The premature burial
Attempt something often enough and sooner or later you get it right. Attempt the biopic often enough and someone was bound to hit the bullseye sometime, not so much telling a subject's story with reasonable accuracy as using said subject's life as grist to express the filmmaker's obsessions on his own stylistic terms--thinking Wong Kar Wai's lush narratively wayward The Grandmaster or Jane Campion's austere Bright Star with its focus on the female protagonist (John Keat's great love Fanny Brawne). Terence Davies' A Quiet Passion does something as interesting if not more so: cast Emily Dickinson--one of America's greatest poets--in what essentially reads as a horror film.
Ghost story
(Warning: plot details and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail)
Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moon and Rain 1953) based on a collection of Ueda Akinari short stories of the same title (in particular "The House in the Thicket" and "The Lust of the White Serpent")--plus a bit of short fiction by Guy de Maupassant ("Decore!" or "How He Got the Legion of Honor")--is often considered the director's finest work, the supreme achievement of not just Japanese but world cinema.
Misbegotten
E. Elias Merhige's Begotten has sprouted a few legends since it emerged in 1990--how the writer / director / producer / cinematographer / special effect-and-sound designer spent three years of his life and an estimated $33,000 to make it; how he conducted extensive experiments including running the unexposed negative through sandpaper and building his own optical printer to fabricate the special effects (most of the details can be found in a 9/20/10 interview he did for horrornews.net). The results have since been considered one of the most (if not the most) disturbing films ever made.
