ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

As I logged another film in my Letterboxd list, a list that is now approaching 5,000 films, I paused a moment to reflect. I’ve been a film buff all my life, well over 50 years, and I appreciate how difficult it is to make a film on a small budget. Back in the day, even as a pre-teen, I recognized that Hammer Film’s The Gorgon, with my childhood heroes Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, was a good horror film, despite some shaky sets and special effects (hey, look at the wobbly sets and the phony snakes in the Gorgon’s hair!). Unlike haughty film snobs, I’ve always tried to temper my expectations and not dismiss a film simply because the filmmakers had limited resources. With the advent of affordable technology, now anyone can make a film. Most efforts, however, turn out as you’d expect: unwatchable amateur hours, filled with boneheaded dialogue, sub-community-theater acting, badly composed shots with terrible lighting, mismatched edits, and poorly recorded sound. I’ve spent many soul-crushing hours with my eyes glazing over watching things where the only positive comments I could make were that “it’s a film,” though just barely, and congratulate the filmmakers for a successful sale to some streaming service. But once in a while, when folks with brains, talent, and big hearts make a micro-budget film, you get something special. This brings us to Left One Alive, the new film from Columbia, South Carolina filmmaker David Axe. And special it is.

Left One Alive ponders the implications of what happens when horror movies end, particularly those horror movies where the final girl vanquishes the monsters and walks out of the woods into the sunlight just before the final credits roll. Axe’s intelligent screenplay tells us what’s next. Sarah (Cailyn Sam) is the final girl. She has survived after having witnessed the mass slaughter of all her camping friends by weird forest creatures. Until that horrific event, she’d led a normal, mundane life living with her sister in some part of small-town America. We don’t explicitly learn a lot about what that life was like, but economical writing allows us to connect the dots. Then her life changes forever. If you thought for a minute how it would, you’d ask yourself: Will there be post-traumatic stress disorder? Of course. Survivor’s guilt? Yep. A film based on her tragic experience? Sure. The scenes depicting the ridiculous Hollywood version of what happened are hilarious and reminded me of The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, a wonderful small film also about some serious existential issues, though with a substantially bigger budget, indie great John Sayles and special-effects legend Douglas Trumball as executive producers, and Sam Elliott in a career-best performance.

These are things that you won’t find in your mine-run horror film, and I was delighted by where this film took me. It doesn’t have a lot of violence, there’s no nudity, and I think I could count on one hand the number of obscenities spoken. It’s a slow, steadily paced, always engaging film, which straddles the line between exploitation and art film, though leaning hard toward the art-film side. While it’s a small film, it’s ambitious. Acting is serviceable or better, with star Cailyn Sam giving a particularly nice performance. Writer/producer/director Axe, abetted by producer/cinematographer/editor Sarah Massey, accomplished what most micro-budget filmmakers only dream of achieving: a film with good cinematography, some modest—yet effective—sound design, and an on-point score. Or as Variety used to say when I read it as a teenager, “Tech credits are pro.” There’s one amazing aerial shot of the forest that was not done with a drone. I’d thought the production, like Herschell Gordon Lewis for 2000 Maniacs over 60 years ago, had secured the use of a bucket truck for a day. That was until I saw behind-the-scenes photos of the plucky Massey in a sling being hoisted high into the air. This can-do spirit forms the film’s DNA and demonstrates what’s possible, even on a budget of $50,000. 

At the end of Left One Alive, the forest creatures referred to in winking fashion by the name of a popular, albeit weird, children’s TV show return to complete Sarah’s character arc. They’re hokey, yet charming, which made me love the film even more. So when the end credits came up, featuring shots from the film done in a style that would feel at home in a $200 million Marvel film, I was left to ponder what happens next. And that, my friends, leads me to tell Axe and company what I hope happens next: they make more films.

Left One Alive is currently streaming on several platforms.