Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film - Hardcover

Mark Bernard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0748685499 ISBN 13: 9780748685493

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2014

Synopsis

This book reveals the role of the DVD market in the growth of ultraviolent horror in the 2000s. This study reveals the history of how the emergence of the DVD market changed cultural and industrial attitudes about horror movies and film ratings. These changes made way for increasingly violent horror films, like those produced by the Splat Pack, a group of filmmakers who were heralded in the press as subversive outsiders. Taking a different tack, this study proposes that the films of the Splat Pack were products of, rather than reactions against, film industry policy. It blends study of the film industry with analysis of films such as the Saw and Hostel franchises.

About this title

Review

"Thorough and engaging 'Selling the Splat Pack' is an industrial and economic analysis of a cycle of brutal but popular works of the mid-2000s like the Saw series, Hostel and Haute Tension (Switchblade Romance)." -- Glenn Ward, The Gothic Imagination

"Roth is one of the primary filmmakers at the (stabbed and bleeding) heart of Mark Bernard's 'Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film'. In the Edinburgh University Press release, the author examines the business behind pushing the likes of Rob Zombie and the Saw franchise onto audiences of the multiplex and then, more tellingly, to home-video consumers who salivate over discs branded with lurid promises of "UNRATED" cuts and extra content... 'Selling the Splat Pack' emerges as a smart study in the economics of horror - not to be confused with the horror of economics." -- Flick Attack and Bookgasm

"Bernard's criticism of the 'Splat Pack' (and their imported peers, French director Alexandre Aja and Scottish director Neil Marshall) is incisive and delightful, thoroughly researched and written with a scholar's skepticism and a fan's enthusiasm ... Bernard gives horror obsessives (or film studies majors) deep and insightful new angles from which to assess their favorite fright flicks. It won't help justify a taste for gore in the minds of those who can't stand it, but for those of us whose celluloid bloodlust is insatiable, 'Selling The Splat Pack' yields an abundance of ideas to ponder during repeat viewings." -- Bryan Reed, Charlotte Viewpoint

About the Author

Mark Bernard is Instructor of American Studies and Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0748685499
• ISBN 13: 9780748685493
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224