Here's a real UFO, an extremely low-budget, genuinely independent film by a 22-year-old writer-director from Philadelphia that immediately establishes a distinctive and promising voice.

Andrew Repasky McElhinney's "Chronicle of Corpses" is a gothic horror tale set in the early 19th century on the grounds of a dying slave plantation somewhere in the Middle Atlantic states. Though once the center of a thriving economy, the plantation has degenerated into inertia and neglect, largely as a result of the deepening decadence of its ruling family, the Elliots. 

Grandmother (Marj Dusay, of the soap "All My Children") has retreated into wordless dementia, leaving the family affairs in the hands of assorted offspring and in-laws, most of whom have serious problems with drinking and sex. There are a priest (Jerry Perna) still on retainer, a saucy young Irish servant (Margot White) who preserves what's left of the plantation's rapidly dimming life force, and the family's youngest member, Sara (Ryan Foley), a haunted teenager, who together represent what resistance there is to the dark forces gathering both inside the family and outside the house. 

Something strange and possibly supernatural is rampaging through the woods around the Elliot compound, selecting its victims at random and destroying them in assorted awful ways. Mr. McElhinney is careful not to overdefine his metaphors: the monster represents at once the waning of a singularly unjust period of American history and the manifestation of a particular disease infecting American families. 

Shooting on 16-millimeter film and using a cast drawn largely from local theater groups, Mr. McElhinney has created a movie that is not without the flaws endemic in low-budget productions but still projects an amazing degree of stylistic assurance and originality.

Unlike most of today's indie directors, he shows no interest in jittery, hand-held compositions. His film consists of strongly framed long shots in which the characters speak largely in mumbling monotones while remaining motionless, a style that recalls at once the deliberately zomboid acting of Edgar G. Ulmer's grade-Z classics of the 1940's ("Detour," "Strange Illusion") and the Brechtian alienation techniques of experimental European filmmakers like Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet. The film takes on a hushed, ritualized tone as the bodies begin to pile up, and the family confines itself more and more to the plantation's chapel. 

Mr. McElhinney is obviously an experienced cinephile (he is also the programmer of a long-running film society in Philadelphia, the Chestnut Hill Film Group), but his film doesn't drown in show-offy references to old movies. It is more a case of an antique aesthetic absorbed and revived. 

Though the technology is no longer available to create the kind of stately, formal tracking shots that Ulmer specialized in, Mr. McElhinney and his cinematographer, Abe Holtz, have been able to recreate the dreamy, fateful sense of those shots by using a Steadycam mount. 

"A Chronicle of Corpses" belongs to the small but significant tradition of outsider art in American movies - films like Herk Harvey's "Carnival of Souls" or George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" - that reflect powerful personalities formed outside any academic or professional tradition. That most of these are horror films is no coincidence; they are the films that haunt American cinema, pointing to paths that were never taken, to doors that remain firmly closed.