Retreating From The Elephant: The Perpetually Impending Demise of Indie Cinema

by Scout Tafoya

At any given moment, the movie I’m most looking forward to seeing simply doesn’t exist because no one financed it. Right now, it’s the new movie by Amanda Wilder. We are more than 10 years away from “Approaching The Elephant,” the magnificent and sensitive documentary about an alternative school in New Jersey, made by someone who seemed primed to become the heir apparent to Allan King. The trouble? No one with money ever paid to find out just what Amanda Wilder’s career could have been. 

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve spent the better part of the last three years trying to get a movie financed, and when that didn’t happen, I quite literally begged people for money and came up with just enough cash to shoot it. We still owe many thousands of dollars to different funds, and there’s no post-production budget. If this sounds like a blue ribbon winner at the 8th-grade sob story competition, it most certainly is, but imagine how the rest of the independent film world feels. 

I’ve been making micro-budget features since I was 20. Some people tried to do things the hard way, and all they got was this lousy economy and a sudden industry interest in movies by YouTubers. During my years-long odyssey to get my film “Stubborn Beast,” co-directed with my best friend in the world, Tucker Johnson, I called in every favor I had accrued, and when I tell you it wasn’t even close to enough…

The film I’m looking to second of all is the non-existent follow-up to Jennifer Prediger and Jess Weixler’s sharp and surreal “Apartment Troubles,” a comedy that came out of nowhere, the product of two underutilized actresses with a lot to offer beyond the bare facts of their places in the film economy. This hysterical movie struck me as the arrival of a duo capable of anything. Evidently, I was wrong, as no one else but me seemed to rise to this special movie’s defense. 

The independent film world is more harsh and worryingly dispirited than it’s been since the 1960s. I was asking people for leads, only to be told time and again that if such things existed, there’d be a much healthier American cinema. Or as Bruce LaBruce memorably let me down easy: “Honey, if I knew someone, I’d be making a movie right now.” And LaBruce is comparatively prolific if not better treated by distributors, certainly in America. It’s a miracle when one of his movies makes it to my television, let alone theaters near me. 

The one art theatre in Baltimore needs new projectors and runs mainstream movies to keep the lights dim, and programmers like Eric Allen Hatch and Alex Lei try to keep the cinema flourishing elsewhere. Alex and I took Tony Buba, the legendary (to the initiated) documentarian behind “Lightning Over Braddock,” and it took us both by surprise how much the experience of an 82-year-old experimental Marxist non-fiction director and the 36-year-old version of the same thing were alike. 

As Amanda Wilder’s second film doesn’t exist, as “Apartment Troubles 2” seems less than certain, the movie I’m most looking forward to this year, Patrick Wang’s “A. Rimbaud,” I likely won’t see. It’s only playing a handful of theatrical dates, put up almost like concerts. A great artist can no longer rely on regular bookings. With this in mind, I wanted to run down a list of artists whose work struggles to enter the public consciousness, or indeed artists who never made their second film.

Read List here…

Independent cinema gets thrown around at directors who maybe once had to scrounge to get their budgets, like Sean Baker and the now-divided, rightly polarizing Safdie brothers, but they’ve been supported by a pretty serious financial apparatus in the last 15 years. Those directors ought to be subsidizing independent cinema, and to their credit sometimes they do (Baker produced Joanna Arnow’s first feature to his eternal credit), but there is no reason for there to be an ecosystem of people connected by and best defined by wasted potential, and that’s before we tally up “valedictory” figures like Alan Rudolph, John Waters, Billy Woodberry, Julie Dash, Tamara Jenkins, and Larry Fessenden. As with any other industry with insufficient union protections, the infrastructure was made by people who won’t get to enjoy it. 

So yes, by all means, feel sorry for me, GOD KNOWS I NEED IT, but I’m at the very bottom of a very long list. The less curious we get about where the money is going, the more we have to settle for not caring what the studio system produces, because there’s only so much funding, only so much oxygen, and only so much room at the top, and that’s without factoring in the people who kick the ladder down when they’ve made it there. Enjoy the next movies you see with no studio financing, no name producer, no major stars, the next truly independent movie you see. It could be your last. 

read full article at RogerEbert.com

Nathan Grubbs’s COWBOY continues festival run after unspooling at the
2026 Radiance Film Festival in London.

In New Orleans, war veterans Juno and Mo scrape by on small-time heists, selling their loot to a secretive pawn shop owner. When Juno plans a risky horse theft to fund a fresh start,
a rival’s betrayal leads to tragedy and prison. Haunted by his past, he re-enters a woman’s life under a lie, desperate for forgiveness.

 written by Chris Sivertson, Jeff Hoffman, Joshua Deitz.
produced by Nathan Grubbs, Laura Singleterry and
GEP pal Marc Senter (BLACKOUT, TRAUMA OR; MONSTERS ALL).
starring Nathan Grubbs, Alexandra Essoe, Marc Senter, Eddie Steeples and Fessenden.

Keep a lookout for COWBOY as it makes its rounds in the Festival circuit. 

Poster at by Zachary Johnson

GEP Pal Ilya Chaiken (LIBERTY KID, MARGARITA HAPPY HOUR, PRETTY UGLY: THE STORY OF THE LUNACHICKS) rehashes short film, written by & starring Holly Ramos.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival 2004.
Originally commissioned by the 1st Howl East Village Film Festival 2003.

See it now on Vimeo!

Ana Asensio, director of the GEP award winning MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND
(and frequent TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE thespian),
returns to the director’s chair with her second feature GOAT GIRL
which began its US release at Cinema Village 7/19 with Fessenden hosting the Q&A.
Photos by Jimmy Ryan

See GOAT GIRL at Cinema Village

Goat Girl (Spanish: La niña de la cabra)^[1] is a 2025 coming-of-age drama film
written and directed by Ana Asensio starring Alessandra González and Juncal Fernández.

The film premiered at the 28th Málaga Film Festival on 18 March 2025
ahead of its 11 April 2025 theatrical release in Spain by Avalon.

By Erik Reeds

Picture this: The Earth is melting. The alarm bells have been sounded for ages, and nobody is doing anything. The general public wavers between shock and apathy, ultimately settling on profit motives and unending capital growth. Things are getting more and more atomized. You feel called to action, and yet you know you can only watch as shit hits the fan at increasingly high speeds. At a certain point, everything seems to be getting so depressing and solipsistic that you yearn for a real doomsday – a real last winter, if you will. This was Larry Fessenden’s vision in 2006, when he released his potential magnum opus in The Last Winter. How are things today?

Perhaps it’s better to begin discussions of The Last Winter with a brief mention about Wendigo, Fessenden’s earlier, more intimate creature-based horror. That film is closer to a chamber horror, with a minimal cast and fairly sparse narrative developments (the violence is scant and devastating), but it features a similar wintery setting and a nature-as-redemption plot device. The coded politics in that film are present, but are just that: present. In The Last Winter, they are bursting at the seams; it’s an embittered, desperate cry against the world for ravaging itself to dust. There is also, of course, a wendigo spirit, one which seems capable of great destruction but also great beauty. One wonders if, by the end of it, this is even consequential to humanity’s likely doom, or if we’re already getting ourselves there just fine on our own.

Neither the setup nor the political themes are especially radical, yet everything flows together so well that the closest cinematic relative of The Last Winter might be Carpenter’s The Thing, a similarly icy, totally brilliant movie that mines horror from the atomization of man. The Last Winter, like Carpenter’s film, is about a crew in the frozen tundra, this time in Alaska. Both films are microcosmic horrors of sorts — works about how things are obviously dire for their isolated protagonists and how much worse it will get if the outbreak extends beyond their small, deteriorating world.

James Hoffman (James Le Gros, who does phenomenal work) is an environmental consultant who hates his job: working as the patsy for an oil company. Hoffman is a world-weary scientist, someone who, even in his young age, has seen so much of nature obliterated that he feels torn between passionate defiance and quiet obedience. His angel on his shoulder is fellow scientist Elliot Jenkins (Jamie Herrold), who tries to invigorate him into defying oil company North, their employer. His devil is Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman, never better), the head of the local drilling operation, who needs Hoffman’s approval to allow North to commence drilling operations. Pollack’s rhetoric is convincing; he spits out words like “energy independence” as if they have any tangible meaning, and he is clearly peeved about the presence of any environmental loonies in his rugged operation. Things quickly go south when one of Pollack’s family friends, Maxwell (Zach Gilford), goes off the deep end before getting spirited away by some sort of tundra ghost.

The calamities begin to pile up, rescue and help seem a million miles away and there’s little the isolated base can do to save themselves. Fessenden intelligently never really frames his kills in this sequence as being entirely the result of his beloved wendigos; instead, there’s an element of plausible deniability when a character dies from seemingly natural causes or another is killed by a worker who has clearly lost her mind. It’s not until the final segment, where Hoffman and Pollack are at the end of their rope just outside an Inuit village, that Fessenden gives in and shows off his surprisingly well-CGI’d wendigo finale. Pollack’s demise is to be expected from a revenge-minded horror film, but Hoffman’s is some of the most tender in all of cinema; it feels closer to Mekas than anything resembling Carpenter. 

The Last Winter is hardly the first horror film to structure its kills around justifiable revenge, but Fessenden treads a dangerous line in his application of that trope. Do the North employees (along with the environmental scientists) deserve death for their stochastic violence against nature? What about their violence against humans – the communities near the base, whose lives are being slowly uprooted due to climate change? The irony of the two (white) disheveled leads groveling before the nearest Native residents after all hell has broken loose will not be lost on astute viewers. Hoffman’s internal voiceovers do a great job at communicating directly what is already implied from the visual language: nature is fighting back against a dangerous parasite — us. 

Like all Fessenden’s best films, there’s a sort of unspoken mourning here — mot necessarily for the deaths of the characters, many of which seem apathetic or even excited about the destruction of the world, but because the events don’t seem to change anything. This existentialism is fairly basic; the fact that it somehow works along with everything else the film is doing is a minor miracle. It’s such an overwhelmingly bleak (yet realistic) look at how things are, which can make it a tough sit. The question eventually becomes whether the audience is supposed to identify with the wendigo or with Hoffman. The answer, perhaps, is that it’s easier to identify with one of the workers who met their cruel fate before they realized just how bad things really are.

Fessenden stocks have not been exceptionally high at any point in film history, though they were likely never lower after The Last Winter, which was a colossal flop upon release. It’s not hard to see why: not since Mamet’s Spartan has a Hollywood release been so brutally black-pilled. What pleasures it offers do not depart much from Fessenden’s other, subtler material, and those works, despite their occasional brilliance, never caught on to the degree that they probably should have. This is normally the part where one mourns for the lost reception of the film in question and pleads for any potential readers to give it the old college try. In the case of The Last Winter, it may be more fitting to plead for environmental consciousness and activism instead, no matter how hopeless the prospects seem. If you do need a film to at least jump-start you into that headspace, it’s difficult to think of a more fitting one than this.

Read at Spectrum Culture

BIRTH OF THE LIVING DEAD now streaming on AMC Plus.

By SERGIO PEREIRA

The best werewolf movies inspire the viewer to bark at the moon. Having said that, there are so many options in this genre that some films often get eclipsed by other high-profile counterparts. For example, most audience members know all too well about the influence of “Teen Wolf” and “An American Werewolf in London,” but how many remember the likes of “Wolf” or “The Cursed?” Maybe they might ring a bell to one or two people, but they’re howling good times in their own right and deserve more attention.

It’s time to rectify this and give the spotlight to the best werewolf movies nobody talks about anymore. In terms of selection criteria, the films chosen here all have positive scores on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer at the time of writing and rarely appear on best-of lists. Basically, they’re underrated gems of the genre.

BLACKOUT

Larry Fessenden should be a name familiar to lovers of indie horror. He possesses a highly impressive filmography as a writer, actor, director, and producer. In 2023, Fessenden wrote and directed “Blackout.”

So, what’s “Blackout” about? The protagonist in the story is artist Charley Barrett (Alex Hurt), who drinks heavily to the point of blacking out — much like the title of the film. However, Charley also has another problem: He suspects that he might be a werewolf and is murdering folks. There’s a sense of shame he feels when he wakes up every morning and comes to terms with what he’s doing to the townspeople of Talbot Falls. Thus, this becomes a tale about Charley grappling with his choices and inner turmoil.

“Blackout” wanders more on the drama side than straight-up horror, as it becomes a character study about Charley. This is deeper than ordinary werewolf movies, where a character needs to deal with their duality. Instead, this is Charley coming to terms with the fact that the werewolf is a part of him — not just an alter ego. It’s a fascinating approach to the werewolf concept, and the critics agreed too, as “Blackout” earned itself 75% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer.

Check out full list at Looper

From The Writer of MADGE, THE WORLD SPIDER, AND ONE LAST DRINK

Like any good bar story, this one began in a bar. But not just any bar. The Hamptons on King Ave, in Columbus, Ohio was the spot. Or rather, not the spot, but a spot, situated near the campus of The Ohio State University. My buddies and I would meet there on the patio some nights during our college years. We found ourselves on that same patio a few times after graduation, with plans to catch up, introduce new girlfriends, and search for some meaning to connect us and our uncertain futures as our lives created distance from each other. 

The vibes of The Hamptons, which has since been closed down, were always off. Something sad radiated from that place, and no amount of loud music from the jukebox or cheering football fans could drown it out for me. It was a sobering place, and sober I remained, as observer instead of a partaker in my mates’ revelries. The basement, where the pool tables were, was almost always empty. It felt separate from the bar upstairs, but no more comforting. There was a bar counter down there too, but with no bartender and no drinks. On the wall hung a cheaply made pop art painting of a woman who looked like she could’ve Marilyn Monroe or Madonna, but so indistinct that she truly could’ve been anyone. And in the corner of that basement was a dance floor, made for no more than two people. In the middle of the floor was a small disco ball. In all the times I visited The Hamptons, I never saw anyone on that dance floor. But I always wondered, what if there had been someone? And so, Madge was born. 

Though the memory of that place and the possibility of that lone dancer remained, it would be two years before some semblance of that story began to take shape during my MFA program at Adelphi University on Long Island. In fact, it was the title, “Madge, The World Spider, and One Last Drink,” that came to me first. Why a World-Spider? Well, spiders made me uneasy, yet I was fascinated by them. Some aspect of those feelings, mixed with being a lifelong Spider-Man fan, and a love for The Cure’s “Lullaby” gave birth to the World Spider in 2014. After numerous reworkings, largely pertaining to Rodney’s characterization, I published “Madge, the World Spider, and One Last Drink” in my short story collection, We Make Monsters Here in 2021. 

I sent the collection to a few friends in the horror space who I thought would dig it. Co-producer of this tale, Sean Redlitz, a screenwriter who I met through his work at Shudder, was one of the first I sent it to. He and Jenn Wexler’s positive response emboldened me to think about the potential of the stories beyond the page. At the time, I had no idea he knew Larry Fessenden. But I had connected with Larry on a piece I wrote for Fangoria called “Reckoning with the Wendigo,” in which he was my main interview subject. Larry sent me some Wendigo related books and comics he’d worked on over his career for further research. As thanks, I sent him a copy of We Make Monsters Here. I had no expectation he would read it or that anything would come of it. He’s an understandably busy guy, and I just wanted to express my gratitude.

A couple more years passed, and Sean told me Larry had discussed wanting to do another Season of Tales From Beyond the Pale, and that my collection had been discussed. Larry, I was told, was particularly drawn to “Madge, the World Spider, and One Last Drink” and wanted to know if I was interested in writing an adaptation. I jumped at the opportunity. I’d written screenplays before but never one strictly for audio. Sean was instrumental during that process, shooting off ideas that would not only open the story up a little more, but also permit me to rethink my imagery sonically. He has been a crucial sounding board during this experience. 

Casting the actors for the episode was also an exciting new prospect. While I was writing the script this episode, a PR friend sent me a link to a film for review consideration. That film was Chris Skotchdopole’s Crumb Catcher. I loved the film and eventually wrote a booklet essay for the Arrow release of the film. Crumb Catcher was my introduction to Ella Rae Peck, and Rigo Garay as leading actors. Both were on my list for roles in the tale, and funny enough, I did not know that Rigo was also a producer on the then upcoming season of Tales (as well as writer and director of his own episode this season, “SUPER!”). The casting process was an easy-going, collaborative experience and the end result, as you can hear, is a true feat, bound together by Motell Foster’s three incredible, distinct, performances. What sticks with me the most about this entire process is how these seemingly disparate threads, stretching out over a decade, came together. Friends I grew up with, friends I met through my work in journalism, artists I admire, each with their own threads and connections, made this possible. That’s a creator’s dream, and a pretty wicked cool web at that!

—Richard Newby, 6.11.26

Among the unsung heroes of TALES are the artists banging out striking posters
reduced to thumbnails on the internet.
Here is TALES regular Trevor Denham’s sketch and final for WORLD SPIDER