In the 1980s, when the home-video revolution turned backyard directors into VHS auteurs, Chester Novell Turner lived his childhood dream of making horror movies. He bought a video camera, borrowed money from his mother and enlisted the help of buddies, a girlfriend and a preacher to make two ultra-low-budget movies that looked as if they were shot in a basement, because, in some cases, they were. “Black Devil Doll From Hell” was about a kindly woman who is raped by a ventriloquist’s dummy; “Tales From the Quadead Zone” was a trilogy of shorts that featured a killer clown and the ghost of a dead child. As word slowly spread about Mr. Turner’s gritty movies with African-American casts — a rarity in the very white horror world — bootleg copies of his films spread like crazy along the VHS underground.

Then he stopped. Although Mr. Turner told a newspaper in the late 1980s that he was at work on another film, it never materialized. In 1996, rumors surfaced that he had been killed in a horrifying car accident. Grief spread among his devotees, who by now were sharing the Gospel of Chester on the Internet. Although, by then, DVDs had started to replace VHS as the home entertainment option of choice, Mr. Turner’s films became some of the most prized VHS horror titles among fans who treasured the low-fi beauty of a chunky plastic box of tape.

As his renown among indie horror connoisseurs grew, mysteries remained: Why would he make a sinister psychosexual movie like “Black Devil Doll”? How did he come to make his leading character a working-class black woman, an unheard-of protagonist in the horror genre? Just who was this Roman Polanski of the South Side of Chicago?

Fast forward to 2013: a spry and alive Mr. Turner, 67, learns to his surprise that he is a niche horror star who is being cheered by fans at sold-out screenings across the country and is the subject of a new DVD boxed set.