Editorials
5 More Overlooked Indie Horror Films You Should Watch
With the ease of movie-making technology and the advent of numerous new venues for watching films, the number of releases per year has grown exponentially. It’s great for horror fans looking for new movies, but it can be tough for horror filmmakers to find an audience with the sheer number of films for viewers to choose from.
Today we’re serving up five MORE overlooked indie horror films that deserve more attention than they received.
The Ugly (1997)
This 1997 film from New Zealand was released in the U.S. during its initial run, but you wouldn’t know it from its near-invisible streaming presence. The story follows a fame-hungry psychologist who wants to profile a notoriously violent serial killer who has spent years in isolation in a mental hospital. As she begins her sessions, she thinks she’s getting inside his head… but she slowly realizes it’s the other way around.The dilapidated asylum is a stand-in for the corroded mind of the killer Simon, played with both vulnerability and menace by Paolo Rotondo. Scott Reynolds’ feature directorial debut is assured and disturbing, and it’s a crime that both he and Rotondo weren’t hot commodities after this film. With stark cinematography, haunting images, and an impactful ending, the movie leaves a lasting impression. Though it’s hard to find it digitally, it’s definitely worth hunting down.
They Look Like People (2015)
Perry Blackshear’s first feature is a triumph of ingenuity on a tiny budget. Childhood friends Wyatt and Christian get together again as twentysomethings after both have just gotten out of a troubled relationship. Christian is wounded and trying to find motivation to ask his co-worker out, while Wyatt is dealing with something much more serious: he believes that creatures are infecting and taking over people he loves in preparation for a worldwide takeover.The film has three primary performers, and they all do subtle, excellent work, with the two male leads embodying a compelling and lived-in friendship. The sound work in the film is excellent and unnerving, and the few visual effects in the film are simple but hauntingly memorable. They Look Like People is a slow-burn indie that uses its minuscule resources for fantastic results.
Mr. Jones (2013)
There have been so many found footage films in the wake of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity that sometimes it feels like there’s nothing new to do with the format. Thankfully, films like Mr. Jones come along to re-invest me with hope for the future of the style. To spoil how it subverts expectations would be robbing the film of its most interesting surprises.Writer/director Karl Mueller tells the story of a couple who moves to a cabin in the woods so the boyfriend can work on finishing his film project. They discover they’re distant neighbors with a strange outsider artist named Mr. Jones, known for anonymously mailing his disturbing work to random people. After they sneak into his house to learn more about him, strange things start to plague them. There’s so much more to the story than this; find out for yourself.
PVC-1 (2007)
The central premise is simple: a woman has a bomb secured in a PVC pipe around her neck by armed gunmen who tell her family to provide them with ransom money or they will activate the bomb. What ensues is the real-time journey of the family, from their isolated house to a police station where an officer tries to help them deactivate the bomb.The simplicity of the story allows director Spiros Stathoulopoulos to flex his muscles with this film that is shot entirely in a single unbroken take. The terrifying directness of the story is all the more affecting if you know that the events of the story are based on a true story. Cast with non-actors in many roles, and containing passages of haunting silence and close-ups of anguished faces in the midst of existential uncertainty, PVC-1 is a powerful piece of verite filmmaking.
The Human Race (2013)
In an instant, eighty people are torn out of their normal lives and dropped into a winner take all race. They are given a designated path and a few rules: don’t leave the path or you die, get passed three times by the group and you die, and keep going until there is only one runner left. It is appropriate that director Paul Hough’s film is about running because the action in his first feature film never slows down.A clear labor of love for the filmmaker and his enormous cast, the film paints a big picture on a small canvas. Shocking deaths, double-crosses, a diverse cast, and a wickedly dark sense of humor make this high-concept, high-octane film a fantastic watch with a group of friends. It can be found easily online, and you should find it soon.
Editorials
Taking a Closer Look at the ‘Christmas Carol’ Ghosts of Ti West’s ‘Ebenezer’
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’

The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’

Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.


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