Concept films on a low budget are what Clay Liford is aiming for. The New York native, a Metroplex film scene mainstay for years, warns that it's easy to fail working the way he does. However, his directorial debut -- an anthology horror film entitled A Four-Course Meal -- succeeds often enough to make it interesting. It's being screened tonight (Wednesday) at the Rave Ridgmar Motion Pictures theater, and the 30-year-old Liford is excited over the prospect of an audience that's not mostly composed of his friends and the people involved in making the film.

Its framing story concerns a group of scientists and soldiers at a secret bioweapons facility who are under quarantine after the release of a deadly virus. (One of Liford's humorous touches: The killer pathogen is called the Sniffles virus.) As they wait to die, the men tell stories to pass the time. The most conventionally scary of the three, "Caged Meat" is about a condemned prisoner (played by Mur lead singer Max Hartman) who becomes increasingly convinced that he's being stalked in his cell by a Japanese flesh-eating demon known as an oni. "Flowers Grown From Powdered Bones" is a black-and-white silent film about a man (also Hartman) who delivers live children to fairies for a living, not knowing what the fairies are using them for. "Working Stiffs," the lightest segment, is about a corporate drone (Bill Sebastian) trying to negotiate office politics in a workplace that uses zombies as entry-level employees.

A cinematographer and editor on various local films and tv shows, Liford has also served as second unit director on Barak Epstein's Cornman, which received some play in Fort Worth. (Epstein returned the favor, serving as unit production manager for A Four-Course Meal.) His current project started with the "Powdered Bones" segment, which was first conceived as a one-hour film with dialogue and later as a silent half-hour short. Most of it was shot in Decatur and Weatherford, but some of the exteriors were shot in Russia, where Liford spent some vacation time. "I was amazed by the film students there," he said. "They're so poor, but they all shoot in 35mm" (as few student filmmakers do). The segment has a gently creepy atmosphere and strikes a tone that's almost Pre-Raphaelite in its supernaturalism. Liford cites the influence of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, saying that Maddin's Archangel was a constant reference point.

When "Powdered Bones" had trouble being accepted by festivals because of its excessive length (for a short), Liford dug up some other scripts and cobbled them into a feature. Using the same actors in the different segments helped make the anthology more cohesive. "I didn't want it to seem like I'd stuck four unrelated things together," he said. The actors often pull double duty -- Hartman wrote songs for the film, while Amber Bordelon did production design as well as playing the main character's silly wife in "Working Stiffs." Liford is quick to praise his stable of actors. "When you find good people, you latch onto them," he said. He also lavishes praise on his composer, North Richland Hills' Timothy Edward Smith, and his makeup artist, Guillermo Becerra, for his work on the oni and the zombies.

After his current film is released, Liford plans to produce Live at the Sandpiper, a movie directed by Derek Welch about a washed-up standup comic, which will shoot this summer. Through it all, he philosophically embraces the low-budget aesthetic of his filmmaking. "The theater chains and video stores don't charge less for a low-budget movie. If you're going to film something cheap, it should look cheap for an artistic reason instead of budgetary reasons." Given the originality of his story ideas and the wildly different looks in A Four-Course Meal, Clay Liford seems to wear that cheapness very well.