Made for Just $80K, ‘It Ends’ Is a New Horror-Thriller Taking Audiences by Surprise

Every so often, a filmmaker with almost no budget manages to make something that has the industry sitting up and paying attention. That’s exactly what’s happening with 28-year-old writer-director Alexander Ullom, whose scrappy, cosmic-tinged horror debut has turned into one of the most surprising success stories of the year.

That film is ‘It Ends,’ a road-trip horror-thriller following four recent college grads who accidentally turn onto a never-ending highway populated by incomprehensible cosmic forces. It’s the kind of high-concept premise that sounds simple on paper but demands real craft to pull off, and critics are increasingly convinced Ullom has done exactly that.

The film’s origin story is almost as compelling as its plot. Speaking to Variety, Ullom revealed the film’s full production budget landed at $80,000 after three separate rounds of filming, though it started far smaller, beginning at just $30,000 before ballooning through multiple reshoots. That number climbed even further once post-production was factored in, with the total cost eventually settling somewhere around $150,000, a shoestring figure for a film now earning genuine industry buzz.

Ullom didn’t hold back when discussing why ‘It Ends’ managed to break through in a marketplace that increasingly rewards a different kind of filmmaking origin story. Discussing the current horror landscape, he told Variety, “It’s weird because ‘It Ends’ wasn’t made for a marketplace, whereas with ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms,’ Curry [Barker] and Kane [Parsons] honed their craft for years on YouTube.” He continued, “The model that has worked for a long time doesn’t work anymore and there are certain sensibilities and cultural tastes that you can’t manufacture without letting the kids play. It would be really fucking awesome if this trend continues.”

Getting the film to audiences at all proved to be its own battle. After a well-received premiere at SXSW in March 2025, ‘It Ends’ initially struggled to find a distributor and sat in what’s often called distribution purgatory for the better part of a year. A chance encounter between Ullom and filmmaker Nicolas Curcio eventually caught the attention of Letterboxd’s CEO, who agreed to feature the film in the platform’s Video Store for undistributed movies, a move that ultimately caught Neon’s eye and led to the studio picking up worldwide theatrical rights.

That gamble has paid off in a big way. The film has since won the Best First Feature Award at the Fantasia International Film Festival and the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Award at the Atlanta Film Festival, cementing its reputation well before its wider theatrical release on August 21.

Ullom’s resourcefulness extended even to the smallest production details. The crew purchased a used 1990s Jeep Cherokee to serve as the central setting for the film’s trapped characters, then resold it afterward for more than they paid, turning a small profit on a vehicle that had absorbed countless miles during filming. Ullom compared the move to Christopher Nolan’s famous trick of planting and later selling the corn used in ‘Interstellar’s’ cornfields.

Neon was reportedly so impressed with Ullom’s work on ‘It Ends’ that the studio also agreed to distribute his follow-up feature, ‘4 x 4: The Event,’ which the director has described as “balls-to-the-wall gore and violence” and billed as a mashup of ‘Battle Royale,’ ‘Saw’ and ‘Climax.’ For a filmmaker who was ready to upload his debut straight to YouTube not long ago, that kind of rapid ascent marks a genuinely rare trajectory in independent horror.

With ‘It Ends’ now in theaters and a genre pedigree building fast around his name, Ullom looks positioned to become one of horror’s most closely watched new voices.

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