Wind Chill - how this ended up banished to the realm of DTV while bigger-budgeted, smaller-brained genre fair like Halloween stunk it up at multiplexes exemplifies much of what’s wrong with the studio system in my view. An intelligent, reserved script, tight direction, and a strong ensemble cast (including up-and-comer Emily Blunt) combine to produce a slow-burn ghost story focused on a very nasty stretch of Pennsylvanian back-road with a long, ghoulish memory. If one of the more chilling cinematic ghost stories in recent years wrapped in a first class production package (courtesy of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, no less) can’t hook modern auds, I’m not sure what can.

The Empty Acre - regional filmmaking isn’t what it used to be – an anomaly. The advent of digital cinema has opened the floodgates for a spread of titles from those afore-mentioned far corners, often to diminishing returns. It wasn’t that ‘70s and ‘80s were a goldmine for quality mom-and-pop productions – it’s just that novelty often masked serious flaws. Filmmakers working outside the industry no longer have the same luxury – so when a title like the expertly crafted, supremely spooky Kansas-set Acre comes along, notice must be taken. Concerned with the ill effects a barren patch of farmland seems to taking on a small town, the film follows a young mother convinced that the disappearance of her newborn signals something much darker.

The Last Winter - we've covered at length and even reviewed writer / director Larry Fessenden’s nature-run-amok parable for Twitch, but one more mention won’t hurt – especially when Winter stands as one of the most assured, important genre films of the last few years. As an oil operation prepares to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, something trapped below the ice and snow is seeping back up, ready to extract vengeance for the century-long grave desecration perpetrated by a crude-hungry society. The evil twin of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Fessenden’s razor-sharp parable gives all sides a fair shake while arriving at a horrifying, inevitable denouement brewed from the same black tea as the apocalyptic works of Terry Gilliam and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Police Beat - criminally unavailable until earlier this year despite a 2005 copyright, Zoo director Robinson Devor (also responsible for the superlative late-90s Seldom Seen candidate The Woman Chaser) offers the strangely affecting tale of an outsider attempting to come to terms with life in America while working as a bicycle patrolman in Seattle. Equal parts comic and tragic, the film presents the world almost exclusively through the eyes of the increasingly detached, disaffected West African ex-pat Z (the outstanding Pape Sidy Niang, performing half the role in English and half in his native Wolof) as he deals with the travails of his job and an unresolved relationship back home.

Ever Since the World Ended - finally scoring a release after going without a home vid distributor for an inexplicable six year years, mock-dock ESTWE concerns itself with a San Francisco almost completely devoid of life following a world-wide plague. Comprised of interviews and video journal entries, the low-low-budget film offers a number of startling images of one of the U.S.’s most populous cities as a ghost town while allowing its “subjects” an opportunity to philosophize on what it means to start life over again, and where modern accomplishments may stand in the bright lights of history. A think piece with sci-fi trappings, the film walks a delicate line with aplomb, refusing to over-stay its welcome while offering a full, at-once otherworldly and relatable experience.

Altered & Believers - two Blair Witch alums made good in big ways in 2007 – co-directors Eduardo Sanchez with Altered and Daniel Myrick with Believers. Sanchez’s film – written as a comedy and reworked to surprising effect as a more traditional suspenser – chronicles four friends attempting to extract revenge against the aliens who abducted them years earlier with disastrous consequences. Perhaps due in part to its comedic origins, the script imbues a natural quality to dialog and interactions between characters, and presents a number of truly inventive turns (including a clever twist which keeps the aliens’ visage hidden for a good portion of the film). Myrick’s Believers - issued as part of Warner Brothers’ increasingly potent Raw Feed line – showcases a strong pair of lead performances as two paramedics find themselves trapped inside the compound of a doomsday cult just hours away from their projected, well, doomsday. Scary and cerebral in the right proportions, the film posits an all-too realistic scenario with style and scope on a limited budget. Here’s hoping for more from both filmmakers much more often in the years ahead.