The CompleteFull Moon Filmography

A Short History

Full Moon Features is the life's work of producer-director Charles Band, a second-generation filmmaker — his father was the director Albert Band — who has been turning out low-budget horror, science fiction and fantasy since the 1970s. More than almost anyone, Band built his career on a single bet: that audiences would rather own a wild, imaginative B-movie at home than wait to catch one in a theater.

He was an early force in home video, founding labels such as Media Home Entertainment and Wizard Video and helping put now-legendary titles — among them Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I Spit on Your Grave — onto store shelves on tape. He also helped reignite the 3-D craze of the early 1980s with Parasite (1982) and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn (1983).

In 1983 Band founded Empire Pictures, a Los Angeles company with a production base in Rome that released genre films at a breakneck pace. Empire produced a remarkable run of cult favorites — Re-Animator, From Beyond, Ghoulies, Trancers, Troll, Dolls and Robot Jox among them — and gave early screen time to future stars including Helen Hunt, Viggo Mortensen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Mariska Hargitay. Mounting debt and currency troubles forced Empire to close in 1988, and its film library was sold off.

Undeterred, Band regrouped and in 1988–89 launched Full Moon (first as Full Moon Productions, then Full Moon Entertainment, and eventually Full Moon Features). A landmark distribution deal with Paramount Home Video — paired with Pioneer for LaserDisc — let him pioneer the modern direct-to-video feature. The company's first release, Puppet Master (1989), grew into what is widely considered the most successful straight-to-video horror franchise ever made. Full Moon also popularized the "VideoZone" featurettes tacked onto the end of its tapes, offering behind-the-scenes content years before DVD bonus features became standard.

Through the 1990s and beyond, Full Moon built a stable of beloved series: Puppet Master, the Romania-shot Subspecies vampire films, the time-jumping Trancers, Demonic Toys, the Tommy Chong-led Evil Bong comedies and the Gary Busey-fronted Gingerdead Man. A family of sub-labels widened the catalog — Moonbeam for family adventures, Torchlight and Surrender Cinema for late-night adult fare, and others. After parting with Paramount in the mid-1990s, Full Moon began distributing its films itself, the fiercely independent model it still follows today.

Full Moon assigns every release a sequential FM Film #. Because Band folds in the titles he controls from before Full Moon existed — the Empire era and a few earlier pictures — the numbered list below runs from #0 (Last Foxtrot in Burbank) to the company's newest productions.