INTERVIEW: Severin (and physical media) is here to stay
Photo: Cemetery Man stars Anna Falchi and Rupert Everett. Photo courtesy of Severin / Provided by Foundry Comm with permission.
Severin Films is the purveyor of wondrously offbeat cinema, and the creatives behind the boutique company take their job seriously. They scour the annals of movie history, looking for forgotten gems and rare indies, and when they land on a title that they’d like to bring to their ever-expanding audience, they’re all in. That means Severin will produce tons of bonus features and original documentaries to contextualize the original film and offer commentary on its impact.
The last two years have been banner ones for Severin. They have released a number of high-profile movies and box sets that have sold extremely well and have the fan community buzzing. Right now, for example, they are pushing a new box set called House of Psychotic Women Rarities Collection: Volume 2, featuring titles such as Butterfly Kiss, Morgiana, The Savage Eye and The Glass Ceiling. Accompanying the quartet of films are 11 hours of bonus material, and one can show their true fandom by purchasing the set as part of a large bundle that consists of two more films (In My Skin and Entertaining Mr. Sloane), with an exclusive slipcase, keychain and board game as well. Everything in the set is real, physical, tangible, able to be held in one’s hands.
Releasing something like House of Psychotic Women Rarities is just another day at the office for Severin.
“We’re spreading our wings on the kind of things that we can do without abandoning what Severin is all about,” said the company’s co-founder David Gregory in a recent phone interview. “I think it really started when we went all in with the Al Adamson box set, and from then on, we’ve got ambitious with our box sets but also with the kind of films that we go after and the kind of lengths we go to in making the special editions.”
The creatives behind Severin don’t have strict guidelines on what movies they will distribute. It ultimately comes down to the personal taste of the team working behind the scenes. Gregory has the final say, but he is open to many different examples of genre cinema. Russ Meyer films? Sure thing. Blood Island films from the Philippines? Absolutely. The Mask of Satan? Let’s give it a whirl. Dario Argento? Sign us up.
“Really, it’s down to our personal tastes, and it’s not just me,” Gregory said. “A lot of people bring suggestions to me. Ultimately I’m the one who makes the final decision. For example, Kier-La Janisse kind of runs her own department. I haven’t seen a lot of the movies that she champions, but I absolutely trust her tastes. And the way that she actually builds a special edition is second to none, so usually I’m pretty encouraging of that. But, yeah, certainly we all grew up as fans of horror cinema, to put it in the simplest terms, but genre now is so wide-reaching that it’s almost meaningless. I mean, so many things could be considered in the horror genre or, for want of a better term, cult films. I don’t think that’s a good term to describe these films at all because it doesn’t really tell you what it is other than something that not everybody likes. But, yeah, it’s really something that we think is deserving of championing and deserving of introducing — either introducing to the audience that may not have heard of it before, or revisiting classics like Opera and Cemetery Man and just making them the best they can be.”
Arguably one of the best releases this past year was Scala!!! Or, The Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-Up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits, a documentary that looked at the cultural impact of a genre movie-house in London. For Gregory, this film was personal.
“Well, Scala!!! was important to me,” he said. “As soon as I heard they were making Scala!!!, I kind of wanted to be involved in some way, shape or form. I used to go to the Scala when I was living in England, although I wasn’t in London. I grew up in Nottingham, but I went to the Scala several times to see horror movies that you couldn’t see elsewhere in England at the time. So it was a very important place for people like myself and anyone who was a cineaste.”
Gregory added: “So when I heard that they were doing a documentary, I first of all wanted to see it, and then when it became a possibility that we could put it out in the U.S., I jumped at it. … So on disc one, you get the Scala!!! documentary and a whole host of extras that were produced to be released with the Scala!!! documentary for the BFI release in the UK. But then Kier-La and I did discs two and three, so she put together a bunch of short films, which had played the Scala, which hadn’t been out on physical media or hadn’t been for a long time. And then we did some documentaries as well. The one that I was very involved with was called Splatterfest Exhumed, which was about one particular 24-hour horror film festival, which would have been a trainwreck because it was thrown together by this 18-year-old kid who didn’t know what he was doing, but it wound up being one of the great horror film festivals of the era in the UK.”
Gregory said luckily there are many fans who have tastes that match up with Severin’s tastes. He said the behind-the-scenes professionals are essentially the same as the audience. Ultimately, it comes down to liking physical media.
“We like physical stuff,” he said bluntly. “We want to actually own these films and have them in our own library. If you looked at my office now, it looks very much like a video store in the early ‘80s in England, and we like the items that come along with these things. If you think of promo items that came out with King Kong 1976. There were these frosty glasses, which had images of King Kong on them. Those are things that we really coveted when we saw these movies and loved these movies.”
When Severin released its box set of Meyer films, the company included actual business cards from the legendary cult director. “I was up at Russ Meyer’s house, and there was a lot of material that was just sitting around,” Gregory said. “It had been sitting around for a long time. They were probably going to be thrown away. I’m like, ‘This is gold. You don’t throw this away. Anyone who is a fan of Russ Meyer wants one of these business cards. This is a piece of history right here, you know.’ So to us it’s an item we actually wanted and are proud to own. It may seem a little strange to people who aren’t into this kind of thing, but we are in the physical media business.”
One of the most exciting features of Severin’s offerings comes in the form of the written word. They are releasing more and more books, often bundled with the movies, and they are capturing new audiences with these fascinating reads. For example, Severin’s 2024 Black Friday sale included two titles by Brad Carter: novelizations of Virus: Hell of the Living Dead and Rats: Night of Terror.
“Brad Carter, who has written most of those books, turns out he’s kind of a genius in these things,” Gregory said. “His writing style really matches the lurid prose that is required for those novelizations, [like] the pulp horror paperbacks of the late ’70s and ‘80s, and he’s taken it to a whole new level. If you’ve seen the Virus: Hell of a Living Dead or the Rats: Night of Terror novels, they were epic, epic books, and in those cases, I told Brad to speak to Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, who wrote the original scripts. They were so naive when they wrote those scripts that they didn’t realize the limitations of budgets, so they wrote huge, epic scripts for these Bruno Mattei movies, which could never be made on the budget that they had. So I was like, ‘Why don’t you talk to them about what the original plan was in their scripts and then develop that into your novelizations,’ which is actually how some novelizations were done back when novelizations were a big thing. Sometimes it was done from the first draft of the script, which didn’t end up being the movie, so often the novelization was actually quite different from the movie.”
Severin has many big plans for 2025, but Gregory kept them to himself, so as not to ruin the surprise for the fan community. But one can expect the company’s dedication to physical media to continue for quite a long time.
“Look, I’m sure people are running out of shelf space, and they have been since film collecting began,” Gregory said. “But if you look at the size of Blu-rays and UHDs, compared to VHS, they’re a lot smaller, so you can fit a lot more. It’s basically, are you in this for the long haul, or are you not? The people who collect our stuff and the other boutique labels’ stuff, they want the best, most pristine, beautifully packaged version of that film. … There certainly has been a downturn in the number since the heyday of DVD, but we’re seeing still a very steady audience for this kind of thing.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
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