ARROW VIDEO ANNOUNCES "AMERICAN HORROR PROJECT" |
Arrow Video is pleased to announce the
American Horror Project, a new series of box-sets which sees a
variety of rarely seen and long-forgotten cult horror films being
restored and returned from obscurity and risk of being lost forever due
to fragility of original film material.
American Horror Project will ensure that these unique slices of
the American Nightmare are brought back into the public consciousness
and preserved for all to enjoy in brand new High Definition transfers
from the best surviving elements.
The first volume of the series will be released Feb 22nd
(UK) and 23rd (US) 2016, with Arrow Video commited to bringing these
lesser-known efforts of US genre cinema back into the limelight where
they belong.
Volume I of this series presents three tales of violence and madness from the 1970s.
Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (Christopher Speeth, 1973) sees a
family arrive at a creepy, dilapidated fairground in search of their
missing daughter, only to find themselves at the mercy of cannibalistic
ghouls lurking beneath the park. Meanwhile,
The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber, 1976), stars Mollie
Perkins (The Diary of Anne Frank) as a young woman whose bizarre and
violent fantasies start to bleed into reality – literally. Lastly, every
parent’s worst nightmare comes true in
The Premonition (Robert Allen Schnitzer, 1976), a tale of psychic
terror in which five-year-old Janie is snatched away by a strange woman
claiming to be her long-lost mother.
Newly remastered from
the best surviving elements and contextualised with brand new
supplementary material, with American Horror Project we can re-evaluate
an alternative history of American horror and film heritage.
American Horror Project
is a story of the unsung heroes of American horror cinema – films from
the USA’s golden age of terror which, for a multitude reasons, have
either slipped through the cracks or never
gained the recognition they so richly deserve. Films that aren’t
mentioned by movie fans in the same hushed tones of reverence as
The Exorcist or Halloween – but are every bit as bold, bloody and bizarre as their more famous counterparts.
In much the same way
that Stephen Thrower’s landmark study NIGHTMARE USA told an alternative
history of the independent horror film during the 1970s and 80s, Arrow’s
Horror Project aims to shine a light on
a number of innovative and provocative films made during this period
that for whatever reason, have been allowed to languish,
under-appreciated and waiting to be rediscovered.
The majority of these
films haven’t been seen for many years, and none of them will have ever
been remastered for Blu-ray before. In some cases, they will have only
been available on VHS!
So for every one of
our titles, we’ll be restoring these films from scratch, seeking out the
best existing source elements and (whenever possible) involving the
original filmmakers to ensure that the films
can be seen at the highest quality and in most historically accurate
presentations possible. In many cases this may mean extensive detective
work and piecing the films back together from a number of separate
elements, given the lack of care that some of these
titles suffered back in the day. Most of these films will never appear
pristine, but viewed in the context of the Horror Project, will reflect
their own unique production and distribution histories in a way that
they’ve never been afforded before.
This was an incredibly prolific and creative period of independent filmmaking and Arrow’s Horror Project seeks to rescue these important films from being lost to cinema history forever.
-James White, Head of Technical and Restoration Services at Arrow Video
Arrow Video Official Channels
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