After Dark Films, founded by Courtney Solomon (Dungeons & Dragons and An American Haunting), is making a splash in the low-budget horror scene. In 2006 the After Dark Horror Fest arrived, spotlighting eight films that would have otherwise been relegated to the straight to video market where they would most likely be ignored. This festival of sorts offered an opportunity for horror fans to get a look at these films on the big screen, as well as give the filmmakers some more exposure.

This year, the second for the festival, I was able to take in five of the features. Are all of them great? No, but they all have something to offer, something outside of the mainstream glut of remakes and imports. One of these films is Mulberry Street.

This is how you make a movie with a miniscule budget. I have read that the budget was in the vicinity of $60,000. That's right, the budget was that small. There are a couple of reasons why this movie works as well as it does. It was shot on mini-DV, pretty much a commercially available camera, and when you take something of that quality and blow it up for the big screen you are going to expose all of the grain and the flaws. You have to make that work for you. Director Jim Mickle does a great job of using the grain to create a gritty authenticity, documentary in look; it is as if you are there. Mulberry Street gives a viewer the feeling of being a fly on the wall, placing you right in the middle of the scene.

The next element to success at this level will be quality performances. It is a given that at this level you are not going to have any "name" stars, but that does not mean that you won't get good performances. In the case of Mulberry Street, all of the performances are pitch perfect. At the top would have to be Nick Damici (who also co-wrote the script with director Jim Mickle) as Clutch, former boxer and father to an Iraq war veteran named Casey (Kim Blair). Each character that enters the frame, from Clutch to the old guys, Frank and Charlie, who live upstairs, to Coco, the gay man next door, all feel real. It is like they truly belong where they are, more the actual tenants of the building than actors brought in to play roles.

That brings me to the biggest selling point and the root of why this movie works, when, all things being equal, it probably shouldn't. The screenplay is the key to Mulberry Street's success. If you are looking for natural character growth built on believable dialogue, look no further. As written by Mickle and Damici, the characters are a product of their environment, rather than story contrivances built to get the characters into the positions required by the story. In a way the performances are an extension of the script. The strong performances give credence to the words being spoken, while the strength of the screenplay give the actors the right words to make everything believable. It is a symbiotic relationship that hits just the right balance here.