What genres should indie filmmakers who still want a return aim at?

Horror.

Back in the era of B Movies, they were able to make all these cheap horror movies because they actually made money. Even some of the most notorious Z grade trash made a profit. But even without the old B Movie / Grindhouse theater circuit, horror continues to turn an easy profit.

Which is probably why it remains one of the only interesting and innovative genres... it can profit from a reasonably tight budget even with enough wiggle room to be weird, whereas more expensive investments like capeshit can't afford to take risks.

Also, horror operates on a more primal and at times sensory / prelinguistic level, it's fundamentally aesthetic and visceral and needs to find interesting ways to push your buttons. Political people praise scifi for 'imagining new possible futures' but it's horror that stretches into the most compelling new zones because it's more affective and sensory, and can prove innate social dynamics while not being bound as much to political ideologies and their dictates. And anyways, the most forward looking or compelling visions in cinematic scifi is usually in horror-scifi.

Where is the market for action though? Are you referring to the kind of cheap straight-to-dvd budget action that is popular in Mexico / India / Africa about gangs and stuff?

Are there any you know of right now?

Mr Nobody, Cloverfield Paradox both sucked
Primer was top notch

Not that user, and I'm a big fan of metaphysics and potentially metaphysics in horror, but most horror will usually revert to just 'showing' physical embodiments or phenomena of demons or spirits, or depict metaphysical dynamics just as another physical world. Like the physical demon in Drag Me to Hell, or the way the possession in The Exorcist effects the girl in a way that her head can spin around, which is why I've never been impressed by that movie. Or that movie The Void, with cliche tentacle monsters and then a literal other dimensional world.

In that way Hereditary was impressive at least, or similarly see how the occultic dynamics in Rosemary's Baby are more subtle and y'know, not physical but implied, read between the lines.

Or more interestingly the between-the-lines dynamics in Upstream Colour, or Alice Sweet Alice (which implies some dynamic but doesn't show it).

LOTR has a successful metaphysical dimension to it, the physical Balrog aside. Magic is always invisible and more just implied as influence and power, or metaphysical gifts / forces figure into it as virtues and feats of love and sacrifice, along with a Medieval metaphysical aesthetics / logic of radiant light and presence.

What else....
Don't Look Now has a metaphysical, kind of ritualistic-tragic structure that encompasses the fractured mosaic of the whole film itself.

Primer was fucking boring though

Yeah, it was like the work of an autistic logician, which is the impression I get of Caruth. His movies are utterly cold and numb.

Career engineers are usually a pretty sterile bunch. I'd say his other movie is the exact opposite though.

I think the other movie is much more interesting and covers a wider spectrum of thought/material than just autoid tempero-physical engineering, but it's still really numb. I want to like Upstream Colour much more, it's structurally, relationally, and compositionally interesting, but it's so numb in a way that puts me off.

Cerebral sci-fi shorts. Adapting Stephen Baxter short stories is probably the best bang for buck. Alastair Reynolds requires too much budget.

The no exposition thing really doesn't help that but hard to see how it might've worked otherwise. It was a mistake casting himself though. Those scenes where we're just bouncing to the other people involved with the pig farmer are pure kino I could've used way more of that.

What was that horror movie that had a scene where I think the MC met a guy in a diner at night and the guy was drinking coffee saying he can't sleep at night time anymore because something would get him. It was a horror movie, I think female MC, I only remember that scene though.

Thought it was pretty fun, very rewatchable.

both of the previously mentioned projects would require much more than a crowdfunding drive would get

It's the only way he'd get to do them with full control. Might be why he hasn't tried to get them in development.

Mulholland Dr.

It was definitely not this. I think it was an early 2000s horror