Cosmic Horror

Occasionally, an indie film slips through the mainstream and becomes a hit. It's easiest to do in the horror genre, where a low budget doesn't keep fans away (the recent Terrifier franchise is a great example of this, but it goes back to Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, and many earlier films). In 2023, Older Gods became one of the crossover hits, a microbudget horror movie with a trailer that garnered over 500 thousand views on YouTube (watch the trailer below). Using thick layers of atmosphere and drawing on the terrifying lore from H.P. Lovecraft's body of work, Older Gods managed to create a spellbinding horror mystery with very little money. Now it's streaming for free...

"Older Gods is filled with enough passion to not only look past its small budget, but to offer a more personal horror film with a surprisingly large scale. Older Gods is perhaps one of the best horror movies so far this year, certainly in the Lovecraftian horror genre. It offers a deeply compelling mystery, an undeniably tense atmosphere, satisfying jump scares, and plenty of creepy visuals. If you're a fan of horror and Lovecraft in particular, Only Gods is the movie for you."

"One of Older Gods' major achievements is its haunting atmosphere," continues MovieWeb's review. "From the location, music, cinematography, and pacing, Older Gods is a tense and haunting movie the whole way through. It never eases up; thank God it was only 80 minutes, because it'd almost become oppressive if it was any longer. Filmmaker David A. Roberts does a wonderful job at expressing isolation and anxiety throughout"...