Reservoir Dogs was certainly not 15k

While this is true, the first episode was posted within weeks of the first Slender Man photoshop images being created on SA. Troy Wagner, the series creator, was a part of the original forum thread where Slender Man was cooked up.

Cube is set in a gigantic maze-like cube with thousands of different rooms that have various obstacles the characters have to deal with as they explore, but the movie had a tiny budget so they only built one room.

So what they did was build the room with removable panel walls that were different coloured gels. They simply swapped the panels from scene to scene so some rooms were red, some were blue, etc, and simple camera angles were enough to convince you the characters were travelling through this giant structure. Very cleverly done!

I thought that was because one of the actors was allergic to horses.

For the Dutch historical naval epic Michiel de Ruyter (trailer), which has a massive budget for a Dutch but a small budget compared to an American epic (about $8.5 million), director Roel Reiné juggled three ships around to make it seem like the naval battles on screen had many, many more.

'tis why I specified "modern" slenderman.

He was a simi-obscure art project pre-marble hornets.

Slenderman existed as photoshop images and a creepypasta on the forum SomethingAwful before the excellent Marble Hornets videos came out.

It's adapted from a play so it makes sense that most of it takes place in one room.

In the Wrath of Kahn, the bridge of the Enterprise and the bridge of the Reliant (Kahn's ship) are the same set with slightly different configuration.

Watch James Cameron's masterclass. He used miniatures, reverse projections and matte paintings for future war scenes in terminator, shot in streets with car dealerships so that he had well lit streets at night, and often meticulously planned every shoot so that the budget remains as constrained as possible.

I've heard of filmmakers hiding in the bushes during battle or crowd scenes of big budget movies and filming the scenes for their own movies. Gettysburg with Martin Sheen comes to mind.

Also, John Waters used to hide his camera in the back of a van to avoid permits when shooting at public buildings.

Nah, I knew it was not a real shark, as opposed to Jurassic Park.

It was originally cleverly posted as a one-of-the-first "found footage". If you just read it, and did not read the reviews, subsequently going into a movie theatre with the perception it was an actual documentary - it did hit the right way.

I don't know if there's one specific thing to point out, but Nolan's commentary for Following is great for this stuff. Nearly every shot is economical or for a purpose. The movie was heavily rehearsed so they could film as few takes as possible and thus save on 35mm film costs. He shot the opening framing scene very professionally and static so when the rest of the movie goes handheld, it seems like an artistic choice for the story within a story. The commentary's filled with stuff like that.

• Monsters (2010) - original budget of $1.5k. Nobody except two leads knew they were in a movie. Special effects edited by the same guy who shot it, in the course of 2 years.
• Cosmos (2019) - original budget of $0. Shot with the borrowed equipment and savvy fellows who knew a thing or two about radioastronomy,
• Reservoir Dogs - original budget of $15k. You shoot it with a bunch of actor friends in an empty mini-warehouse.

Here's some ideas from the past.

I don't think that was low budget at the time, the salt corroded the mechanical shark, the idea of using the barrels as a proxy of the shark attacking was truly innovative.

And doing a literal cop-out rather than have a big fight scene at the end.

There's something in The Blair Witch Project that still haunts me, and I don't know if it was discovered in the editing room, or always planned.

A few times throughout the movie, the DAT sound recorder for the 16mm camera is farther away than the person holding said camera. This dissonance is scary, particularly in the final shot. The DAT is on the basement floor and Heather is still holding the 16mm upstairs... so her screams get closer, louder and more hysterical as she descends further down. Yikes.

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail's replacing horses with coconuts.

The Whale is shot entirely in one room. Sure that helped with the budget.

The Fountain (2006) was initially supposed to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett with a $70M budget. But Pitt ditched for Troy and the project was scrapped. Aronofsky rewrote the script (cutting huge set pieces) and got Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz on board. What was really cool was his use of low-cost macro photography for the space scenes instead of CGI.

Yes Corman and woods were masters of their craft. Ever see plan 9 from outer space? Woods shot that for under a thousand dollars.

I used to watch the saw 1 commentary and the way they used that budget always amazed me . I think one cut was them walking from a dungeon set to the police department and it was one take they just moved between a beam or something

That's true, I've never seen it so I can't say much. I will give him a ton of credit for The Trip (1967), the hallucination sequences in that are wonderful for something that cost so little. There's a reason so many filmmakers who worked under him became bigger names afterward, a fantastic teacher. A lot of what Cameron did on The Terminator seems to be a lot of what Corman probably taught him