10 Great Horror Movies Made In Really Weird Ways
6. The Same Set Was Recycled With Different Colours - Cube
Horror is a popular genre for low-budget filmmakers because it's easy to produce passable results without much money, especially if you severely limit the number of locations your characters are in.
And so 1997's Cube, a sci-fi horror film about a group of strangers who wake up inside an interconnected labyrinth of deadly cube-shaped rooms, found a quite ingenious way to keep its budget down to just $350,000 CAD, which in inflation-adjusted US dollars would be around $450,000 today.
Because there was no way that such a low-budget production could afford to build a large set containing multiple connected rooms, director Vincenzo Natali suggested that a smaller set be cleverly recycled to represent the larger cube.
And so, a set comprising one-and-a-half cube rooms was built, allowing Natali to cheat the impression of two rooms next to one another. He then simply changed the coloured panels on the side of the cube whenever the movie's characters entered a new cube.
However, due to the time-consuming nature of switching the panels over, the decision was made to film all scenes set within each coloured room in a block, rather than constantly switching the panels out.
Sometimes the most basic solutions are the best - after all, it's tough to imagine anyone watching Cube and being taken out of the movie by its cleverly thrifty use of a tiny set.
It certainly paid off, as Cube went on to gross almost $9 million worldwide.