Art the Clown isn't the only game in town if you're looking for a cheap thrill. In fact, the increasingly successful Terrifier series is going upscale, at least from its humble, $35,000 origins: the latest film in the demon slasher series came in for around a cool $2 million—still cheap, but a far cry from the early days. And no one is likely to say it wasn't worth the extra investment: The third installment opened at #1 at the U.S. box office, taking an axe to the wildly disappointing Joker: Folie á Deux. That movie cost around $200 million and fell to fourth place in just its second weekend. Money ain't everything, even in movies, and horror movies have a long and venerable history of doing a lot for a little. Resourceful filmmakers with access to a bucket or two of fake blood have been able to craft suspenseful and/or horrifying stories with nothing more than a few thousand bucks and, sometimes, a willingness to toss actors into harm's way.
In celebration of Art's triumph over the combined might of the Joker and Harley Quinn, here are 18 other movies that built a lot of horror from precious little cash.
Creep (2014)
I've seen suggestions that the budget for Creep was as low as $500, which seems impossible, but the found-footage film certainly wasn't expensive, and built careers for director and co-star Patrick Brice, as well as co-writer and co-star Mark Duplass. Videographer Aaron (Patrick Brice) shows up at a cabin in the middle of nowhere to help Josef (Duplass) create a video diary for his unborn child—he's dying, he says. Which is poignant, until Aaron's car keys go missing and Josef gets progressively weirder, first in awkward, uncomfortable ways that get progressively more sinister. It's a simple format done well, and with disturbing style—sort of a two-hander play done as a horror movie. The sequel is similarly successful, and done on a similar micro-budget.
Where to stream: Netflix, digital rental
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Budgeted at $60,000, the original Chain Saw movie went over that by various reported amounts, the best guess being that the movie wound up being made somewhere in the $140,000 range—not nothing, especially in 1974, but still firmly on the cheap side. It works, in part, because audiences come away from the movie feeling as though they've seen something far more gory than they actually have; the gritty, dusty, filthy confines of the Leatherface family compound seeping into your soul before the closing credits. Of course, a low budget does come with some trade-offs, including cast safety: Tobe Hooper talked about how each cast member sustained injuries of some sort, and one actor even had his finger sliced open when stage blood just wasn't working. Verisimilitude gone a bit too far, perhaps.
Where to stream: Tubi, Peacock, Prime Video
Skinamarink (2022)
No plot, just freaky vibes in writer/director Kyle Edward Ball's feature debut. An ode to childhood nightmares, it was made for the dream price of $15,000, having begun life as a YouTube channel devoted to recreations of the childhood nightmares submitted by users. What plot there is involves a four-year-old named Kevin who injures himself while home alone with his six-year-old sister, Kaylee. There's little narrative logic in what follows, and it’s entirely easy to understand why the film was polarizing for audiences who, understandably, are waiting for something to happen. Where the film succeeds, and brilliantly, is in recreating the sense of a child’s twilight world, one in which even a familiar home can feel bizarre, unsettling, and terrifying under the right circumstances. Ball takes his time creating that mood, and opens doors on childhood perception that you might have thought were closed forever.
Where to stream: Hulu, AMC+, Shudder, digital rental
Paranormal Activity (2007)
Whatever you think about the series as a whole after about 80 sequels and spin-offs, the first was a legitimate phenomenon and one that kept me, a horror movie junkie, up half the night staring at my bedroom door. Cheap? Sure. Effective? Absolutely. Shot for approximately $15,000 with a two-person cast and static cameras, the film documents the haunting of a typical San Diego home involving a couple of 20-somethings. No gore here, just creepy doings and weird stuff happening while you're asleep. The initial budget was supplemented to the tune of around $200,000 for upscaling and reshoots when it was picked up by a studio, but that's still a spookily paltry budget for a movie that went on to make something like $200 million dollars.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Psycho (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock was at the absolute height of his popularity and directorial powers, and studios still didn't want to touch Psycho—seen as lurid and trashy, the higher-ups at Paramount (then Hitch's home base) worried, in particular, what being associated with such a project would do to the reputation of their star director. Determined, Hitchcock worked out a deal to film at Universal using the TV crew from his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, while forgoing his typical fee in lieu of a share of profits. $800,000 wasn't nothing in 1960, but it's as low as any budget he'd worked with in his then-20 years in Hollywood; for comparison, his previous film, North by Northwest, cost 4.5 million. No matter: Psycho, with its corpses, cross-dressing serial killer, and oedipal subtext was among the biggest hits of Hitch's career—and that profit-sharing deal made him very, very rich.
Where to stream: Netflix, digital rental
Carnival of Souls (1962)
A producer and director of those educational and industrial films that we often saw mocked back in the MST3K days, Herk Harvey spotted an old abandoned resort pavilion and was able to rent it for $50. The story of a woman (Candace Hilligoss) who stumbles into a mysterious carnival following a car accident, Carnival of Souls is suffused with brilliantly spooky atmospherics and existential dread, feeling a bit like a Jean Cocteau movie...made for around $30,000. It doesn't look expensive, but it feels rich, predating George Romero's low-budget opus Night of the Living Dead by six years.
Where to stream: Max, AMC+, Tubi, Shudder, Crackle, the Criterion Channel, Prime Video
Spider Baby (1967)
"This cannibal orgy," the opening narration goes, "is strange to behold in the maddest story ever told." Spider Baby is a cult classic bit of southern Gothic trash (that's complimentary) involving the caretaker (Lon Chaney Jr.) of three siblings suffering from a made-up disease that causes them to regress back down the evolutionary ladder once they hit puberty. Ralph is naive but desperately and aggressively horny; Virginia is obsessed with spiders, occasionally murdering unsuspecting visitors by trapping them in webs of her own construction; Elizabeth is the least violent of the three, but helps to cover up the crimes of the rest of the family. Poor Bruno is just trying to hold things together, a task complicated when distant relatives show up to lay claim to the family home. Though filmed three years before its release, this was one of the last films for Lon Chaney Jr.; his health already in decline, the actor took the job for a mere $2,500, one of the film's many cost-saving innovations.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, Prime Video
Open Water (2003)
Hard-working couple Daniel and Susan just want to spend some time together, and a scuba-diving trip sounds like just the thing. Until they wander off and the boat leaves them behind. In the ocean. Full of jellyfish and also sharks. It's a brilliantly elegant premise made more believable, and far more intense, with the use of actual sharks in the filming (taking up most of the movie's relatively small budget). The dynamic between the central couple isn't terribly compelling, but you wouldn't want to get too attached to them, anyway.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
Halloween (1978)
A collaboration between director John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill, Halloween is the dream for any independent filmmaker: Impressed by Carpenter's earlier Assault on Precinct 13 (made for just $100,000), producer Irwin Yablans and financier Moustapha Akkad were willing to give the director a shot at a slightly higher-budget movie, but only if it were to be a Black Christmas-style stalker horror movie. The rest is history: With Carpenter on the scary bits and Hill writing believable teenagers, the movie was a surprising box office hit and an even more surprising critical success. It remains among the most profitable independent movies ever, even without the endless sequels and reboots.
Where to stream: AMC+, Shudder, digital rental
Friday the 13th (1980)
A slightly more expensive movie to make than Halloween, though you wouldn't know it to watch, Friday the 13th rode the slasher wave that the Carpenter/Hill film started to big box office and franchise glory. Of course, it wouldn't be until the second film in the series that our beloved Jason would become the threat, but no matter: Sean S. Cunningham's summer-camp slasher is a lean, no-frills horror movie in which we're introduced to camp counselors only to watch them get murdered in increasingly elaborate ways. It might not be high art, but it does exactly what it says in the tin.
Where to stream: Paramount+, AMC+, Shudder, digital rental
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
The indie hit that opened up a whole new world of low-budget horror filmmaking, Blair Witch took the found footage format and made it into a genre of its own, for better or worse. Filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez created an outline for the film and then left it largely to its cast to improvise dialogue while wandering around in the woods. It shouldn't work, but Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard sell every minute (perhaps because they were genuinely put through the wringer, both during filming and in the years since). From an initial budget somewhere in the $25,000 range, the film earned hundreds of millions, and still manages to creep people out.
Where to stream: Peacock, digital rental
The Innkeepers (2011)
Well before the X series, Ti West directed several acclaimed horror movies that didn't make a whole lot of money but, hey, also didn't cost a ton. The Innkeepers is probably my favorite of the early batch: starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, and Kelly McGillis, it's set at the closing weekend of the once-venerable Yankee Pedlar Inn—a real and allegedly haunted hotel in Torrington, Connecticut, where some of the movie was filmed. A couple of slacker desk clerks are overseeing the place while also hoping for some evidence of the supernatural. As you might expect, they get their wish. A solid, effective haunted hotel story with a couple of neat twists.
Where to stream: Peacock, Tubi, Shudder, Prime Video
The Evil Dead (1981)
Though largely serving as a proof-of-concept for the more elaborate and expensive Evil Dead II (a virtual remake), Sam Raimi's original Evil Dead has nasty pleasures of its own, eschewing the very dark comedy that the series would come to be known for. Five Michigan State University students, including Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell, naturally), head off for a weekend at a cabin in the woods(!) in rural Tennessee, where all sorts of demonic activity ensues. The gloriously old-school (and over-the-top) practical effects were crafted on a slim budget without ever looking cheap.
Where to stream: Tubi, AMC+, digital rental
Cannibal Holocaust (1978)
Such was the shock over the proto-found footage style of Cannibal Holocaust that its director, Ruggero Deodato, was charged with obscenity and then murder, the film’s vérité style so convincing that some audiences believed that it was a document of genuine cannibal-related deaths. The quasi-viral marketing campaign, decades before Blair Witch) fed into that belief by keeping the movie’s actors out of the spotlight (until they were needed to clear Deodato's name). All that for $100,000.
Where to stream: Peacock
Hush (2016)
Mike Flanagan's 2011 feature debut, Absentia, was similarly brilliant and made on a shoestring, but my favorite of his early-ish, low-budget works is this slasher—made short before he'd hit it big with Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, etc. Co-writer Kate Siegel also stars here as a deaf horror author stalked by a killer. Sharp and thoroughly suspenseful, the film makes great use of the lead character's deafness without ever treating the resourceful writer as an object of pity.
Where to stream: Shudder, AMC+, digital rental
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
I tried to cap budgets on this list at around a million dollars or so, even though you could go much higher and still consider a movie low-budget. I'm making an exception for Wes Craven's masterpiece, A Nightmare on Elm Street, which came in at about $1.8 million. That's still not a lot of money, and seems shocking given all that Craven was able to accomplish here: elaborate dream sequences, set pieces involving buckets of blood and rooms on gimbles, fights, fires, and even a couple of name actors in John Saxon and Academy Award nominee (for Nashville) Ronee Blakley. Oh, and let's not forget Robert Englund's iconic Freddy makeup. It seems impossible that this polished and acclaimed horror movie was made for that amount of money but, of course, Craven had experience in doing a lot with a little in films like The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes.
Where to stream: Max, digital rental
You're Next (2011)
Erin (Sharni Vinson) accompanies her boyfriend to his family reunion in rural Missouri—a terrifying scenario right from the start, but, believe it or not, it gets worse. Intruders, one in a fox mask and one in a lamb mask, start killing family members who are forced to hide and defend themselves with help from resourceful Erin. It's a sly and well-executed slasher from director Adam Wingard, with a clever twist.
Where to stream: Netflix, digital rental
Terrifier (2016)
Art the Clown begins here, with this $35,000 slasher that introduces the demonic killer clown at the outset of his increasingly gory multi-movie killing spree. Each movie in the series has cost a a bit more, while also performing significantly better at the box office. With Terrifier 3 already doing big numbers, and getting solid critical reviews, a fourth movie is on the way.
Where to stream: Peacock, Tubi, Prime Video
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