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Selling the Splat Pack
The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film
by Mark Bernard
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Book Presentation:
The role of the DVD market in the growth of ultraviolent horror in the 2000s
Were brutal American horror movies like the Saw and Hostel films a reaction to the trauma of 9/11? Were they a reflection of ‘War on Terror’-era America? Or was something else responsible for the rise of these violent and gory films during the first decade of the twenty-first century?
Selling the Splat Pack unravels 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, Mark Bernard proposes that the films of the Splat Pack were products of, rather than reactions against, film industry policy. This book includes an overview of the history of the American horror film from an industry studies perspective, an analysis of how the DVD market influenced the production of American horror films, and an examination of films from Splat Pack members such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, James Wan, and Alexandre Aja.
By re-examining the history of the American horror film from a business perspective and exploring how DVD influenced the production of American horror films in the early twenty-first century, this thought-provoking book provides students and scholars in Film Studies with an alternative perspective on the Splat Pack.
About the Author:
Mark Bernard is an Instructor of American Studies and Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is co-author (with Cynthia Baron and Diane Carson) of Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation. He is currently working on a book about horror film acting and stardom (with Kate Egan) and a book about the representation of food in the horror film.
Press Reviews:
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
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
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
In this much-needed addition to the study of contemporary US horror cinema from an industry standpoint, Mark Bernard’s Selling the Splat Pack provides an extremely lucid framework in which we can engage with and truly understand the reasons behind the outburst of the horror ‘indies’ of the 2000s and their success in the theatrical and DVD markets. Packed with fresh ideas and arguments, and through an in-depth examination and understanding of the converged-with-other-media American film industry, the book offers a fascinating new perspective in the study of horror film that will appeal to both academics and fans of the genre.– Yannis Tzioumakis, Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Liverpool
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> From the same author:
Appetites and Anxieties (2013)
Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation
by Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson and Mark Bernard
Subject: Sociology
> On a related topic:
Queer for Fear (2024)
Horror Film and the Queer Spectator
Horror and Science Fiction Cinema and Society (2024)
American Culture and Politics in the Cold War and After Through the Projector Lens
The Exorcist Effect (2023)
Horror, Religion, and Demonic Belief
by Joseph P. Laycock and Eric Harrelson
Japanese Horror Culture (2023)
Critical Essays on Film, Literature, Anime, Video Games
Dir. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Subashish Bhattacharjee and Ananya Saha
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