Buchanan is perhaps best known for exploitation, science fiction, and other genre films, including "Free, White and 21", "High Yellow", "The Naked Witch" (made for $8,000), "The Loch Ness Horror", and "Mistress of the Apes". Among Buchanan's work, eight direct-to-television films he wrote, produced, and directed under his own Azalea Films production entity in the mid- and late-1960s, for American International Pictures, still generate a good degree of fan adoration. The titles − "The Eye Creatures", "Zontar, The Thing from Venus", "Creature of Destruction", "Mars Needs Women", "In the Year 2889", "Curse of the Swamp Creature", "Hell Raiders", and "It's Alive!" − were largely remakes of AIP films from a decade earlier. Buchanan's instructions from AIP were: "We want cheap color pictures, we want half-assed names in them, we want them eighty minutes long and we want them now".