About 20 years ago, when Jason Davis was a film student at Columbia College, he decided to be very upfront with his professors. He told them he was there to make horror films, which is probably the scariest thing a film instructor can hear. Even if they set aside dreary old antiquated arguments of what meaningful art should look like, the practical hurdles alone are beyond most young filmmakers — a truly effective horror movie needs an uncommonly skilled understanding of editing and lighting and drama.
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A professor asked: “Why even go to school to make a horror film? Why not just do it?”
A good question, and one that Davis knew had already been answered a million times before. Unlike every other film genre, the history of horror, at least since the 1950s, is a story of amateurs stumbling in the dark. And so Davis founded the Chicago Horror Film Festival at the 3 Penny Cinema in Lincoln Park, to spotlight Midwestern indie horror shorts. Twenty years on, he’s no longer with the festival, but the monster refuses to die.
In fact, when the Chicago Horror Film Festival begins Friday at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema in Lakeview, its schedule of 150 films — mostly shorts, a few features — will have been culled from more than 650 submissions. Scarier still, it opens months after a pair of smart indie horror movies, “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” made by Gen Z directors who cut their chops on YouTube, overtook the usual Hollywood I.P. factory, outperforming the latest “Star Wars” chapter. Even more terrifying: The Chicago Horror Film Festival isn’t alone anymore. An hour southwest of Rockford, the first Illinois Horror Movie Festival kicks off Friday in Milledgeville, screening 66 homemade horror shorts.
“I think what I like is you never know what you’re going to get,” said Miss Jenna NightVeil, the new festival’s director, “but you always know it couldn’t rely on … money.”
The pacing of these films can be off at times. The script may be nonexistent. The monster could be constructed out of Play-Doh. You might be too bored to be scared.
But when a good indie horror movie works — whoa.
There’s not another genre of cinematic storytelling quite so reliant on homegrown innovation, no-budget ingenuity and fresh-faced fearlessness as the regional American horror film — movies made cheaply, independently and, typically, outside Los Angeles. The tradition, with exceptions, dates back to the zero-budget monster flicks of Roger Corman, “It Conquered the World” (1956), “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957) and “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960). Arguably the first genuine benchmark of the regional horror film is “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), made in the Pittsburgh area by George Romero, with funds gathered from friends and family and businesses. A local butcher donated the gore, so to speak.
Or wait, maybe the first was “Carnival of Souls” (1962), an unnerving cult classic shot around Kansas for $30,000, with a crew of five using egg whites for ghoul makeup.
Either way, many of the milestones of the past 50 years of horror filmmaking originated with a similar band of amateurs operating outside the studios, learning on the job. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) was shot around farms in Central Texas by Austin students for $114,000. “The Evil Dead” (1981) was shot in an abandoned cabin in Tennessee for $350,000. “The Last House on the Left” (1972) was made in New York City using veteran porn filmmakers. For the original “Halloween” (1978), a crew in South Pasadena scattered, raked and reused the same bags of leaves to save money. For “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), the cast itself shot footage around state parks in Maryland. Many directors now synonymous with the genre — John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg, Sam Raimi — started out with small, regional oddities.
Khafre Liggens, whose 16-minute short “The Man Bat” is screening Sunday at the Chicago festival, said that he does feel as though he is working in this old tradition. “I hope Sam Raimi once felt the way I do, that he didn’t always know what he was doing but he also didn’t want to wait for permission to tell the stories that he wanted to tell.”
But at the same time, Liggens wondered if he could even call himself a filmmaker. When he’s not shooting horror movies — and he’s been making horror shorts around Chicago for the past 12 years — Liggens is a Chicago police officer. “Growing up, I watched Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien,’ John Carpenter’s films, old Universal monsters — can I really consider myself part of that lineage? I know by definition I’m a filmmaker, but I don’t know if I feel worthy to even consider myself doing that same job. You start at it from the ground up.”
The lessons, though, seem familiar, timeless.
Shadows, he understands, are free. A closed door is more ominous than an opened one. His Man Bat is actually an actor in a wetsuit with sculpted muscles, wrapped in electrical wiring — Chicago’s Mothman legend is the inspiration. But he also recently graduated from DePaul University with a master’s in cinematography and decided to shoot on costly 35mm film, playing to a grainy ‘70s aesthetic, awash in shadows. Final cost: “About $15,000, though at some point, I stopped calculating; it got too depressing.”
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Ashland Thomas, a former director of the Chicago Horror festival and now a filmmaker himself previewing his work this weekend at the Illinois Horror festival, said he remembers sifting through submissions “made for $5 in a garage, alongside shorts made for $20,000 — and the quality would be all over the place.” Budget was not necessarily a sign of talent. “You’d get films from people who seemed to wake up one day, call their friends and decide to make a movie in their backyard, and good for them.”
Ira Childs and Lionel L. Chapman, a pair of Chicago filmmaking friends who call themselves the Splatter Brothers, have made 15 shorts (and one feature “95% done”) since 2015. Their latest, “Circus City,” showing at the Chicago Horror festival, was partly shot in and around their own apartments. “We’ve learned you don’t have to pay for a location this way,” Childs said. “You can shoot there a while, just as long as you let neighbors know, ‘Look, you might see some murderous clowns running around.’”
“You learn that you’re learning,” Chapman said. “And every film, it’s something new.”
For David A. Holcombe, while making his mermaid horror flick, “Fish is Dog Spelled Backwards” (also at the Chicago festival), he learned to trust his instincts and lean into the power of herky-jerky, tactile realism. The night before he shot a scene at Oakwood Beach off 41st Street — a sequence in which an actor catches an unusual fish — he decided against creating the fish digitally. Instead, he bought a fishing pole and a small fish prop and painted it, then, while the scene was being shot, he worked it off camera.
Holcombe, 42, who primarily makes social-justice documentaries and works with a lot of young filmmakers, said: “It seems insane to me that teachers would dissuade anyone from trying horror. It’s such a great entry point. Drama is hard to do well in, but horror can be symbolic, surreal, silly — you can learn to make stuff with your hands and probably will. I often wonder if a good student in a film school is not in the most practical of places.”
None of this, of course, is new.
Except for the looming temptation to skip a step or two and use artificial intelligence. None of these filmmakers said that they succumbed. But some wondered if the grimy, low-fi tradition of the Regional American Horror Film could survive an AI future. They fear the grit of classic low-budget horror could lose its personality to a smooth professionalism. Think “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Chris Vecchio, co-director of the Chicago Horror festival, said he’s planning to institute an AI policy soon but, at least this year, he doesn’t think AI was used in any of the films being screened.
“At least not that I know of! It’s hard to tell! It wasn’t long ago indie horror was still basically a bunch of friends with an 8mm camera running around in the backyard,” he said. “But at least technically, you see people stepping up their game right now. Maybe because of all the box office success? I’m getting submissions these days, from young filmmakers — the quality is so good it’s terrifying.”
If you go
The Chicago Horror Film Festival runs Oct. 2-4 at Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St.; tickets and more information at www.chicagohorrorfilmfest.com