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This chapter describes the use of the Arriflex 35 in low-budget films. These include films such as Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence (1961), Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Skill with an Arriflex also launched the careers of a number of important cinematographers, most famously, Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs.

This chapter traces the production history of SAW (2004). The film was initially conceived and filmed as a short by its creators, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, in order to create a 'calling card' for potential backers. However, backers were suitably impressed, and the two received enough capital to expand SAW into a full-length cinema release. It is interesting to consider how such an apparently humble text as SAW, one that propagates such abject, extreme imagery, has caught the public imagination. Like other game-changing horror successes, SAW's budget was, by Hollywood standards, very low. However, low-budget successes are familiar to horror, with fans expectant of, and even encouraged by, a film's lowly roots. The distributors of SAW were quick to capitalise on the film's genre appeal. Lionsgate released the film, and every subsequent sequel, on the weekend before Halloween. This savvy marketing strategy imbued each film with the aura of an 'event' release. The impact of SAW on the genre industry is discernible in the extreme horror films that followed on from its success, films that emphasised their gory content and focused on themes of pain and suffering.

This chapter focuses on the birth of modern horror. The horror genre is ultimately concerned with the battle between good and evil. At times this can be very clearly delineated, but in real life this is not always the case. At the time of its release, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was truly ground-breaking in its approach to horror in everyday life. Shocking and controversial, it was initially denounced by critics yet became a worldwide box-office sensation and set the direction of the genre for the next fifty years. One of the most analysed and discussed films in cinema history, and arguably the single most influential film in the evolution of the horror genre, entire books have been written about every aspect of Psycho's production, reception and lasting influence. By contextualising the film in the environment of a Hollywood that found itself under mounting pressures, the chapter examines how Hitchock's low-budget film changed the face of horror forever.

This chapter gives a detailed summary of the events in the film, and discusses the techniques and devices it employs to tell the story. It describes how Terence Fisher, the director of The Curse of Frankenstein, was received by some film critics. He was as an auteur, a director with a unique creative vision, which imbues his oeuvre with particular and consistent artistic qualities for some, and for others, he was a hack and a plodder who made derivative and uninteresting films. The chapters also talks about the remarkably vigorous quality of the team's work ethics. It describes how the team remained harmonious and excited throughout the making of the film even though the working conditions were not always ideal. The chapter also discusses how the film was able to work around its relatively small budget. Though it manifests in the small number of shooting locations and the size of the cast, the budget limits were otherwise extremely well hidden by the deceptively spacious scenes captured by Fisher's camera, and in the immaculate costume and scenographic design. The chapter also discusses how audiences received the film when it was first shown in theaters.

This chapter talks about the initial reception of the film and its rise to cultdom. It discusses how a film that gets prematurely dismissed as bad is able to rise above by gaining some high profile and highly vocal supporters. One such supporter that was cited was Quentin Tarantino who mentioned The Thing as an inspiration to Reservoir Dogs. The chapter states that this was a crucial stage in the film's journey from flop to classic. It discusses how The Thing qualifies as a cult film citing its budget, its approach to goriness, and its troubled production story. It also discusses the transformations the film had to go through as it was transferred for home-video release, and for cable TV. The chapter describes the film's reception in the 1990s and the decades that have followed. It also discusses the film's influence on films and TV shows in the 2000s.

This chapter deals with Veit Harlan’s belated and unexpectedly intense interest in the cinema as an art form. Although his first four films are adaptations of stage plays, two of which Harlan had directed himself, he is more interested in visuals than in dialogue. He is particularly interested in dissolves, some formal and others metaphorical. Dissolves will become his trademark, most notoriously used in Jud Süss. Despite his own artistic ambitions, Harlan is initially regarded as little more than a reliable director of low-budget comedies, and his debut film, Krach im Hinterhaus (Trouble backstairs, 1935), remains for several decades the only German low-budget film by a first-time director to become one of the year’s top-grossing pictures. Unusual for an alleged opportunist, he makes his fourth film, Alles für Veronika (All for Veronica, 1936), for a Jewish producer, Moritz Grünstein, in Budapest’s Hunnia studios.

This chapter examines the events that led Hal Ashby to direct the film The Last Detail. During the pre-production of Three Cornered Circle, actor Jack Nicholson told Ashby about his upcoming film The Last Detail. Nicholson recommended to producer Gerry Ayres to bring in Ashby to direct the film. This film was a clear step up for Ashby. He had his biggest budget yet at $2.6 million and salary of $95,000.

This chapter is about the economics of musical film production. Early economical efforts such as Broadway Melody and Gold Diggers of Broadway reaped huge returns, but were followed by overpriced failures like MGM’s unreleased March of Time. Another MGM film, Dancing Lady, was considered the model of efficient cost and profit, while the studio’s later series of Esther Williams films were overwhelmingly profitable. The careful budgeting of a 42^nd Street later gave way to the excess cost and financial failure of films like The Pirate and Porgy and Bess, and in the later 1960s the budgets of films like Hello, Dolly! spiralled totally out of control. In the 2000s, a Chicago or Les Miz will do well at a moderate cost, but far more expensive action films are always considered more feasible.

This chapter marks a return to De Palma's roots in comedy with Home Movies (1980), which was similar to The Wedding Party (1964–65), Greetings (1968), and Hi, Mom! (1970), all made in the 1960s. Another sense in which the new film marked a “coming home” for De Palma was that he returned to Sarah Lawrence, the college where as a student he had gained his first filmmaking experience under mentor Wilford Leach. Now De Palma would be the mentor, giving later students some hands-on filmmaking experience, since Home Movies would be made by them as part of a class that De Palma was teaching on how to make a low-budget film.

This chapter analyses the artistic aspects of House of Usher (1960) to reveal how Roger Corman's crew managed to successfully fuse the dark Romantic tradition to which Edgar Allan Poe belongs with a more expressionist horror film aesthetic that made the film more directly appealing to 1960s horror-movie audiences. Used in the context of low-budget horror films, expressionism should be understood as a term denoting ‘art which depends on free and obvious distortions of natural forms to convey emotional feeling’. House of Usher is not expressionistic because its frames resemble the art of Edvard Munch, but because its mise-en-scène is not naturalistic but functions as a visual vehicle for the expression of subjective states of mind and emotions. In developing House of Usher, Corman told his crew: ‘I never want to see “reality” in any of these scenes’. The décor of the Usher mansion is not designed for verisimilitude, but to give the audience a glimpse at the fear that lurks in the darkest corners of Roderick's psyche.