What most influenced Angelo Espiritu’s new film, “Death of the Author”? The budget, he says. A whopping $5,000.

“When we wrote the film and planned the narrative, we knew that we didn’t have a lot of money so we couldn’t tell a story that had a lot of spectacle and action,” says the Fredericksburg-based director who co-wrote the feature with his co-producer wife, Catie. “We knew we needed to tell a story that was very character-based, very grounded in the emotion and the interactions.”

The Byrd Theatre will screen the ambitious low-budget “Death of the Author” on Monday, Sept. 9. It’s one of two new independent movies making their world premieres at the Carytown movie palace this month. While these two movies, each shot in Virginia, couldn’t be more different in terms of tone and approach, not to mention budget, they each feature troubled female protagonists and challenge the viewer to determine what’s real and what’s imagined.

“Solitude,” a horror film based on the History Channel TV show, “Alone,” is produced by Richmonder Dalton Pope, also the film’s second unit director, and will make its Byrd premiere screening on Saturday, Sept. 21. The indie feature, made by the same co-directing team (Jeremy Brown and Mick Strawn) that made the popular Kickstarter-funded fan film, “Friday the 13th Film: Vengeance,” was produced on a budget of $80,000.

While their “Friday the 13th” reboot was heavy on slasher bloodletting, “Solitude” is a different, more subtle brand of horror. “It’s more psychological gore rather than physical gore,” says Pope. “It has a totally different feel,” echoes Strawn. “In its own weird way, ‘Solitude’ is a ghost story.”

The film was slated to shoot on a single remote location outside of Minneapolis that was owned by one of the actors, Larry Roberts, a former survivalist who competed on the original TV show (another popular former contestant, Nicole Apelian, also co-stars). But when the footage was assembled, Pope says, something didn’t seem right.

“All of the [flashback] scenes in black-and-white that were set in the 1800s, we originally had Kara, our main character, reading out of her journal she finds and telling that story. But it just wasn’t selling what happened to this family. So we shot additional scenes over a weekend in Mechanicsville to properly tell the story of the Brennan family.”

Mechanicsville, he adds, “just has 1800s vibes.”

While “Solitude” primarily follows a single protagonist trying to survive on her own in an inhospitable, increasingly surreal landscape, “Death of The Author” has a cast of more than three dozen people, each trying to make sense of the life of a woman (Riley Johnson, played by Amy Lynn Birch) in a series of interconnected vignettes. It was lensed in and around Fredericksburg, Stafford and King George County, including the Estates at White Hall.

“Death of The Author” explores what it means to “author” your own life, and who gets to write that story. It’s based on a literary theory of the same name by French critic Roland Barthes, the director says. “How other people perceive us may not be the full picture of who we are. Something you do can be viewed as charitable to one person and pompous and self-righteous to another. Following Riley Johnson in the film, we learn that she herself is prone to taking people’s lives and twisting them for entertainment purposes. And she learns that her own story can be just as twisted by others.”

In “Solitude,” the motivations are simpler and more primal. The protagonist Kara (a properly harried Sam Ren Vincent) just wants to be the last person standing so she can win a million dollar reality TV prize. “The premise is that you basically throw a human being out in the wilderness and see how long they’ll last,” says Strawn, who bristles at comparisons to “The Blair Witch Project.” “I think of it more like ‘Alone’ meets ‘Predator,'” he says.

The film does start out a bit like “Blair” and other found footage films, with visuals from body cameras and monitors telling the story. “The TV show prides itself on the idea that the survivalists are actually the ones filming themselves,” says Pope. “We wanted to flip the film on its head and come up with a new style where it’s not fully ‘found footage’ and not fully cinematic but a blend of both.”

Strawn, a veteran production designer and special effects artist who has worked on dozens of big budget films, like Blade and Boogie Nights, says he and co-director Brown, who wrote the story, have a clear division of labor on the set. “I’m the technical guy and he’s the guy who can deal with the actors.” The designer’s primary concern was getting the atmosphere right, and “Solitude” has a claustrophobic, shadowy mise en scène that is consistently unsettling. “Isn’t that the joy of a good horror film?” he asks.

Although they all collaborate from different cities–the retired Strawn is based in Tennessee, Brown in Minnesota and Pope in Richmond–they have plans to rejoin for future horror ventures. But first they have entered “Solitude” into a few film festivals and have submitted the movie to FilmHub, a self-distribution platform, in the hopes that it will be streamed on Amazon Prime, Tubi and other services.

Espiritu and his wife had made an earlier film in 2021, “Bleeding Pages,” a coming-of-age story, that was released directly to YouTube. That movie is sort of a “spiritual successor” to ‘Death of the Author,’ he says. “Both talk about stories and how we grieve in different ways.” But the new film represents a serious pivot for the couple. They started a production company (Chiral Studios) and began to, as he says, “take the craft more seriously, treat it a bit more as a business, pay our actors, get some funding, cast people we’ve never met before. Going in, we wanted this to be a film that starts testing what we can do as cinematographers, writers and directors on a budget.”

“Death of the Author,” which the director also hopes will hit streaming services later this year, has already started conversations. Two of the actors in the movie, Kevin Lee Rosenblum and Sara Jane Palmer, shot their own short film with director Brendan Riley titled “You Should Have Known Better,” that expanded the tale of their two characters. It will also be screened at the Byrd on Sept. 9.

“[In] all of these stories,” Espiritu says, “it’s about trying to be understood. But you can never walk in someone else’s shoes.”

“Death of the Author” will premiere at the Byrd Theatre on Monday, Sept. 9, along with the short film, “You Should Have Known Better.” Tickets are $13 advance or $15 door. 6:30 p.n. https://chiralstudios.com/tickets

“Solitude” will premiere at the Byrd Theatre on Saturday, Sept. 21. $9. 6:30 p.m. https://www.brownspacefilms.com.