Most low-budget, independently produced horror movies are cheesy gross-outs designed for the straight-to-video market, and that can make it even harder for a real movie maker who's decided to dip a toe into the scare genre; his work may end up tainted by association. When the writer-director Michael Almeda decided to make Nadja (1994), his oddly poetic comedy about a vampire princess in Brooklyn, he had an additional problem in that the children of the night were becoming so goddamn overexposed; Almeda, who has since become best known for his amazing 2000 Hamlet and his documentaries about the creative process (This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World), was competing for attention with Anne Rice and Francis Ford Coppola, with Jess Weldon and lesser pretenders coming up fast. Seen today, Nadja is a flawed but strikingly inventive, great-looking, and sometimes very funny riff on the mythology of the undead. It's also very evocative of a specific time and place, and I don't mean Transylvania. Almeda cast it with what you might call the Mid-Nineties Indie Film All-Stars: The stunning Elina Löwensohn in the title role, Martin Donovan, Suzy Amis, Jared Harris, Karl Geary and, on the comeback trail, Peter Fonda as the vampire killer Van Helsing. (Fonda, who's just arrived in town after finally dispatching Dracula, is especially funny explaining that staking the old Count was no great challenge: "He was like Elvis at the end. . . The magic was gone, and he knew it.") There's also a cameo by David Lynch, who was one of the movie's producers, as a security guard at the morgue. One line in particular also time-stamps the picture, when Jared Harris, as Nadja's brother, describes an ESP message from his sister as "a psychic fax." If the picture had been made twenty minutes later, he would have said "e-mail."
The 1988 ghost story Lady in White was made in Wayne County, New York, on a budget of less than five million dollars, by the writer-director Frank LaLoggia. Unlike Nadja, it has no special pretensions to artistry; LaLoggia, who had earlier made a horror movie called Fear No Evil that he felt had been mangled by the releasing studio, simply wanted to make a good, commercial movie that was true to his conception and wasn't subject to meddling from a bunch of suits. He succeeded: it's an entertaining, stylish little spook story, with a terrific lead performance by the eleven-year-old Lukas Haas. Ironically, though, the movie ended up getting good reviews and considerable attention as an indie-filmmaking success story but failed to achieve much distribution; just because you make your film your way without interference from the suits doesn't mean the suits have to show it. (LaLoggia didn't get to make another movie for more than twenty years, and that film, The Haunted Heart, hasn't received theatrical distribution.) Luckily, both Nadja and Lady in White have been preserved on DVD to entertain and scare audiences that never knew they existed during their brief tour of our nation's movie theaters. — Phil Nugent