The problem with a lot of latter-day horror movies is that most filmmakers enamored enough of the genre to contribute to it only scrutinize other movies in the style when considering aesthetics. In preparing and executing “The Signal,” co-writers and directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry have cast a wider net than most of their low-budget peers and scoured the last several decades of horror pictures and cult films in general.

A union of three “transmissions,” each the work of one of the individual filmmakers, “The Signal” combines “Pulp Fiction”- style multi-plot storytelling with dystopic satire and enough body rending to satisfy the most discriminating torture porn enthusiast. Nevertheless, “The Signal” sparks with its own original energy even as it revisits and indulges its influences.

It’s New Year’s Eve in a city called Terminus that bears a striking resemblance to contemporary Atlanta. Alone together, Mya (Anessa Ramsey) and Ben (Justin Welborn) weigh the ethical burden of an affair they’re conducting behind the back of Mya’s exterminator husband, Lewis (A.J. Bowen). But the right and wrong of Mya and Ben’s burgeoning relationship quickly takes a backseat to a much larger and more immediate crisis. Unaccountably, every television set, radio, and telephone in Terminus has become a one-way transmitter emitting a frequency that’s shaking the city’s already fragile sanity loose from its moorings. The signal’s abstract sound and images — a super-concentrated dose of the most dehumanizing, rage-fueled extremes of media saturation — lay waste to individual impulse control, transforming anyone listening and watching into determinedly homicidal maniacs.

At home with Lewis, a man who we gather didn’t need much of a push in order to fall off the deep end, Mya watches in horror as banal neighbor-to-neighbor disagreements and her own domestic conflicts escalate into a full-on bloodbath. “The bat doesn’t get put down,” says one of Lewis’s sports-minded friends, innocently hefting a Louisville Slugger before his life is irreversibly altered by the signal’s insistence on a fatal resolution to every encounter. Over three discretely titled acts, “The Signal” doesn’t set down the bat, hammer, chain saw, hedge clippers, or power drill for very long, either. This is an uncompromisingly violent movie.

Unlike director Eli Roth’s enervating and frightless torture tableaux, however, “The Signal” is not afraid to take stock of the actual human misery and personal destruction that violence leaves in its wake. The dispatching of a housewife paralyzed by denial via insecticide is particularly gruesome for its intimacy, and bittersweet in its sense of loss and waste.

Because the three sections that make up “The Signal” are directed and written by three different filmmakers, they vary somewhat in tone. The second chapter, entitled “Transmission II: The Jealousy Monster,” veers most directly into satire, while bookended episodes on either side address Mya and Ben’s interrupted romance. And yet, “The Signal” bears an underlying unity that goes beyond the conceptually threadbare narrative device of dovetailing separate story lines together by coincidence. Shooting in flatly lit, messy green and brown tones, and scoring their picture with a relentlessly cheesy synthesizer soundtrack, Messrs. Bruckner, Bush, and Gentry romance 1970s drive-in filmmaking considerably more lovingly and effectively than Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were able to do in last year’s self-indulgent big-budget box-office flop “Grindhouse.”

Much of the credit for the unusually sober pitch of this otherwise blood-drunk and potentially factitious enterprise goes to the film’s cast of big-screen unknowns, many culled from the Atlanta theater scene. “This is getting to be ridiculous,” one character offers as the body count reaches double digits. And yet, as over the top as “The Signal” quickly goes, no one in the cast stoops to playing farce as farce.

Mr. Bowen, a veteran of previous collaborations with the “Signal” brain trust, is particularly strong as Lewis. “I want my wife and I want my home and I want all of you people to stop bothering us,” Lewis says with a self-righteous indignation totally at odds with the gory reality he has personally cultivated. Called upon to portray a broad spectrum of profoundly antisocial behavior, Mr. Bowen tirelessly pursues the truth in Lewis’s perverse and impossible quest for stability, and in doing so exposes the latent narcissism, selfishness, and potentially fatal hypocrisy that are the pitfalls of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

A highly perceptive and sophisticated lamb of a film clad in primitive, low-budget, blood-soaked wolf’s clothing, “The Signal” fluently essays the soul-killing rot of joyless modern life parked in front of a television set and the specious reality check offered by our anxiety-obsessed mass media, even as it gleefully burlesques the symptoms.

One would have to travel back to the early films of David Cronenberg to find a horror movie as intelligent, grim, and ruthlessly fun.