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Ask a room of working horror filmmakers why they keep going and you get a punchline before you get an answer. Michael J. Epstein went first. “The answer is simple. We’re very, very stupid.”
Then he actually answered it. Artists make art because it is how they make sense of the world and connect with other people. A minute later he landed on the version he meant: “This is what being human is about. It’s about creating conversations. It’s about trying to find meaning in the world.”
Both halves are true at once, and the gap between them is roughly where independent horror lives in 2026. Making a film and releasing one have both gotten easier, and Epstein’s point is that the audience has not grown to match. The four people on this roundtable described a working environment where crews keep shrinking, rates keep sliding, and finishing the movie may be the easier half of the job.
Epstein is a writer, director, producer, and editor. Sophia Cacciola is a cinematographer and director. Jeff Farley is a special makeup effects designer approaching, by his own count, fifty years in the business. Salvador Medina is a writer, director, and producer working in Mexico. One of them called the hidden labor behind some no-budget claims exploitation, in that word.
The compromises start well upstream of the camera. Epstein described writing as a producing function first. “There are tons of compromises in that. How many characters are there? How many locations are there? What locations can we afford to get access to? How many special effects are there in it?” Those are producer decisions embedded in storytelling. His summary of the job: identify what is viable, then build the project around that viability.
Cacciola’s warning came from further down the call sheet. Crews have been getting smaller and rates with them, and she now finds herself arguing to keep a first AC and a separate gaffer on a show at all. “There’s a reason it’s ten different jobs.” Her other complaint is the free part: scripts arrive on a first or second draft and rehearsal gets skipped, and those are the cheapest improvements available.
Medina came at the multi-hyphenate question from a different market. In Mexico, he said, no studio pipeline is waiting to buy a spec. He started as a first assistant director, learned scheduling and budget control there, and became a producer because otherwise nothing he wrote got made.
Farley pushes the other way. His department’s prep is already all-encompassing, productions keep trying to add squibs to his plate, and below-the-line people need to focus on their own job. Epstein, who has done sound, camera, and by his count edited five other people’s features this year, framed versatility as a phase you outgrow. The control felt good early on. Now he would rather hand those departments to people who want them, and does them anyway.
Every one of them treats the shooting plan as a hypothesis. Medina shot his feature during the last severe COVID wave in Mexico, under strict rules about who could be on set and when. He checked how people were feeling each day and tried to shorten the schedule when the crew was tired or worried about getting sick. “I always go prepared, but I am always flexible.”
Farley said Medina was absolutely correct, and named what makes that flexibility survivable: repetition. The same crew film after film becomes a real bond, which is how a windstorm day with Dave DeCoteau still made its page count.
Epstein’s version is a rule. “At the end of the day, we have to have shot the things that are necessary to make the movie.” Faced with a director locked on one version of a shot, he gets something that functions and looks at it later, and he estimated the director finds it solid about ninety-five percent of the time.
Cacciola supplied the version with a stopwatch on it. A complicated move or a split diopter can eat two hours out of a day scheduled for twenty pages. “The movie’s going to live in close ups.” Get the meat of the scene, protect time for the shot that matters, let go of the one nobody will miss. Storyboards promise a huge room with light pouring through big windows, and then the location is a tiny bathroom. That is not a shrug: “I would rather aim high than aim low and try really hard to get it as close as possible.”
She would also rather schedule gore inserts on their own day, even after an edit, so the effects can be lit and photographed properly instead of squeezed in around the actors. Farley agreed from the effects side, and said he is forever stressing how much productions undervalue inserts.
Asked whether independent genre film is propped up by underpaid and unpaid labor, nobody hedged. Medina said yes, and got specific. On his own feature he was the only person in the budget who took no fee. Everyone else got paid, if not their full rate, and anyone who asked for back-end points got them. Crews in Mexico are commonly paid 60 or 90 days after a shoot, he said; his team tries to pay everyone by the end of the first week. The principle is transparency: here is what I have, half up front and the rest on the last day, and say so if you need more.
Epstein was blunter about the version of this that gets celebrated. He gets angry at filmmakers bragging about a two-thousand-dollar movie. “You didn’t actually make it for that money. You just didn’t pay all the people who did all the work on it.” Making a film with friends who all chose to contribute is fine. Turning that number into a marketing hook is, in his words, exploitation. The honest version costs the producer, too. When a collaborator calls the night before a shoot day because a commercial gig came in at fifteen hundred dollars, the answer is “take that gig. We’ll figure it out.”
Cacciola named the cost that never appears on a call sheet. She has invested, by her description, high five figures in cameras, lenses, and lights, and she is expected to bring all of it. “Being a gearhead is kind of a curse.” It is also why she gets hired half the time, since productions cannot cover a rental house and its insurance. Kit fees, she said, are a thing of the past. Then she noted that she does it herself, hiring a sound person partly because they own a kit.
Farley tracks the squeeze on a longer timeline: the figures he gets quoted have gone flat while the dollar has not. Epstein said cinematography rates now run lower than fifteen years ago. Both claims are anecdotal.
Asked to choose between more money and more time, the group barely treated it as a question. “Money, you can throw at any problem, including time,” Epstein said. Not answering to a studio means he and Cacciola can take years finishing a film. What they cannot do is manufacture shooting days, because days are a dollar figure. Medina would take the money specifically to buy time, better props, and a more comfortable crew.
Cacciola wants it spent before she ever plugs in a light. “If you can pay for good production design, if you can pay for a good location, you’ve done ninety percent of making your movie look good before I get in there with lights and cameras.”
Farley answered with two mottos. One he remembered from John Carl Buechler, told to a first-timer in the shop: “The hours are long, but the pay is low.” The other he shared with a colleague during their Full Moon years: “A little goes a long way, but a lot goes much further.”
On whether the hard part is now the movie or the audience, the room converged fast. Epstein described scrolling a free streamer past thousands of titles he has never heard of and asking the question that got the biggest laugh of the hour. “Have we made so many movies that there’s nobody left to watch them?” He is not pro-gatekeeper and likes that anyone can put something out. It just means cutting through is brutal, and every marketing lever he has tried has worked a little without ever launching anything.
Cacciola’s frustration was about where the effort goes. Marketing is effectively a full-time job, and it is unclear whether the answer is the ten influencers covering movies that week, traditional press, or becoming an influencer yourself. “I would much rather be thinking about a traditional narrative film than thinking about making a TikTok video.”
Medina put the stakes plainly. His feature was a proof of concept for a new production company, and he thinks they proved it. “But if nobody watches it, what’s the point?” He would take people watching and hating it.
Farley, who has lived through most of the format revolutions of the last fifty years, declined to cast streaming as the villain. Big-budget films he worked on also failed to find audiences, so the problem is neither new nor exclusive to the small end. He called it a double-edged sword and said he remains torn on whether it helps or hurts low-budget horror.
Nobody in this group treats festivals as a sales floor, and all four defended them anyway. Cacciola has gotten most of her cinematography work through them, and the part she values most is calibration. Sitting in a room watching what other people managed “at a similar budget to you and a similar skill level to you” is a different exercise than measuring yourself against Marvel. She did flag one squeeze, with established genre distributors now placing their own titles at smaller festivals as marketing, taking slots that used to belong to independents. Her answer on whether a festival gets you a deal was blunter: probably not.
Epstein uses festivals as test screenings. He watches from the audience for where people laugh and where they do not, and nearly every film they have made has been recut afterward. He also described the reputational mechanic without pretending to respect it. When their paired films The Once and Future Smash and End Zone 2 premiered at FrightFest in the UK and Screamfest in the US, distributors got interested before evaluating the films themselves, because the selections signaled that somebody else had already vetted the work. He thinks that logic is wrong, and the offers that followed were not good ones.
His warning is about expectations. FilmFreeway lists thousands of festivals, many of them awards mills that hand you a trophy for a submission fee. “You have to go with realistic expectations.” And yet posting those meaningless awards still makes friends excited to see the movie. “It’s how you use the festivals.” Farley agreed, and admitted the international awards he did not know he was up for helped more than he expected.
Medina got the most concrete return of anyone. He met a group of Mexican filmmakers at FilmQuest in Utah and came home to build an anthology of shorts about the water in Mexico City being cursed. Everyone else got busy, so he wrote his, then expanded it into a feature script that he said helped him secure his US manager. Cacciola put the same point geographically. “The best way to meet people in LA is to go somewhere else.”
The closing question was the obvious one. Given all of that, why continue? Epstein returned to meaning. Film is one of the best ways he knows to make something tangible out of an experience and hand it to someone who will talk back. It is not a smart field, he said. People work long hours for very little money and find meaning in it anyway.
Cacciola named the thing sitting in the room. She does not know what to tell people coming up, because AI is in the room with us and she cannot say where that leaves anyone in college now. What she does believe is that audiences will still want “a real human emoting in a tight shot,” because looking at a face is wired into us. Whether independent film is still a career in ten years, she does not know. She hopes so. She is not ready to quit.
Medina keeps doing it because it is horror specifically. If it were not horror, he is not sure he would bother; it is the best vehicle he has found for saying something about who he is. His advice: “Do it because you want to say something.” Not because you want to be a millionaire and the next Guillermo.
Farley finished on the longest view available. Storytelling is not just ingrained in the culture, it is ingrained in people, and it moves generation to generation. We keep telling the same stories in different ways. Everyone on the call is still a fighter, he said, and somebody out there is watching.
None of that fixes a rate card. It does explain the room.