Science fiction is easily the most popular genre in all of movie history. Just look at the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time: seven of them are either sci-fi films (like Avatar, which remains lodged at No. 1) or superhero movies with heavy sci-fi elements like Avengers: Endgame. Some of the biggest and most enduring franchises in the business—the aforementioned Avatar and Marvel, along with Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, and Jurassic Park/World—proudly bear the sci-fi banner.
One thing that nearly all those films share, in addition to their science fiction content, is their cost: not only are films like Avatar and Endgame the biggest box office earners, but they are also among the costliest films ever made, with their price tags soaring into the hundreds of millions. To create the world of Pandora or show the Avengers battling the minions of Thanos takes unimaginable sums of money, but if done well, the end results look like they’ve leapt out of the pages of sci-fi literature or comic books.
Yet science fiction is also a genre of big ideas, and in the world of filmmaking, it doesn’t always take massive budgets to get those concepts onto the screen. Over the years, upstart writers and directors have found ways to utilize limited resources and create science fiction films that can still bend one’s mind without assaulting one’s senses.
We’re not talking about even modestly (relatively speaking) budgeted fare like Denis Villeneuve’s brilliant Arrival, made for $47 million, or films like 2018’s Fast Color or Prospect, with budgets in the single-digit millions. No, we’re talking about super-small science fiction movies: films made for less than $1 million, and in some cases far less than that. These films stretched their dollars as far as they could, many of them made by filmmakers who later went on to create far bigger projects. The movies themselves may be small, but the ideas contained within—as befitting their genre—are vast.
THX 1138 (1971)
Based on a student film he made at the University of Southern California in 1967, THX 1138 marked the directorial debut of one George Lucas, whose first stab at science fiction was remarkably different from his later exploits in a galaxy far, far away. Teaming with producer Francis Ford Coppola, who had recently launched a production company called American Zoetrope, Lucas expanded his short student project into a full-length feature starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance, set in an underground dystopia where sex is prohibited and the populace is controlled through powerful drugs and surveillance.
Lucas used locations around the San Francisco area—including unfinished subway tunnels, the Marin Civic Center, and San Francisco International Airport—for his futuristic hellscape, also recruiting locals both for speaking parts and as extras. The sterile-looking sets and costumes, the android policemen, and the unsettling sound design all contributed to the eerie, immersive nature of a film that, while certainly derivative, remains an interesting, anomalous entry in Lucas’ career. And it was made for a reported $777,000—although even at that price it flopped in theaters, earning just $2.4 million.
Dark Star (1974)
Like George Lucas, legendary genre director John Carpenter got his start at USC, where he and fellow student Dan O’Bannon—who went on to write Alien, among others—labored for two years on a student film called Dark Star. A parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie followed the exploits of four crew members, on an interstellar mission to destroy “unstable” planets, who are all going slowly mad after 20 years in space. Carpenter scored the film in addition to directing and co-writing it with O’Bannon, who also served as production designer and visual effects supervisor, while starring as the astronaut Pinback.
Carpenter and O’Bannon’s initial 45-minute cut, made for $6,000, caught the attention of American producer Jonathan Kaplan and Canadian distributor Jack Murphy, who provided the funds to shoot an additional 45 minutes of footage. The completed feature, estimated to have cost $60,000, was picked up for distribution by producer Jack H. Harris, who pumped a little more money into reshoots and editing. Genuinely weird and funny, Dark Star has become a cult classic—and its sets and VFX still look pretty impressive for a movie shot on a shoestring by a couple of film students.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
The debut feature (and at 67 minutes, it barely makes it to that status) from director-writer-star Shinya Tsukamoto remains one of modern Japanese cinema’s most groundbreaking and influential films. The plot—a term very loosely applied to the film’s experimental narrative—follows an average Japanese salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi) whose chance encounter with a metal-obsessed young man leads them both on a nightmarish evolutionary journey, which finds both men merging their flesh with metal and eventually merging with each other to create a new kind of being.
Tsukamoto, only 29 at the time, made Tetsuo after spending years working on short films and in experimental theater. Initially investing his own money in the film (which he shot on 16mm), he managed to get some additional investors to complete it, bringing the movie in for around $100,000. To this day, it remains a bracing experience: sort of what would happen if David Lynch and Sam Raimi got together, had a celluloid baby, and put it in an industrial blender. Its heady (if primitive) concepts about transhumanism arrived just as cyberpunk was also on the rise, fueling the movie’s elevation to cult classic status as well as a gateway film for the nascent J-horror wave to come.
Cube (1997)
Five people awaken in a strange room and discover that hatches on the walls and in the floor lead to other, identical rooms, many of which contain some sort of deadly trap that will instantly kill anyone who triggers it. The rooms are all part of a vast labyrinth into which the five have been imprisoned for reasons unknown, by persons unknown—and with escape seemingly impossible unless they can figure out the pattern that will lead them out of the cube.
The genius of Cube, which marked the directorial debut of Vincenzo Natali (Splice), was that the Canadian production essentially required just one set to represent the more or less identical rooms in the maze that the actors move through. The cast was mostly unknown and/or local to Toronto, with Nicole de Boer—who plays the math student Leaven—later joining the final season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Ezri Dax. Although Cube suffers from some uneven acting and stiff dialogue, its gripping central premise, cerebral thrills, and surreal overtones more than justify its final cost of $700,000.
Pi (1998)
The first feature in what would become a long, distinguished career for writer-director Darren Aronofsky, Pi is an intimate, lo-fi drama that takes place mainly in one reclusive statistician’s cramped apartment as he searches obsessively for a number that is the organizing principle of reality. The film encompasses number theory, the structure of the universe, the map of the human brain, Jewish mysticism, and whether God itself can communicate through mathematics. Filmed in and around New York City in high-contrast black and white, buttressed by an immersive sound design, Clint Mansell’s pulsing score, and some genuinely eerie imagery, Pi arrived as Hollywood sci-fi movies were becoming increasingly dependent on both over-the-top spectacle (Armageddon) and established IP (Godzilla, Lost in Space, The X-Files).
Aronofsky and his producer, Eric Watson, solicited donations of $100 from everyone they knew to raise around $60,000 for the film’s production. Another $70,000 went toward post-production, with the film costing around $134,000 by the time it was ready for its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. It ended up grossing around $3.2 million in limited release, making back its budget and then some. But more importantly, Pi was a claustrophobic, cerebral thriller which hinted at the oddly poetic forces shaping the universe. Its ideas remain audacious, all the more so for being presented on such a microcosmic scale.
Primer (2004)
Primer cost about $7,000 to make—not shabby at all for a movie about the discovery of time travel. Shane Carruth wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored, and co-starred in the film, which follows two friends and engineers, Aaron and Abe, whose work on various projects in Aaron’s garage leads them to stumble across a way to move backward in time through the use of a chamber they call “the box.” The shifts in time cause the two friends’ relationship and health to both deteriorate, as one of the men wants to stop the experiment on ethical grounds, while the other wants to see how he can exploit it.
The movie was shot on 16mm film and lensed in a few locations around Dallas, Texas—with Carruth interested in a plain, unadorned look for the movie as well as a believable way of portraying two fairly ordinary would-be scientists who suddenly find themselves wielding immense power. To that end, the increasingly convoluted plot is almost deliberately hard to follow, and the jargon can be impenetrable—which is kind of the point: Aaron and Abe don’t even fully understand what they’re doing. But the consequences could be cataclysmic.
The Man from Earth (2007)
The Man from Earth is the only film on our list scripted by a veteran science fiction writer: Jerome Bixby, who penned the classic story “It’s a Good Life” (made into an unforgettable episode of the original Twilight Zone), as well as the film It! The Terror from Beyond Space, plus the Star Trek original series episodes “Mirror, Mirror,” “Day of the Dove,” “By Any Other Name,” and “Requiem for Methuselah.” The Man from Earth was Bixby’s last completed work before he died in 1998, literally dictated to his son while Bixby was on his deathbed.
The film, a treatise on memory, loneliness, and what it means to be human, shares a premise with “Requiem for Methuselah,” as a college professor (David Lee Smith) claims to his colleagues that he’s 14,000 years old and has led many different lives under different names. Some of his friends are played by genre vets like Tony Todd (Candyman), John Billingsley (Star Trek: Enterprise), and William Katt (The Greatest American Hero). Shot for $200,000 by director Richard Schenkman, The Man from Earth has been distributed through both legal streaming and illegal pirate networks (with the filmmakers’ approval) and even inspired a 2017 sequel, The Man from Earth: Holocene.
Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)
The feature directorial debut of Panos Cosmatos, son of filmmaker George P. Cosmatos (Rambo: First Blood Part II), Beyond the Black Rainbow is an unabashedly experimental, hallucinatory film about a mad scientist (Michael Rogers) who keeps a young girl with telepathic powers (Eva Allan) imprisoned in his research “institute,” where he hopes that he can find the ultimate path to transcending human existence and becoming a superbeing. Well, we think that’s the plot; Beyond the Black Rainbow is deliberately ambiguous in many ways, and the film’s cryptic nature only adds to its interesting mystique.
Cosmatos channels films from the 1970s in the movie, both in terms of its slow-burn pacing and use of bold, glowing color schemes throughout. Shot in three weeks, largely in Vancouver, Beyond the Black Rainbow grapples with themes of human consciousness, thought control, mutation, and loss of identity while keeping its striking imagery confined to a handful of locations. Costing just over $1 million to make (the most expensive film on this list), Beyond the Black Rainbow may be too self-consciously obscure for some, but it’s still a brain-searing, visually dazzling head trip on a budget.
Monsters (2010)
Not surprisingly, a number of the films on this list were often the brainchild of one or two people wearing many different hats and handling many different aspects of the production because—well, frankly, because they were the only person available and it kept costs down. Such is the case with Gareth Edwards, who wrote and directed his feature debut, Monsters, while also creating the visual effects, acting as production designer, and working as his own cinematographer. The film follows two people (Scott McNairy and Whitney Able) who try to make their way back to the U.S. from Mexico through a zone on the border that has been infested with extraterrestrial creatures.
Edwards shot the film with consumer-grade cameras, edited it on a laptop, and filmed in five countries with a crew of five people, often shooting on location without permission. He spent five months creating the visual effects on his laptop with easy-to-purchase software. The result is one of the most imaginative and striking sci-fi debuts of the early 2010s, all done for what Edwards claimed was under $500,000. Since then, Edwards has worked on one massive franchise after another, directing Godzilla (2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), and the upcoming Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025). His original 2023 film The Creator, however, while having a far bigger budget than Monsters, was done in that same DIY style: he used relatively cheap digital cameras, kept the crew small, and filmed on location to avoid building large sets.
Another Earth (2011)
Three of the more interesting filmmakers to emerge from the independent world in the last 15 years or so, who have dabbled repeatedly in and around science fiction, are actor/writer Brit Marling, writer/director Mike Cahill, and writer/director Zal Batmanglij. Marling has collaborated with both as an actor and co-writer on a number of projects, including the breakout sci-fi film Another Earth. Directed by Cahill, the film stars Marling as a promising young astronomy student whose future is scuttled when she kills two people in a drunk driving incident. At the same time, a duplicate Earth appears in the solar system, holding out the possibility of a second chance for the guilt-wracked woman.
Cahill shot most of the movie in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, using local connections to keep costs down and even filming scenes in the home he grew up in. Although the science in Another Earth is even more wonky than usual (for filmed sci-fi), the movie still works on a conceptual and emotional level, with the other Earth effectively used as a metaphor for other paths one’s life could take. The film cost $150,000 to make, and Cahill has since followed it up with sci-fi outings I Origins (2014), also starring Marling, and Bliss (2021). Marling has also worked with Batmanglij on the genre-adjacent Sound of My Voice (2011), The East (2013), and the cult Netflix series The OA (2016).
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
Based on a true incident, in which the editor of a small magazine placed a fake ad in the classified section looking for “somebody to go back in time with me,” Safety Not Guaranteed marked the directing debut of Colin Trevorrow, who has since gone on to helm and/or co-write (with his collaborator Derek Connolly) the three Jurassic World movies released since 2015. Trevorrow and Connolly also co-wrote the script for Star Wars: Episode IX – Duel of the Fates, which Trevorrow was slated to direct until the project was reimagined as The Rise of Skywalker.
All this sprang from a $750,000 sci-fi comedy starring Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake Johnson, and Kristin Bell. Plaza and Johnson play reporters for a newspaper who set out to uncover the truth about a man named Kenneth (Duplass), who placed the ad, and learn that everything may not be what it seems—including whether Kenneth is delusional or can truly travel through time. The well-drawn characters and witty script boost the film’s themes of loss, guilt, how we perceive ourselves and others, and whether it’s possible to achieve one’s once-promising ambitions. With its early availability on Netflix, Safety Not Guaranteed also changed the game for independent filmmakers who were able to find new outlets for their work—so in a way, this little comedy about time travel did actually predict the future.
Coherence (2013)
Coherence may be the smallest film on this list after Primer—but like that lo-fi outing, it’s a feat of universe-shaking storytelling confined to the most humdrum of settings. Writer/director James Ward Byrkit’s story takes place at a suburban dinner party where the power goes out following the passing of a comet overhead. It soon becomes apparent that the comet’s wake has somehow created a series of alternate realities, and the eight people at the party exist in each one—and some of them may be crossing back and forth between realities.
Byrkit shot the film over five nights at his own home in Santa Monica, California. The cast was comprised of friends, many of whom didn’t know each other very well, and the film was mostly improvised around a series of narrative beats and character notes that Byrkit prepared for the actors beforehand. With little in the way of visual razzle-dazzle, Coherence is solidly character-based and intimate in scope, while dealing with mind-bending concepts. Coming in at a cost of $50,000, Coherence only made a small amount at the box office ($140,000), but it is the kind of film viewers will keep discovering for years.
The Vast of Night (2019)
A switchboard operator and a disc jockey in a small New Mexico town in the 1950s stumble upon a strange radio signal which they believe could be coming from outer space. That is the premise that kicks off this film directed by Andrew Patterson, who co-wrote the script (using the pseudonym James Montague) with Craig S. Sanger and financed its $700,000 budget with earnings from his Oklahoma-based commercial production company. The Vast of Night taps into the aesthetics of ‘50s science fiction B-movies, the heightened interest in UFOs at the time, conspiracy theories about Area 51, and two real-life incidents involving an alleged crashed object in Pennsylvania and the disappearances of six people in Oklahoma (where Patterson is from) to weave a genuinely eerie tale (with two charismatic leads in Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick) about finding human connections and common understanding in an indifferent, possibly hostile universe—a theme that resonates throughout much of science fiction, big or small.
What are your favorite low-budget genre films?
