Low-budget film
Many young or first-time filmmakers shoot low-budget films to prove their talent before working on larger productions.
Most low-budget films that do not gain some form of attention or acclaim are never released in theatres and are often sent straight to retail due to their lack of marketability, look, narrative story, or premise.
Jeremy Gardner, director of The Battery says that horror fans are more attracted to how the films affect them than seeing movie stars.
Science fiction films, which were once the domain of B movies, frequently require a big budget to accommodate their special effects, but low-cost do-it-yourself computer-generated imagery can make them affordable, especially when they focus on story and characterization.
Plot devices like shooting as found footage can lower production costs, and scripts that rely on extended dialogue, such as Reservoir Dogs or Sex, Lies, and Videotape, can entertain audiences without many sets.
[8] Wayne Wang's film Chan Is Missing, set on the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown, was made for $20,000 in 1982.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote that the budget would not have paid for the shoelaces in the film Annie.
[18] The UK film Monsters is a recent successful example of bringing what was once considered the exclusive preserve of the big studios—the expensive, special effects blockbuster—to independent, low-budget cinema.
Some low-budget films have failed miserably at the box office and been quickly forgotten, only to increase in popularity decades later.
The most famous examples of this latter-day popularity of low-budget box-office failures include Plan 9 from Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Due to budgetary constraints, the vampires in the film were zombie-like creatures instead of fast and agile monsters portrayed in the novel.
An example of such would be the popular 1992 film El Mariachi, in which the director Robert Rodriguez was unable to afford second takes due to the $7000 budget.
[31] Influenced by the success of Slacker, Clerks was written and directed by Kevin Smith for $27,575 in 1994 which he paid for on his credit card and grossed $3.2 million in theatres.
[33] Primer is a 2004 American science fiction film written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a former mathematician and engineer, who also starred, and was completed on a budget of only $7,000.
Dutch avant-garde filmmaker Cyrus Frisch shot the 70-minute film, titled Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan for only $200 on a Sharp 903 cell phone, with its built-in 3.2-megapixel camera.
Paranormal Activity, a 2007 horror film written and directed by Oren Peli, was made for $15,000 and grossing about $193,355,800 (adjusted by inflation: $274,603,025).
Two studies conducted from a British perspective includes Steve Chibnall's Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British 'B' Film[44] and JC Crissey's doctoral thesis The UK low-budget film sector during the 'digital revolution' between 2000 and 2012: a quantitative assessment of its technological, economic and cultural characteristics.
