Infirmary: One Building, Three Actors, a Year of Asking

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jason Blum has a rule for cheap horror that every producer in this tier can recite with a drink in hand: you may have a big cast, many locations, or heavy practical effects, and you may choose two. Nicholas Pineda, making his first feature, Infirmary, could afford one. He chose the building. Everything else in this production, the form, the cast size, the story, even the title, is downstream of that single pick, and the result, a found-footage night shift in a psych ward shot entirely inside a real abandoned hospital in Los Angeles, premiered at FrightFest in the UK and is now streaming on Shudder. I have not read a cleaner demonstration of the one-rule constraint this year, so let me walk it in the order the decisions were actually made, because the order is the lesson.

The Blair Witch Project: The Architecture of a Hoax

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Before the proliferation of social media, independent films relied entirely on traditional, expensive festival acquisitions for marketing. You went to Sundance, you prayed a studio bought your film, and you hoped they spent millions putting it in theaters. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez broke this model by weaponizing the nascent internet.

Blurring the Lines

For their $60,000 “found footage” film, The Blair Witch Project, the directors launched BlairWitch.com. They did not present the narrative as a fictional horror film; they presented it as a genuine, tragic documentary about three missing student filmmakers.

Found Footage on The CineBlog

Infirmary: One Building, Three Actors, a Year of Asking

The Blair Witch Project: The Architecture of a Hoax

Blurring the Lines