I wanted a film professor tell her class that making horror movies was like the old

Western prospectors that would pan for gold. He geared up a clip from some black and white cowboy

movie that showed a skinny, raw-boned, shrunken

little monkey of a man in overalls and a flipped brim hat tugging a mule up to the edge of a river

before getting out his metal pan.

He'd said with a derisive sniff that people made horror movies because they were cheap to make.

Expectations were low, and if you hit it big, well, they were very profitable.

The reality, of course, was that most never found more than a few gold flakes.

His point was to convince us found more than a few gold flakes.

His point was to convince us that horror was a creatively bankrupt and shallow genre and

that wasting time on it was a fool's errand.

What he actually accomplished, at least as me and my friends in the class were concerned,

was simply to reconfirm our opinion that he was an out-of-touch pompous ass. Horror movies could be made cheaply, that's true. And depending on the

script and the crew's ability to do less with more, you could make a really cool movie

for a fraction of the cost of, say, fantasy or period drama.

But besides all that, there was one simple fact that caused our little filmmaking group to make our first post-graduation project a scary movie.

Because horror is badass.

We threw around different ideas for weeks. Production needed to be aggressively economical.

We didn't want to do any of the tired sub-g genres without a fresh approach, and we had none.

So no demonic possession, no film cruises characters inexplicably trapped in the woods,

and no damn haunted houses.

Initially we're going to avoid using the found footage format entirely,

...