Blood Rites

Andy Milligan shooting a period gothic in Staten Island with a hand-cranked Auricon newsreel camera he owned, and sewing the costumes himself.

A Victorian family gathers for a reading of a will. They start dying. Milligan made films this way for two decades: no crew, borrowed houses, his own tailoring, and a camera that could not hold a shot steady.

The result is truly unlike anything else. The camera whips around rooms because it was hand-held on a machine not designed for it, the dialogue is a torrent of vicious family recrimination because that was what Milligan wrote well, and the gore is offal.

Nobody has ever made a convincing case that it is good. A small and stubborn group argue it is important, and the auteurist case for Milligan is real if you have the patience.

Successfully prosecuted, under the title Blood Rites rather than The Ghastly Ones.