of Star Wars just three years before. Horror was the strongest low-budget genre of the time, particularly in the "slasher" mode as with The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), directed by Amy Holden-Jones and written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown. The film was produced for New World on a budget of $250,000. At the beginning of 1983, Corman sold New World; New Horizons, later Concorde–New Horizons, became his primary company. In 1984, New Horizons released a critically applauded movie set amid the punk scene written and directed by Penelope Spheeris. Vincent Canby's admiring review ends with a definitive compliment: "Suburbia is a good genre film." Writer-director Larry Cohen continued to twist genre conventions in pictures such as Q (aka Q: The Winged Serpent; 1982): "the kind of movie that used to be indispensable to the market: an imaginative, popular, low-budget picture that makes the most of its limited resources, and in which people get on with the job instead of standing around talking about it." In 1981, New Line Cinema put out Polyester, a John Waters movie with an estimated $300,000 budget and an old-school exploitation gimmick: Odorama. In October that year, a gore-filled yet stylish horror movie made for less than $400,000 was premiered at a theater in Detroit. The writer, director, and co–executive producer of The Book of the Dead, Sam Raimi, was a week shy of his twenty-second birthday; star and co–executive producer Bruce Campbell was twenty-three. Retitled The Evil Dead, it was picked up for distribution by New Line in 1983 and became a critical and commercial hit. Comparing it to Night of the Living Dead, one reviewer said "it achieves a similarly claustrophobic intensity on a microscopic budget. It's a shoestring tour de force." One of the most successful B-movie companies of the 1980s was a survivor from the heyday of the exploitation era, Troma Pictures, founded in 1974. Troma's most characteristic productions, including Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986), Redneck Zombies (1986), and Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), take exploitation for an absurdist spin. Troma also built on another B-studio tradition: re-releasing the often embarrassing early films of actors turning into major stars. In 1986, the company acquired and distributed two unreleased films, Sizzle Beach U.S.A. (shot in 1974) and Shadows Run Black (shot in 1981), capitalizing on performances by Kevin Costner, who had recently appeared in the popular Silverado (1985) and was set