If you have an interest in Cult Cinema, then you know who Charles Band is. If you don’t, I highly recommend you go do some research before reading any further. And if you don’t know who Charles Band is while claiming to love Cult Cinema, hand in your membership card on your way out.

Charles Band is a legend. An icon. A movie-making machine, a one-man studio and distribution centre for the macabre and, at times, utterly insane. If Roger Corman is the Orson Welles of Independent Cinema, then Charles Band is the Sam Peckinpah. A man driven by his love of the craft and the urge to entertain on his own terms.

He is also, by all accounts, one of the nicest people that you would ever hope to meet.

Everyone says so. Every single talking head in Full Moon Rising: The Charles Band Story agrees that Charles Band is an all-around sound bloke and the sort of fella who would give you the shirt off his back if you asked for it.

And here’s the kicker. You believe them. Every time somebody says something nice about him, you can sense it’s true. So many documentaries pay lip service to the person it’s about. You know the kind, everyone claims the subject is the second coming of Jesus, but in reality they’re a coke fiend with a sketchy history buried so deep that it’s at the bottom of the ocean. But with Charles Band, there’s none of that. No matter who’s talking, be it John Carpenter, Barbara Crampton, or Mike Deak, their love and respect for Charles Band is plain to see.

A great part of that, I feel, is that Charles Band is a self-made man. Sure, he comes from a Hollywood background, but he was the one hustling to raise funds for his empire, working all hours to make his dream of a thousand movies by the millennium a reality.

That lineage, though, is straight out of classical cinema folklore. His grandfather, Max Band, was a renowned Lithuanian-born painter whose inner circle included actual world leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt. His father, Albert Band, was a key figure in studio-era Hollywood, working closely with John Huston and playing a direct role in casting a young Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle, a woman who would end up babysitting a young Charles.

Yet despite growing up rubbed shoulder-to-shoulder with genuine Hollywood royalty, Band never coasted on his family’s coat-tails or waited around for legacy studio doors to open. He took that silver-screen exposure, absorbed the mechanics of how stories get made, and channeled it straight into the celluloid trenches on his own terms.

Filmmaker, studio owner, distributor, the visionary who understood how important VHS could be, father, friend, and slightly unhinged. Full Moon Rising: The Charles Band Story catches all of those and more across its run time.

Crucially, this isn’t some sanitized puff piece that skirts around the darker chapters. The film digs straight into the warts-and-all reality of his journey: the agonizing collapse and loss of Empire Pictures, getting tangled up with terrible investments from dangerous people, and the surreal, high-stakes chaos involving actual car bombs. It lays bare the sheer velocity at which his life moved, where high-flying independent production could collide overnight with genuine, underworld peril.

This is in no small part down to director Sarah Appleton, who fully understands just how to make a documentary about a man whose sole purpose in life is to make films. Having established herself as a vital chronicler of genre cinema history, Appleton brings a polished, authoritative hand to the material. She avoids the trap of letting fifty years of chaotic production history descend into a dry, chronological list of film titles. Instead, she captures the spirit of independent filmmaking at its best. Sometimes raw, sometimes insane, sometimes sad, but always entertaining. There isn’t a single minute wasted in this film and there is always another hidden gem lurking under the bed, waiting to pop out.

Which is just what this movie needs. If it had been handled by anyone else, it would’ve just been a glossy PR exercise, but Sarah Appleton doesn’t shy away from the bad times. When the bottom falls out, and it did for Charles Band more than once, she gives it the time it deserves to show that even the sharpest tool in the shed can sometimes be blunted by life. But you can’t keep a good Charles down, and no matter what the industry has thrown at him, he has always come back stronger.

Full Moon Rising: The Charles Band Story is a love letter and a confessional all rolled into one, and it works. Charles Band isn’t just a titan of independent film, he is also someone who has kept the industry alive across the years by, at times, sheer will power alone. The amount of people that have had a career thanks to Charles Band is incalculable, but each one is an intricate part of the Full Moon family, and at its head sits Charles Band.

If you have any love for this thing of ours, you need to watch this film. It’s as essential to the genre as The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr. and Corman’s World, and just as important if you want to get to know the Puppet Master behind some of the greatest b-movies ever made.

You can catch Full Moon Rising: The Charles Band Story on October 20, at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.