Axe

Sixty-eight minutes, shot in nine days in North Carolina, and considerably sadder than a film on this list has any business being.

Three men on the run stop at a remote farmhouse where a girl is caring for her mute, paralysed grandfather. They stay. She does not want them to.

Frederick Friedel was twenty-two. What he made is closer to a bleak rural drama than a horror film: long silences, a girl doing chores, an old man in a chair unable to intervene, and two brief bursts of violence that the film does not linger on.

The reputation is entirely a product of the title and the DPP listing. There is very little in it.

Shot in 1974, unreleased until 1977, which put it outside this site's usual year tolerance and is why its Wikidata entry had to be pinned by hand.