Arrow Video has quickly become the number one name in Horror and Cult releases in the United Kingdom. Their love of box art and posters of the past lives on with their DVD and Blu-ray releases; many of which feature multiple covers, posters, and other collectible items.
They also load up the discs themselves with extras, many of which the company creates themselves.
I recently had a chance to interview Arrow’s Label Manager Francesco Simeoni about some of the company’s inner workings and their overall passion for their product.
What was it that got the whole company started? Was there a feeling that Horror was drastically unrepresented, at least to the degree that Arrow releases bring or was it related to restoration and preservation of cult cinema? Possibly even something else entirely?
For Arrow Video the head of Arrow Films, Alex Agran was in contact with Cult Labs and PR guru Almar Halflidason and they got talking about a few horror films and being that horror and cult were so poorly represented in the UK they decided that it was about time that changed!
Arrow has put out some pretty incredible Blu-ray releases. What all goes into making these high definition releases and what factors decide whether a film gets the Blu-ray treatment or solely DVD?
Simply put (the process takes a very long time!), there is the film acquisition. We say, “let’s acquire film X so we find out who owns the rights.” This may be the filmmaker, a producer, a company or a sales agent. We say we want to license the film for distribution and then we can look at master material. The producer is the one who supplies the material to master a DVD or a Blu-ray from as it’s their film. We do get involved where we can but it isn’t always easy (cf Russ Meyer films which we tried to restore for over a year but were not allowed).
For instance, if it’s an agent they may just have the one master and no material (like a negative) to make anything better from. The master material available decides on whether it is a DVD or a Blu-ray, sometimes the material just isn’t good enough for a DVD and we have to say we’re not releasing this, let’s do better. This is what we did with Demons 1 and 2. We asked all around the world who had a decent master and we found out after much digging we could go back to the negative so in partnership with the film’s owners we did so and we’re releasing them on Blu-ray and DVD next month after about a year of waiting.
Just about all of the Arrow Blu releases are (thankfully!) region free. I’m sure rights issues play into this, but is there anything outside of that that positively or negatively affects being able to do this?
Sometimes it is possible to do region free releases but more often than not it isn’t possible. An agent wants to protect their sales to other territories by imposing region coding. As most fans will know this is easy to get around so we recommend getting a region free player. Much of our future releases will be Region B locked for Europe unfortunately.
There has been a lot of online speculation with the transfers of many of your releases. Some say that you present what you are given with no additional cleanup or restoration, while others say you have direct involvement in how the transfers turn out. Care to put this argument to rest?
As above it is often down to the material we are given from the rights holder and we don’t often have the chance to ‘put things right’ because at the stage the material we are delivered it is impossible to undo things like DVNR. We do constantly try to get the best material we can.
How does Arrow go about selecting the films it releases? Does the availability of extras have any bearing?
We create much of our extras from scratch and try to bring as much as possible that is new to each release so that’s never a problem. We try to release films that deserve to be seen again in the best version possible or highlight a great film that many people don’t know about but we think they should.
The Fulci films are good examples. They had some good releases around but we bumped them up to HD and added loads of extras as we knew a lot of people love these films and will buy them again. Obsession is a really good De Palma film that we felt had quite an underground status. Lots of people know Carrie or Blow Out, but Obsession was very little discussed so we did an Arrow Video Blu-ray of that and we were really pleased with the results.
I for one applaud the overall packing design and physical extras that nearly every release has included (cover art variants, posters, lobby cards, etc). Are these extras something the company sought out to provide from the get go? What goes in to deciding which films get what treatment in this regard?
Yes, absolutely! Horror and cult films were often packaged in those cheap and smelly cases with awful artwork and no extras. We wanted the whole package to be astounding from disc contents to packaging.
The glory days of home entertainment were the VHS days when films had great artwork that shone out from the racks and made you want to pick them up.
When DVD came about it was all digital and Photoshop and all DVD covers became really formulaic and boring (film posters too still only have a limited amount of designs) and we’re big fans of VHS and poster artwork so we combined this with Arrow Video. The extras, like comics and postcards, just comes from the love for each film. When we look at the great imagery available we know we can’t just include it in a booklet or on the case and we know the fans feel the same way so we go the extra mile! This is down to material again, things like Lobby Cards and stills are often not kept so it is hard to find original memorabilia to present in this fashion.
There are a couple different headers within your releases; Arrow Video, Arrowdrome and Arrow Academy. What’s the overall significance of these individual labels?
Arrow Video is the main imprint that deals with cult and horror, ArrowDrome was created because we knew that some people like collecting cult films but maybe can’t afford four or five a month so we thought we could give people more cult over all-per-month like this. Arrow Academy deals with arthouse films and anyone interested in cinema really ought to take a look, there’s a load of stone cold classics on there like Bicycle Thieves, Rififi and The Conformist!
Arrow has a wonderful online forum at Cult-Labs.com. How did this come to be about?
Cult Labs is run by Almar and his team. When the label started we wanted it to be collaborative with the fans. That’s why on every release we feature the logo and invite people to join in. It’s on the forum where we look at the comments and see what people want, when interest is high enough we listen and do what we can. We also poll the members on things like artwork and color designs for ArrowDrome. We believe we’re the only label in the world to do this, the releases are for the fans so why shouldn’t they be involved?!
Synapse is also a part of Cult-Labs. Aside from an obvious love of cult film, are the two companies joined in any other ways?
No, we have a good relationship with Synapse and respect their work very much but we are not involved.
There are quite a few exciting releases on the horizon (House by the Cemetery, Demons 1 and 2 to name a few). Are there future releases currently in the works that you can speak of?
We have just announced the full specs on those plus Blu-rays of Richard Elfman’s amazingly crazy Forbidden Zone and Ferrara’s classic King of New York which takes us up to June – all are available to pre-order now. We’re burying our heads deep in work now as we prepare what will come up in the summer, but we won’t be announcing that for a while.
What movie, if rights weren’t an issue, would you personally love to see released by Arrow?
Probably Eraserhead; it is not only the definitive cult movie but also a spellbinding masterpiece.
– Matt Hardeman
Many thanks to Fran and Arrow Videos for their time and all their hard work.
