The Independent in Huntsville books Abel Ferrara triple feature

The Independent put Abel Ferrara’s early work front and center with a triple feature of The Driller Killer, Ms. 45 and Fear City at Lowe Mill Arts & Entertainment on May 23, running from 5:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. General admission was $20 plus a 50-cent ticket service fee, a modest price for six hours of Ferrara’s raw, confrontational New York cinema in a room built for people who want to watch together instead of alone.

The booking mattered because this was not a routine Friday night title drop. It was the kind of repertory programming that still feels rare in North Alabama, where serious cult cinema often gets pushed to the margins of the calendar. The Independent has made its lane clear: it screens indie and foreign films, art house titles, classics and cult favorites, and it leans into double features, movie marathons and other interactive events that turn a screening into a gathering. WHNT described the theater as a place for movies that are “off the beaten path,” and Ferrara’s bruising early films fit that identity exactly.

That makes the triple feature useful as more than a one-night event. It showed what kind of movie house The Independent wants to be inside Huntsville’s growing indie-cinema scene, one that serves film lovers, filmmakers and creatives instead of waiting for the multiplex to define the market. A program built around Ferrara’s early period asks for a different kind of audience, the kind that shows up for grit, style and a filmmaker’s unfiltered voice, not just familiar franchises or opening-weekend noise.

Lowe Mill gives that ambition a fitting home. The arts complex describes itself as the largest privately owned arts facility in the United States, with 153 working studios for more than 300 artists and makers, seven galleries, a theatre, a community garden and performance spaces. The Independent is in Studio 150, the former home of Vertical House Records and Green Pea Press, and early coverage said the theater quietly opened on October 31, 2025, after first screening films at Mad Malts Brewing. With about 90 seats, it has the scale of a true neighborhood repertory house, and the Ferrara triple feature felt like proof that it intends to stay one.