Nick Damici was 8 years old when he confronted one of his greatest fears. Rats. Dead, smelly rats.

His father tended bar in Hell’s Kitchen, near the corner of 44th Street and Eleventh Avenue. It was the late 1960s, and at night the pavement was so crowded with hookers that traffic stalled. It’s the kind of New York people don’t see anymore. But then, as now, there was a constant: Gotham’s vermin love nothing better than a dark watering hole.

And so it was that the barkeep’s son was given the task of retrieving a dead rat from under the beer taps, where it was wedged. “I reached down there and grabbed it,” Mr. Damici said, recalling his nausea and trepidation. “And its skin came off!”

Mr. Damici, now in his 40s, never forgot that experience. He was never afraid of rats again, either. This is a salient fact. In the new film “Mulberry Street,” which he co-wrote and stars in, Mr. Damici faces off against an army of humans who have been infected by an unexplained virus that turns them into vociferous “rat zombies.”

The film opens this weekend on 320 screens nationwide as part of the second annual After Dark Horrorfest, an omnibus of new, independent horror projects that the distributor bills as “eight films to die for.” The movies screen between today and November 18 in a repertory format, designed to create buzz prior to their releases on DVD in early 2008. New Yorkers can see four movies this weekend at AMC theaters, and four more next weekend.

“Mulberry Street,” which was mostly shot in Mr. Damici’s tenement apartment, is a gritty throwback to low-budget 1970s horror: character-driven, laced with urban quirks, and underscored by subtle social commentary. Yes, there are a lot of extras with prosthetic rat teeth and big furry ears, but as director Jim Mickle explained, the narrative came first. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘What if these special effects fail?'” he said. Mr. Mickle was sharing a table with Mr. Damici at Tom & Jerry’s bar on Elizabeth Street, a location for some key scenes in which it becomes a blood-soaked killing floor as patrons suddenly fall prey to the contagion. Mr. Mickle continued, “What if the stunts fail? Let’s at least make sure we have real characters and a real story to fall back on.”

Mr. Mickle, who has earned a living as a grip on a score of New York independent productions, wanted to resist the formula on which Hollywood producers insist for the latest wave of slick frightshows. “They told me, ‘Okay, so we want 10 to 11 ‘jump scare’ scenes, and five or six scenes of suspense.’ Basically, what they need to cut a trailer.”

Rather than wait for $1 million to come in, Mr. Mickle took Mr. Damici’s original script — a “Night of the Living Dead” homage set in rural Pennsylvania — and transposed it to downtown Manhattan. They used their interns’ $1,200 Sony digital video cameras, and redressed Mr. Damici’s apartment several times to resemble different residences in his building, which sits adjacent to the old-school Milano’s Bar on Houston Street. The rats were kind of an afterthought.

“People kept asking us what kind of movie it was,” Mr. Damici said. “And we’d say, ‘Rat zombies!’ It was a good hook.”

Unlike the recent trend toward so-called “torture porn,” as represented by the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises, the filmmakers stuck to as much realism as possible. Mr. Mickle raised the common point about the popularity of these kinds of movies. “The country is a little bloodthirsty right now,” he said. But instead of using Iraq as only a metaphor, “Mulberry Street” pivots on the homecoming of an Iraq War veteran, Casey (Kim Blair), the battle-scarred daughter of Mr. Damici’s character, Clutch. Casey arrives to find the city has become a much worse war zone than the one she left.

Mr. Damici, who has boxed onscreen with Harvey Keitel (in the forthcoming “My Sexiest Year”) and made out with Meg Ryan (“In the Cut”), obviously relished writing a heroic role for himself. But aside from the rampaging zombies, the film avoids — ahem — overkill. In one scene, there’s the implication that a surge in downtown real estate development may have disturbed something evil lurking in the subway tunnels. In another, there’s a malapropism that refers to “Bush Kills” rather than “Fish Kills.” But it’s all insinuated. “We started getting tangled up in expository B.S., and decided to cut it,” Mr. Damici said. Less is more, especially when there’s no budget.

“The only thing we spent money on was the rats,” Mr. Mickle said. “Watch the title sequence where the rat crawls in silhouette. That’s the rat from ‘The Departed.’ Sammy the Rat. He earned more than the actors!”