These days, you can go to a museum, a bar, or even a public park almost any week of the year and watch movies beyond the standard multiplex fare—on a big screen and with an audience. There’s world cinema, cult classics, festival-approved indie movies, and classic Hollywood available. It’s all a sign of how far and how quickly Knoxville, only recently a celluloid wasteland, has embraced the idea that movie culture can thrive here.

But back in the grim, far-away days of the late ’00s, before the Knoxville Film Festival, the Public Cinema, Movies on Market Square, and a half-dozen other recurring cinephile options, you only had a few choices if you wanted to see movies outside the mainstream: the public library’s DVD collection, a Netflix subscription, or thousands of dollars to spend on the Criterion Collection.

Then, in 2009, William Mahaffey and Nick Huinker, frustrated by the lack of opportunities for filmmakers and fans, founded the Knoxville Horror Film Festival. (Huinker is a contributor to the Knoxville Mercury.) Mahaffey was inspired by the reception he got when he screened his own horror short film, “33 Nights Under the Zombi Moon,” at Pilot Light. He and Huinker were also motivated by a trip that year to Austin, Texas, for Fantastic Fest, the biggest horror, sci-fi, and action movie festival in the U.S.

“The two of us were driving back from Austin and William decided he was going to put together his own film festival,” Huinker says. “He had less than a month to get it done in time for Halloween, and I told him he was dumb to try. And then it turned out great.”

With its eighth edition coming soon, KHFF is Knoxville’s oldest and most venerable film fest. If you can get past titles like Deathgasm, Death Spa, and Bloody Knuckles, you’ll find that KHFF has been, from the start, a solidly professional enterprise. Its programming rivals much bigger horror festivals, and Mahaffey and Huinker bring a keen sense of the genre’s past, present, and future to the job of selecting films.

“I think a lot of people think of horror as just one thing and don’t really understand how many subgenres there are, and how much you can do with it,” Mahaffey says. “I also think it’s important to mix things up, since we’re asking people to watch horror movies for an entire weekend. Overall, though, my main goal is really just to book the best horror on the festival circuit.”

This year’s lineup is the biggest yet, with 10 full-length features, up from five in 2013 and seven in 2014 and ’15. The big news has already been announced: a new 4K remastered version of Phantasm, Don Coscarelli’s mind-bending 1979 low-budget psychedelic horror fantasy (“If this one doesn’t scare you, you’re already dead!”), screening alongside Phantasm: Ravager, the brand-new fifth and final installment in the series, directed by David Hartman. Also on the schedule: Beyond the Gates, directed by Jackson Stewart, about a haunted 1980s VCR board game; Trash Fire, a psychological thriller directed by Richard Bates Jr., whose Sundance-approved debut, Excision, played at KHFF in 2012 (and whose 2008 short that feature was based on played at the first KHFF); Tim Reis’ gory monster/mad-scientist movie Bad Blood; and the over-the-top gross-out flick The Greasy Strangler, directed by Jim Hosking. (The acronym NSFW was invented precisely for content like the trailer for Strangler.)

KHFF has just announced four additional features that add to the breadth and depth of the 2016 lineup: Sadako Vs. Kayako, a Japanese all-star crossover that pits the creepy supernatural antagonists from the late ’90s and early ’00s franchises The Ring and The Grudge against each other; The Master Cleanse, a body-horror FX-travaganza starring Johnny Galecki (The Big Bang Theory), Anjelica Huston, and Oliver Platt; Fury of the Demon, a documentary about a lost cursed film by George Melies that reportedly inspired violence, riots, and vandalism; and Red Christmas, an Australian holiday-season gorefest starring Dee Wallace, best known for her roles in ’80s classics The Howling, Cujo, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and The Hills Have Eyes.

That’s 10 reasons for checking out KHFF next month, along with the usual parade of short films and the Grindhouse Grind-Out fake trailer competition. The best reason, though, according to Huinker, is the chance to see these movies on a big screen with a bunch of fellow enthusiasts.

“Indie horror has become a testing ground for video-on-demand release models in the last few years. And that’s cool in a lot of ways, but it cheats both the audience and the filmmakers out of having the film play out how it’s intended to,” he says. “I’m sure The Greasy Strangler would be fun in a boozy dorm room, but watching it in the dark with 200 freaked-out strangers sounds way better to me.”

Mahaffey agrees—horror is best as a shared experience.

“I would say horror and comedy are the two genres that benefit the most from seeing with an audience,” he says. “I’ve seen horror films by myself at home that totally didn’t work for me, but then when I saw them with a crowd it felt like a totally different experience. I think that’s enhanced even more when you’re seeing it with a crowd of like-minded people who also chose to spend an entire weekend indoors watching horror movies.

“A festival screening is, in my opinion, always the best way to see a film. I just saw Don’t Breathe—which is amazing—and there were maybe 10 other people there. I couldn’t help but wish that we had that film at the fest, because I know it would have been so much more fun watching in that setting.”

The Knoxville Horror Film Festival will be held Oct. 21-23 at Regal Downtown West Cinema 8 and Scruffy City Hall. Watch knoxvillehorrorfest.com for details. Weekend passes are available for $60, along with merchandise and VIP specials, at the KHFF IndieGoGo resale site. KHFF is hosting a preview night at Scruffy City Hall on Thursday, Oct. 6, with a program of trailers and short films and the premiere of the local feature Something’s in the Woods, based on a 2009 submission to the Grindhouse Grind-Out contest. KHFF is also sponsoring Knoxferatu, organized by Kelly Robinson, at Scruffy City Hall on Thursday, Oct. 20, with screenings of Tod Brown’s 1927 circus chiller The Unknown and the 1922 German vampire classic Nosferatu.