Witnessing a small thing defeat a large one brings a certain kind of satisfaction. Not in an arrogant manner. More like how you feel when the chain restaurant that opened across the street is outlasted by a corner eatery. This northern summer, a feeling with a New Zealand accent has been subtly permeating the film industry.
Filmed in rural Canterbury on a budget of about $19,000, the horror-comedy The Weed Eaters has been doing what the big studios have failed to do: packing theaters, creating real word-of-mouth, and making audiences laugh and feel uneasy. Tentpoles with nine-figure price tags, on the other hand, have struggled at the box office with a slow, costly inevitability.
The idea is not nuanced. A group of four millennial friends go on a New Year’s Eve vacation. They discover an ancient cannabis stash belonging to an elderly farmer. As is common in horror comedies, things turn into unintentional cannibalism. In terms of screen content, writer and actor Annabel Kean, who also handled the practical effects herself, is open about what that means, but she’s also quick to point out that it’s far from the visceral realm of Peter Jackson’s early work. That’s essentially a guarantee you can rely on, coming from a New Zealander.
The budget isn’t the only intriguing aspect of this. It’s the procedure. With roughly fifty music videos between them, Kean and director Callum Devlin had enough experience to understand the mechanics of a shot but not enough prestige to overthink everything. Over the course of an Easter weekend, they got together, wrote down what they truly wanted to see on screen, and then went ahead and created it. Roles were doubled by the cast and crew. No one valued their job title. According to all accounts, the outcome feels truly alive.
Kean claims she didn’t know if the movie was successful until the audience began laughing and gasping at the same time when it debuted at the New Zealand International Film Festival to a packed Civic Theatre. No amount of pre-production planning can completely ensure that kind of relief. After winning Best Feature at SXSW Sydney, it was screened at Indonesia’s Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, where a Gen Z audience reportedly laughed heartily at jokes that were written to feel very Kiwi. Though it’s difficult to express clearly, there is a lesson hidden in that particular detail.
This is not a singular occurrence. A different microbudget horror movie, which cost $750,000, recently made $17 million domestically in the US, surpassing studio releases that required hundreds of millions of dollars for marketing and production. The industry discussion that ensued was predictable: everyone said that budgets are no longer important. That’s most likely the incorrect conclusion. The idea that the middle of the market has hollowed out seems more accurate. Massive productions are becoming more costly and brittle. Now, audiences that were previously unreachable can be reached by very small productions with sufficient skill and the right intuition.
The genre best suited to this economics experiment has always been horror. In 1968, George Romero demonstrated this with Night of the Living Dead, which brought in $114,000 and brought in $12 million. In 1999, the Blair Witch Project confirmed it once more. With a $4.5 million budget and $92 million in worldwide box office receipts, the Australian horror film Talk to Me succeeded once more in 2023. A skyline full of computer-generated imagery is not necessary to satisfy the genre’s different demands of its audience, which include a willingness to be shocked, uneasy, and possibly even a little grossed out.
The Weed Eaters contributes to this lineage in a way that is unique to its origins. A 1.8-meter novelty fork will accompany the movie on its theatrical run in New Zealand. At some screenings, there will be meat raffles. Scream contests. It’s the kind of distribution strategy that couldn’t be produced in a boardroom, and the reason it works is that it doesn’t try to be anything but what it is.
According to Kean, the next project will strive for a bigger budget and a partnership with the New Zealand Film Commission. That is a logical progression. However, it’s important to note what this one first demonstrated: that you can create something that people genuinely want to watch if you have enough naivete, enough skill, and, apparently, the right strain of ancient fictional marijuana. Hollywood had to learn that lesson the hard way over the summer.
