The Sundance Film Festival is coming to one sort of end, to match its many beginnings. Technically speaking, the festival has been running since 1978, when it began as the Utah Film Festival and showed a number of relatively recent American classics. But it didn’t move to Park City until 1981, and wasn't taken over by Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute until 1984 (though Redford was also involved in the festival itself before then). It wasn’t rechristened Sundance until 1991—just in time for it take on a larger cultural importance throughout the ’90s independent film boom, helping to break directors like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Rian Johnson, Miranda July, and Ryan Coogler, among many others.
Robert Redford passed away last year, and this year, Sundance holds its last edition in Park City. This change has been in the works for a while, and Sundance will continue in its new home of Boulder, Colorado. But it still seems like an apt time to reflect over the vast swath of cinema that got its start at this most American of film festivals, and offer a guide to four decades’ worth of the best Sundance movies.
This also necessitates some kind of narrowing-down process. In tribute to the fact that Sundance stands apart from other film festivals in the United States—in its January season, in its indie-film aesthetics, in its frequently pain-in-the-ass locations—we've limited this list to American fiction features. (The documentaries really deserve their own, separate list.) To spread the love around within that field, only one feature by any given director will be included. Finally, the list will skew heavily toward movies that were legitimately discovered at the festival, rather than screened there prior to an already-assured commercial release. Perhaps the most prominent example: Get Out showed at Sundance to great acclaim, but in retrospect that movie was going to make its gobs of money a month later with or without the festival-specific buzz. The trailer was already playing in theaters. Similarly, Memento won an award at Sundance but had already shown at other festivals. Whenever possible, we will be talking about movies that premiered, or at very least vaulted into public consciousness, at or because of Sundance. The final number? 42, to celebrate 42 years of the Sundance Institute’s involvement with the festival (though not, notably, a single pick from each year). Also, the years listed refer to the year the film screened at the festival, not the commercial release year, which is not always the same.
Even in this narrowed state, this list could easily have been 100 movies long. Any given Sundance line-up examined years later will have at least two or three movies well worth seeing, and often far more than that. The idea is to mix stone-cold classics with some less frequently mentioned titles and come up with a strong overview of American independents of the Sundance era. So if your favorite isn’t here, just assume that it would pretty easily place at number 43, unless it’s been specifically called out as overrated crap. (What’s independent cinema without a little hating thrown in?)
This is probably not actually one of the 50 best movies to get its start at Sundance. But there’s simply no way to make a list of the best Sundance movies without Parker Posey, and if we’re going to get her on it, why not go all-out star-as-auteur? Posey was a Sundance staple in supporting roles before and after the 1995 festival, but that year Party Girl provided her with a full-blown star vehicle the likes of which she’d rarely see again. Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s movie is very much of its time, which might sound limiting but actually means it stakes a better claim to a ’90s form of indie screwball than plenty of better-regarded Sundance titles that attempt to achieve timelessness through a kind of generic sitcomminess (looking at you, Happy Texas). Party Girl is also a great symbol of indie stardom's capriciousness; just a few years later, the similarly neo-screwball Posey vehicle The Misadventures of Margaret played Sundance, only to fail to ever secure a U.S. theatrical release.
Musicals aren’t often major Sundance attractions for purely logistical reasons; it’s hard to make a good one on an indie budget. (Though if we were venturing outside the U.S., Stuart Murdoch’s delightful God Help the Girl would surely make the cut here.) John Cameron Mitchell pulled it off, though, with his adaptation of Stephen Trask’s stage piece Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a rock musical at the intersection of the gay, trans, and East German experiences. It’s hard to imagine “Wig in a Box” not bringing the house down at the festival. (If you were there and it didn’t, don’t correct me.)
There were a whole lot of chatty-youngish-adults dramedies swirling around the indie scene in the 1990s; Walking and Talking isn’t even the only gerund-and-gerund title. But Nicole Holofcener’s debut feature is up there with non-Sundance title Kicking and Screaming as one of the funniest and more authentically wistful of these accidental Gen-X manifestos. It also has the extra movie-nerd cred of a subplot about sorta-dating the not-very-attractive guy from your local video store.
Darren Aronofsky is a divisive figure, but it’s hard to deny the sheer power he flexed by making a starless head-trip math movie in high-contrast black and white that a certain kind of teenager enthusiastically drove hours to see back in 1998. I may be speaking from experience here (the bad Roland Emmerich Godzilla had just come out; we needed this).
Maybe the most consequential Sundance arrival of the 21st century is Ryan Coogler’s debut feature, which also established his career-long partnership with Michael B. Jordan, who has appeared in all of his films so far. Here, Jordan plays Oscar Grant, a young man murdered by transit cops in Oakland; the movie follows him in the 24 hours leading up to his death, combining slice-of-life portraiture with some bravura Coogler camerawork.
Under certain circumstances, Vincent Gallo is permissible. Sundance in the ’90s offered exactly that kind of circumstance of permission to a lot of performers, filmmakers, concepts, and whole vibes that, for better or worse, might not get made at all today. Buffalo ’66 sits right on the line of indulgence; within five minutes, it has a character marveling at the size of Gallo’s dick. (Not content to write this scene, Gallo went, uh, further with his follow-up The Brown Bunny.) But the movie is also a darkly funny essential text of Upstate and Western New York; it follows an ex-con (Gallo) returning home to Buffalo to visit his terrible parents, exact violent revenge on a Bills kicker who indirectly led to his prison sentence, and fall in love with the girl he kidnaps, not in that order. It might be unbearable if not for—well, it might be unbearable full stop for some, but it’s hard to imagine the movie working quite so well without ’90s indie queen Christina Ricci as the kidnap victim and, yeah, ridiculous fantasy object.
Somehow, Donna Deitch’s romance between a hesitant, uptight professor (Helen Shaver) and a more free-spirited younger woman (Patricia Charbonneau) is set in 1959, from a 1964 novel, produced in 1985, and still plays pretty contemporary today. In addition to crossing eras—it's aware of a lesbian relationship’s scandalous nature in this time period but doesn't dwell on it so intensely as to crowd out the actual characters—it feels cross-regional, too. Befitting its west-and-east couple, Desert Hearts has the plainspoken beauty of a country ballad and the finely drawn details of a New Yorker short story.
This shamefully underseen dramedy should have been hard to miss; it reps one of those rare kaiju sightings at Sundance. Anne Hathaway plays an alcoholic woman who discovers an ability to materialize and remotely control a giant monster in Seoul, her addiction and self-and-otherwise-destruction made manifest. Stealth fest fixture Jason Sudeikis co-stars as the secretly toxic man in her life, forming a perfect yin-yang romantic/antiromantic pairing with another movie further up this list.
Jim Carrey hasn’t exactly been a Sundance fixture—and when one of his projects did premiere at the festival, it didn’t exactly get snapped up for worldwide-release glory. Even in 2009, studios were uncomfortable about the gay content in I Love You Phillip Morris, starring Carrey as a former cop who comes out, does cons, goes to jail, falls in love, and keeps breaking out to pursue the object of his affection (Ewan McGregor). It’s wildly funny, one of Carrey’s best performances, and its theatrical release barely made a peep. This could be read as a sad tale of Sundance’s waning influence—or a sign that the festival's great programming instincts persist even when studio execs have failed it.
Gina Prince-Bythewood’s debut feature is such a skillfully made romantic yet thoughtful studio picture that it’s easy to forget that Sundance was instrumental to its development—and to its director’s ensuing career. Prince-Bythewood has had plenty of mainstream achievements since this one, yet it’s vanishingly difficult to recreate Love and Basketball’s unfussy magic. It somehow works as a sexy romance, a movie about the Black experience, and an unusually perceptive sports picture all at once.
Sundance still has it! As recently as their second-to-last festival in Park City, the festival was playing a formerly low-profile adaptation of a Denis Johnson novella that became a critical darling, unlikely Netflix attraction, and Best Picture nominee (alongside well-deserved nominations for its screenplay and cinematography). If “Sundance-y” has become a pejorative for a certain kind of social-realist drama or cutesy quirkfest, respect is due that Train Dreams feels Sundance-y, too, in the sense that it winds through a less traditional narrative, highly attuned to the rhythms and mysteries of our relationship with nature—Malickian without feeling like a film-school knockoff.
It’s probably cheesy to suggest that there’s a strain of punk rock in the Utah-based, Robert Redford-approved Sundance Film Festival. (Especially in an entry partially about a movie featuring a lot of jazz.) And yet! Traditional studio pictures are so often unreliable when it comes to capturing the ferocious energy of music, whether it’s actual punk or just blood-spattered jazz drums, and Sundance has been a terrific outlet for movies that feel more plugged into those experiences, even if they’re wildly heightened, as with Damien Chazelle’s thriller-intense jazz-drumming movie, or as much about the sociology and the scene as the music, as with James Merendino’s mid-’80s punk scrapbook. Fittingly, it’s set in Salt Lake City. Unpredictably, it’s Matthew Lillard’s finest hour to date; Whiplash offers the same for Miles Teller. You can understand why both of them were immediately earmarked for stardom.
It would be a shame if such a lovely, lyrical movie were lost in the spectacular flameout of co-star Jonathan Majors. Director Joe Talbot and star/co-writer Jimmie Fails did tremendous work in adapting Fails’ reality-based story of squatting in a house supposedly build by his family decades ago in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, making a different sort of hangout movie than the aforementioned chatty-yuppie comedies of the festival’s heyday. This one captures a dreamy, elegiac sense of place that often eludes city-shot productions.
It’s fair to say that by 2009, Sundance had lost some of its edgy mystique, inadvertently pushed toward the center by the wild success of some of its graduates—namely the 2006 release Little Miss Sunshine, which seemed awfully close to beating The Departed for the Best Picture Oscar, considering what a sitcommy bit of quasi-satirical shtick it is. But Sundance can still showcase better coming-of-age pictures even (or especially) if they're not bound for Oscar glory. That’s especially true for this ’09 double feature: one eventual wide release about a wistful 1980s summer misspent working at a chintzy amusement park, and one barely-seen cult comedy about kid detectives who refuse to grow up even as they approach something like adulthood.
“If I can’t say what’s on my mind, then damn everybody to hell!” So says one of the women in Daughters of the Dust, while debating the utility of upholding tradition versus moving forward in history. Julie Dash’s film does both at once. Set just after the turn of the 20th century on an island off the coast of Georgia, the film converges characters and incidents into a single day and change, following an extended family who have forged their own form of African-American culture after their ancestors were enslaved and brought to the United States years earlier. Some will leave, some will visit, and some will stay. Dash’s long-in-the-works film is among the most experimental of Sundance classics, observing its characters by dropping the audience into moments from their lives that are both pivotal and casual. It also blazed a major mainstream trail, though: Remarkably (and given the timing, shamefully), this was the very first film by a Black American woman to receive a theatrical release.
By my own rules, these are tough inclusions on this list, only because both of these movies premiered at other festivals and even in commercial release before its Sundance debuts. But both also won the Grand Jury Prize at two of the earliest post-Sundance Institute iterations of the festival, and boy, have both films endured. Joyce Chopra’s adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” expands a slim classic into an evocative and more heavily populated feature that nonetheless captures the whole vibe of the text —despite taking place 20 years later, now (40 years after that) its own form of ’80s time capsule. A young Laura Dern plays a teenage girl making dangerous but inevitable flirtations with a bigger, scarier world, and it’s a sign of the undiminished Sundance brand (and their genuine good taste) that the film’s deserved Grand Jury Prize win is mentioned more often than its Toronto premiere almost half a year earlier. Blood Simple is admittedly less identified with Sundance (and the Coens became fixtures at New York Film Festival and Cannes moreso than the Utah fest), but it’s fascinating to realize the Coens’ ultra-concise take on the neo-noir thriller was winning festival prizes long before the post-Tarantino boom forced a bunch of much worse gangster pastiches on unsuspecting young people, fest attendees, and movie critics.
American Splendor flouts a major convention—not necessarily in its fiction-documentary hybrid that allows footage of the real comics writer Harvey Pekar to appear alongside his fictionalized version, but in promoting consummate character actor Paul Giamatti to a leading role. Yes, this one got there before Sideways, and may do it even better, giving Giamatti an indelible character in the form of this irascible American original. If, like me, you can’t believe that Ghost World didn’t actually play Sundance, this fellow alterna-comix adaptation helps make up for it.
A24 horror starts here. Just shy of becoming the indie distributor’s biggest-grossing movie upon its 2016 commercial release, and therefore setting the tone for much of their subsequent output, The Witch was an early recipient of the misguided term “elevated horror,” intended to describe the simultaneous austerity and richness with which writer-director Robert Eggers assembles his seventeenth-century New England folk horror. This sells short how viscerally unnerving the movie is—and how unexpectedly gleeful its give-no-fucks finale feels.
Almost 40 years after his debut, Whit Stillman movies remain a sadly scarce resource. This comedy of manners about a middle-class kid taking up with a group of upper-class Manhattanites isn’t, by my reckoning, his very best or funniest movie. But it announces Stillman’s voice, his whole deal, with such ear-and-eye-catching clarity that it’s an absolute must-see, perhaps even moreso than the funnier but more arch Damsels in Distress (which traitorously but fittingly premiered at the Venice Film Festival anyway).
The Wachowskis would quickly move to bigger canvases with their various (and, beyond The Matrix, often-underrated) sci-fi epics. But their Criterion-inducted first feature is a stripped-down-in-more-ways-than-one crackerjack of a neo-noir thriller. While many of their lesser contemporaries were aping Tarantino, they smart threw back to Sundancer Blood Simple, as well as the ’40s noirs that inspired their fellow filmmaking sibs the Coens—with a playful queer twist, as a handywoman (Gina Gershon) gets entangled with a gangster’s moll (Jennifer Tilly) in a plot to make off with two million bucks. So many modern heist movies twist themselves into pretzels to make you feel sympathy for the criminals. This one twists itself into pretzels for the sexy fun of it.
Doesn’t the underrated Death Proof feel more like a movie that could conceivably take place at Sundance, conversationally speaking? Even so: No matter what you think of him, and even if he immediately leveled up to bigger-budget competitions, Quentin Tarantino as a Sundance find is pretty unimpeachable. Personally, I find Reservoir Dogs one of his less monumental features, though it’s obviously a knockout debut that just thinking about seeing it for the first time with no foreknowledge of who this guy is kind of gives me the vapors.
It’s increasingly difficult to pick a best and/or favorite Kelly Reichardt movie, but this triptych of lightly interconnected stories about women living in Montana makes a great case with perfectly judged performances from Laura Dern, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart, and Reichardt’s muse Michelle Williams. Though Montana is a full Idaho away from Utah, it also feels like a particularly Sundance-y effort—and that’s before you get to the scene where Gladstone gives Stewart a ride to a diner on her actual horse.
That it’s become fashionable to dismiss Celine Song is probably attributable to the success of her delicate, quiet directorial debut as Past Lives—and maybe also her tendency to write and direct love triangles that aren’t really love triangles. Here, Nora (Greta Lee), a woman from South Korea who has emigrated to Canada and then New York City, imagines her past and present through a childhood crush, now grown, and her current boyfriend, who knows nothing of her young life in Korea. Much of it seems plainspoken, maybe even uneventful, without any sense of romantic danger. Then, later in the movie, there’s a cut to the past (or possibly an imagined version of it) that took my breath away, as Past Lives reveals itself as less about romantic conflict than the bittersweet effect of glimpsing your past self in someone else.
There are coming-of-age stories before and after this trio on this list; you can’t list Sundance highlights while limiting teenage stories to just one. But this trio offers a real spectrum of the teenage experience. On one end, there’s the misery, cruelty, and mortification of Welcome to the Dollhouse, which still strikes me as one of Todd Solondz’s best, and which I am also afraid to rewatch in the vicinity of my daughter entering middle school. On the other end, older and vastly sillier, is Napoleon Dynamite, whose title character gets off incredibly easy compared to poor Dawn Wiener, yet in his way is equally expressive of that familiar outcast status, portrayed in more of a deadpan comic-strip style. Smack in the middle is Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, which contains harrowing passages but ultimately balances out the cringe, comedy, and emotionality. Given how clumsily Hollywood has dealt with teenagers, all three of these are essential.
Kenneth Lonergan got his start as a filmmaker with Sundance fave You Can Count On Me, but his crowning achievement so far is this grief drama that very much rebukes the kind of indie-movie healing we’ve come to expect about what Marge Simpson describes as “people coming to terms with things,” yet not fully succumbing to miserabilism, either. Casey Affleck has never been better (and, be real: will he ever be?) as a man stewing in a pain that he understandably “can’t beat.”
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I have the sense that in recent years, boutique distributors have realized they can get around Sundance pretty easily for their horror buzz by playing to genre-friendlier crowds at Fantastic Fest or SXSW. But Sundance is still your go-to outlet for movies about ghosts that are more sad than purely scary. Hence Daivd Lowery’s metaphysical haunted-house movie that transcends time with its Malickian take on the great not-quite-beyond, and Steven Soderbergh’s more genre-y but equally grief-aware and location-specific version of the same. (If this is too much Casey Affleck for you, don’t worry; he spends much of A Ghost Story covered in a sheet. And was not actually under said sheet during the filming of some scenes.)
Another gem from the penultimate Park City year, James Sweeney’s sophomore feature immediately became notorious for horny fans unable to stop themselves from bootlegging a sex scene from the digital screening that’s become a regular feature of Sundance since Covid. Fair play, I suppose, to engage in foolhardy obsessiveness over this particular movie, which fuses Sweeney’s melancholy screwball sensibility with, well, I won’t necessarily say De Palma, but it is about twins, so…just watch this movie, and don’t learn a damn thing more about it beforehand, except that Dylan O’Brien gives a spectacular, Oscar-worthy performance as a guy set adrift following the death of his twin brother. (OK, you can learn one more thing: It’s much, much funnier than that sounds.)
And just as some later-period entries prove that Sundance still has the juice, the fact that Sleeping with Other People never really caught on culturally after its Park City debut is a sad sign that American indie cinema had become a lot less marketable by the mid-2010s. Leslye Headland made a bona fide rom-com classic, probably the best of its kind of the past 20 years, a more believably horny riff on When Harry Met Sally with Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie as reconnected former hookups who opt for friendship instead of sex as they pursue others, attempting to repair their broken love lives. Sounds like charming boilerplate, maybe a cut-above Netflix offering, but Headland directs the hell out of it, with grace notes that don’t interfere with the comic rhythms. Moreover, Sleeping with Other People is made by, for, and about people who love repartee—and no offense to Meg Ryan or Billy Crystal, but it’s a lot sexier than its most obvious influence.
If you need a break from sensitive teens, why not try a pair who struggle to feel anything? Anya Taylor-Joy plays an ambitious student with designs on murdering her stepfather, assisted by Olivia Cooke as a sorta-classmate who allegedly walks around with emotional numbness that makes her an unusually dispassionate murder-planner. It’s sort of a De Palma twist on a lopsided version of Strangers on a Train and a smidge of creeping teenage angst. It’s also particularly instructive as a moment on the Sundance timeline; it’s easy to picture the smug, faux-transgressive black comedy this might have been circa 2003. Thoroughbreds is still blackly funny, but director Corey Finley also takes the characters’ inner lives (or lack thereof) seriously.
Somehow, a $28,000 black-and-white feature nearly rated NC-17 for foul language has become a sort of de facto People’s Choice among Sundance pictures. Some of that is down to where writer-director Kevin Smith went in subsequent projects, a canny-in-retrospect combination of baby-steps maturity and full-scale regression. His filmmaking may technically have improved, but it’s hard to match the DIY-looking, classic-security-cam lo-fi of his hilarious debut, not least because a movie about a couple of slackers fruitlessly complaining about and/or rebelling against their dead-end jobs will be relatable as long as dead-end jobs (and dudes jawing about Star Wars) exist. Which is to say, probably well into nuclear winter.
Even those who fetishize David Gordon Green’s indie-movie side as opposed to his forays into broad comedy, horror, or docudrama may not think or talk much about Snow Angels, maybe because it goes heavier on the small-town tragedy than, say, All the Real Girls. (It’s from a novel by Stewart O’Nan.) Yet as hard as this movie can be to watch, specifically the storyline featuring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale as an estranged couple, it’s also an interconnected-stories movie of rare loveliness and beauty, existing contemporaneously with more bludgeoning exercises like Babel. Snow Angels stays confined to a small Pennsylvania town, but finds a richness of character and setting that Green brings to almost everything he touches. Not much of an audience showed up for it, including critics, though that didn’t stop folks from complaining when Green pivoted away from this kind of material for a while. The eventual Snow Angels theatrical release came in 2008, meaning it shared its release year with Green’s Pineapple Express, creating perhaps the most incongruously brilliant single-year double feature of all time.
Forever. Miranda July could have come across as a dilettante, dabbling in indie film after a career in performance art and starting to write fiction. Instead, she delivered a touching, hilarious, sometimes unnerving meditation on forging connections with each other, particularly impressive for its sharp inclusion of online communication at a time when plenty of movies still used anonymous chat as a gimmick or a joke.
Here’s a success story that took a while to actually, well, succeed. The funniest movie of the then-young 21st century sold out its Sundance shows and promptly failed to sell to any distributors at the festival. It was eventually picked up, and debuted in limited release, peaking in fewer than two-dozen theaters, hobbled by reviews that failed to clear 50% on the then-novel Tomatometer. Perhaps my greatest pointless brag as a moviegoer is that a year before moving to New York City, I saw it at the AMC Empire 25, top floor, several weeks into its run, with my college roommate. We howled with laughter the whole way through. We were correct to do so; years of appreciation (and two follow-up series for Netflix) may have overfamiliarized the culture at large with this micro-spoof, but David Wain and Michael Showalter’s absurdist take on early ’80s summer-camp comedies remains a comedy landmark.
Richard Linklater was well-established when he brought his 160-minute miniaturist epic to Sundance in 2014, but it’s hard to compete with, yes, the amount of time this one spans, encompassing nearly the entirety of the 2000s as well as the vastness/smallness/quickness of childhood in general. Maybe it’s almost like cheating to cover so much ground, compared to how most movies must remain affixed in the year of their release (or festival debut). Then again, maybe Linklater is just smart and probing enough to explore our relationship with the inexorable march of time through the simple yet profound capturing of moments in the life of Mason (Ellar Coltrane). Some movies have experimented with shooting in real time; Linklater uses the fakeness of edits to mimic our merciless reality.
Of course Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale represented a major comeback for him at the 2005 festival. But if we’re picking one movie per director, it’s his lighter but no less sharp comedy from a decade later that really deserves a spot, not least because it doubles as a showcase for its star and co-writer Greta Gerwig (whose own movies as a director missed Sundance; even Nights and Weekends was a South by Southwest premiere). Not only is Mistress America one of the best Thanksgiving movies around, it’s one of the flat-out funniest dialogue comedies in Sundance (or maybe just recent American cinema) history, as well as a great movie about (tacitly) the anxiety of aging out of 30-under-30 lists with no exceptional acclaim in sight. Appropriately, this movie wasn’t nearly as beloved as Squid, or its companion piece Frances Ha. But it’s damn near perfect.
It sounds too cute, doesn’t it, in that film-fest way? Brick is another high school story, this one a teenage murder mystery told in a noir-inspired vernacular that never comes close to kitchen-sink realism. Writer-director Rian Johnson has even said that it’s hard for him to look at it as a movie so much as a vivid yearbook of its making, even moreso than his subsequent films. But Brick is actually the great kind of festival favorite, a movie audacious enough in concept and style that it all but requires an adventurous audience to give it a warm reception. Perhaps paradoxically, this movie is also wildly entertaining, as snappy as any number of its classic influences with an overlay of wisdom about the turmoil of our high school years. Johnson is a natural, and as artificial as a tough-talking young sleuth played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be, Brick itself feels as comfortable and confident as any of his excellent subsequent features.
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A found-footage horror movie, from filmmakers and stars who did not become the next big sensation at the box office or the Oscars, seems like a Sundance outlier—the indie-movie version of a one-hit wonder, not least because some of its success was predicated on the early-days buzz, more carny-barker than savvy whispering campaign, about whether or not it was for real. Yet that’s also what makes The Blair Witch Project so undeniable. In its immediate aftermath, it did feel very much like an anomaly; witness the more traditional supernatural story The Sixth Sense immediately outrunning it at the box office, a few weeks after it parlayed some big wide-release weekends into a series of normie WTFs. Yet found footage returned and flourished in a way that Blair Witch made possible; horror became a bigger indie-movie fixture than ever; and the movie itself is obviously a stone-cold classic, one of the scariest ever made, and all the more so for its lo-fi verisimilitude. From what looked like modest resources came a classic, a box office smash, a working subgenre, and scrappy spirit of independent film.