Perhaps one way to
distinguish between how a 'cult' horror film and a 'mainstream'
horror film is sold to their respective audiences is in the treatment
of the content. While the mainstream horror is sold much like any
film conforming to Classical Hollywood norms – a character-driven
narrative, three-act structure, a logical chain of cause-and-effect –
but including set-pieces designed to scare and repulse, the cult
horror film is often sold by downplaying the actual content and
instead emphasising the uniqueness of its premise. Indeed, the
premise itself becomes so important to the cult horror film that in
some cases we can see that it is conceived, financed, produced,
marketed and consumed entirely on that basis, without actual content
of the film playing any significant role. Cult horror films as they
are sold (and indeed produced) today is not so much as entertainment,
or even a commodity, but rather as a form of currency. The idea
of a cult horror film passes from producer, to distributor, to film
fan like a £5 note – its value is in the premise, not the
characters, story, direction, or cinematography.
In the UK we can see
three distributors that overtly take the cult-movie-as-currency
approach; Shameless Screen Entertainment, Arrow Films (specifically
the Arrow Video Collection) and 88 Films. Each of them uses the Cult
Laboratories message boards as a means of advertising and gauging
consumer interest (http://www.cult-labs.com/forums/).
Fans communicate with the labels, suggesting possible titles for
future releases and voting on cover artwork. Of course, these
distributors also release films that are sold on a kind of 'cult
prestige' based upon the content (Shameless release several Fulci and
Argento films, Arrow have picked up several old Tartan Asia Extreme
titles such as Battle Royale) but an overwhelming
number of them are sold on their premises rather than reputation. One
does not look at Ratman and
assume that it is going to have high-quality direction and an
intriguing plot. One instead looks at the tagline ('He's the critter
from the shitter') and decides to watch it (or not) based upon its
preposterousness. But because the majority of these films lack
much merit beyond the bizarreness of their premises, strategies need
to be employed in order to increase sales.
One major technique is to
instigate a collector mentality in their buyers; all three
distributors create a sense of unity within their catalogues – DVD
covers are designed to not only convey the individual film's
distinctness but also unify them under the 'Arrow' or 'Shameless'
banner (88 Films already have a sense of unity in that their releases
are all drawn from the output of Full Moon Features, the low-budget
company behind the Puppet Master
franchise, among others). Many of the DVD spines are numbered to
increase the desire to complete the collection. Shameless releases
can be recognised by the yellow and black colour scheme, while
Arrow's 'colour bar' running at the bottom of the image distinguishes
them from other cult film distributors. 88 Films has decided to
utilise the current fascination with Grindhouse movies and released
several titles under the 'Eighty Eight Films Grindhouse Collection'
label, a way of trying to increase interest in films that otherwise
have little appeal (The Day Time Ended,
Seed People, Beach
Babes From Beyond, and Mandroid
have all been release under the Grindhouse banner despite their not
being remotely 'Grindhouse' in any way).
Part
of the art of selling cult horror lies in this form of presentation.
Just as a film like Seed People
isn't really going to sell unless it's placed within the Grindhouse
Collection, certain products have to be arranged and organised in
such a way to optimise their success. Arrow Video released several
films produced by Fantastic Factory (a production label working out
of Spain) but, perhaps foreseeing that few of the films would sell in
and of themselves, Arrow Video collected the four films under the
'Fantastic Factory Presents...' banner, giving each a similar
aesthetic on the DVD covers and providing extras that unify the
films. Faust: Love Of The Damned
includes the featurette Director Of The Damned: Brian
Yuzna, Faust and The Fantastic Factory,
which traces Yuzna's formation of the label and its first film, but
the 'whole story' of Yuzna and Fantastic Factory is broken up over
all four DVDs, with Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt
featuring the final documentary instalment Romasanta:
Lycanthropes, Lunacy And The Last Days Of Fantastic Factory.
If one wants to own Arrow Video's fairly encyclopaedic overview of
the Fantastic Factory label and its influence on Spanish horror, one
needs to buy all four releases.
U.S.
distributor Anchor Bay utilised the exact opposite approach when
releasing the television series Masters Of Horror.
While Arrow took several films and used DVD extras to unite them into
a single product, Anchor Bay took a single product and turned it into
a label, a collection of 26 films. Just as with Shameless' covers,
the Masters Of Horror
releases each had their own unique look and self-styled logo, but
were all headed with the same banner. Because the series is an
anthology, with each episode directed by a famous horror director and
all coming in at around an hour in length (rather than the standard
42 minutes of US television), Anchor Bay decided to give each episode
its own release, packing the DVD with extras that emphasised the
individual director and making of the specific instalment, thereby
increasing sales thirteen times more than if they had simply released
two 'complete season' box sets alone. It's interesting to note that
in the interviews on the Fantastic Factory DVDs, Brian Yuzna claims
that the idea for Masters Of Horror
comes from his own idea for a series of films, each based upon one of
the Seven Deadly Sins and directed by a famous horror director
(several of the proposed directors for that series, such as Stuart
Gordon and Dario Argento subsequently directed episodes of Masters
Of Horror). When the idea fell
through, he went to Spain to launch Fantastic Factory.
Creating
the sense that these disparate films with bizarre premises can be
seen as a single collection, something that needs to be completed by
any self-respecting cult film fan, helps to draw attention away from
the films' actual failings or achievements as films.
The individual films simply become a checklist, a group of titles and
premises. What's important is that one owns Surf Nazis Must
Die, not that one watches it
(and subsequently realises how poorly paced and dull the film is –
as is the case with any Troma movie not directed by Lloyd Kaufman, it
seems). The 'cult credentials' of the film are less about how weird
the content or execution of the film is (as we might find with The
Rocky Horror Picture Show or
Eraserhead) and rather
purely on the absurdity of the idea (surfing meets Nazis). The appeal
of Shameless' Amsterdamned
is almost entirely in its title and its premise of a serial killer in
a wetsuit leaping out of the canal system. As a narrative, it's just
another serial killer/hard-boiled cop movie making a desperate
attempt to put a new spin on the tried and tested formula. In
reality, few of the films released by these labels are really 'cult'
but simply not very good genre films.
This
way of presenting a less-than-impressive horror film as a 'cult' film
by simply upping the ante in the absurdity of the premise is not
limited to distribution but can also be found in production. Speaking
of the Full Moon movie, Castle Freak (released in the
UK by 88 Films – but too high a quality production to force into
the 'Grindhouse Collection'), director Stuart Gordon recalls
that studio founder Charles Band “had already sold the film on the
basis of the title and the artwork alone. He said 'As long as you
have a castle in this film, and there's a freak inside of the castle,
you can direct it'” (from Anchor Bay's DVD release of Re-Animator).
The process of 'pre-selling' a film is not new, nor limited to
low-budget filmmaking. Plenty of big budget Hollywood films over the
years have been 'pre-sold' on the basis of its star and premise, but
in the low-budget arena pre-sales are an important part of being able
to make films at all. As the inclusion of genuine stars is unlikely,
a low-budget or independent film needs to have a clear and distinct
premise in order to convince financial backers that it will be a
success if made. You have to convince the money men that your Dutch
crime film will do well because it is simultaneously a safe bet
(serial killer movies are popular in the 1980s) and different from
the others (the killer swims around the canals in a wetsuit).
Today,
the trend of absurd movies, started by B-Movie master Roger Corman
and continued by 'mockbuster' studio The Asylum, have tried to play
the 'premise-is-everything' card as much as possible. Whether
something relatively simple, such as Two-Headed Shark
Attack, something a little more
obscure, like Corman's Sharktopus,
or the out-and-out ludicrous glory that is Sharknado,
the situation is much the same: the film is conceived, sold,
financed, produced, marketed and released on the basis of its initial
idea. Sharknado the
movie is not much different (a little inferior, in fact) to Sharknado
the poster. As the tagline states: 'Enough Said!'
- P. S.
