Gabe Powers

Conceived as a brutal homage to Roy Ward Baker’s British anthology horror classic Asylum (1972), Alex Chandon’s Cradle of Fear (2001) was a surprisingly well-promoted entry in the early-millennial indie extreme horror sweepstakes. Though nasty, Chandon’s film has more interest in entertaining a standard horror audience than nihilistic gore reels, like Fred Vogel's August Underground (also 2001) and Nick Palumbo’s Murder-Set-Pieces (2004). The vibe here is “Oh, man, gross!,” not “Jesus Christ...

After Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) took home the Big Five Oscar awards, the film world contracted serial killer fever. Throughout the rest of the decade and into the early 2000s, the genre helped studios put a classy sheen on an established slasher model. These were prestige products called ‘psychological thrillers,’ not dirty ‘horror movies.’ But serial killer movies didn’t require big budgets, so the bandwagon was easy for independent filmmakers to jump onto. Eventually, the...

Los Angeles’ underground punk and hardcore scene of the 1980s was most famously chronicled by Penelope Spheeris in the first of her trilogy of documentaries, entitled Decline of Western Civilization (1981), and her first narrative feature, Suburbia (1983). The scene was further represented in Adam Small & Peter Stuart’s Another State of Mind (1984) and Alex Cox’s satirical sci-fi classic Repo Man (1984). All of these films were gritty and subversive products of the counterculture, yet...