ABSTRACT
Daniel Herbert’s analysis resonates with two documentaries about video collecting, Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector and Rewind This!, both of which profile practices within contemporary American video collecting communities and which almost exclusively align these “cult” practices to marginal horror product. While Herbert’s article and the aforementioned documentaries succeed in offering a fairly well-rounded picture of US video collectors and the legacy of shot on video (SOV) horror films in the twenty-first century, they are less concerned with the industrial contexts that birthed the SOV horror phenomenon in the 1980s. The chapter focuses on these overlooked areas and shows how pioneering video distributors exploited home video technology to produce new horror films, using marketing materials that chimed with the interests of cult horror audiences at the time. By the mid-1980s, the videocassette was a staple of North American households and, consequently, was rapidly becoming a primary distribution platform for film production companies.
