved so popular that it was made into its own feature in 2015. Following that successful production Schirmer teamed up with fellow Indiana filmmaker Brian Williams (director of 2014’s Time to Kill) to form Bandit Motion Pictures, which released two films in 2016: Harvest Lake and Plank Face. Plank Face is the more conventional of the two films, but that’s not saying much as Harvest Lake set a pretty high bar for weirdness. The setup is familiar–a group of young people visit a lake house for a weekend of partying but things don’t go quite as planned–but that’s where the similarities between this and other “cabin in the woods” movies end. Instead of a monster or killer lurking in the woods, there are strange plants whose secretions allow them to exert a kind of sexual mind control over anyone who ingests them. The result is closer to David Cronenberg’s Shivers than Friday the 13th, a beautifully shot and ominous dreamy hybrid of Lovecraftian horror and pan-sexual eroticism. Harvest Lake is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Bandit Motion Pictures, Vimeo VOD, and (as of this writing) free streaming for Amazon Prime subscribers.
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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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