Preserved for Posterity? : Present Bias and the Status of Grindhouse Films in the “Home Cinema” Era

despite the closure of virtually all original grindhouse cinemas (Schonherr 126), the twenty-first century is hardly a “post-grind-house” era. As a concept, “grindhouse” has transcended the American cultural context out of which the term arose. The films once shown in grindhouses continue to find new audiences. US distributors such as Grindhouse Releasing offer uncut, remastered versions of such films as Pieces (1982) and I Drink Your Blood (1970). Something Weird Video specializes in distributing low-budget films such as Eve and the Merman (1965) and Gold Train (1965) that otherwise would have been forgotten by all but the most avid paracinema aficionados. Since 2005, UK-based distributor Nucleus Films has released four volumes of Grindhouse Trailer Classics, and Synapse Films has released six DVD volumes of grindhouse film trailers along with twenty-two compilations of 8mm stag films in its 42nd Street Forever series. Nostalgia for the grindhouse era is propagated by publications such as Robin Bougie’s Cinema Sewer (1997–), documentaries including American Grindhouse (2010) and 42nd Street Memories (2015), and fan Web sites such as 42ndstreetpeteforever.com and Grindhousedatabase.com (both established in the first decade of the 2000s). Both David Church’s Grindhouse Nostalgia and John Cline and Robert Weiner’s collection From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse attest to continuing scholarly interest in grindhouse. “Grindhouse” movies’ formal properties and themes have been emulated in contemporary films, ranging from Tarantino and Rodriguez’s $53 million double feature Grindhouse (2007) to numerous lower-budget direct-to-video (DTV), or direct-to-DVD, neo-grindhouse films such as She Kills (2015), Jessicka Rabid (2010), and If a Tree Falls (2010). These neo-grindhouse filmmakers frequently and overtly appropriate elements from their forebears. For instance, the poster design used to promote Gutterballs (2008) is lifted from I Spit on Your Grave (1978); the scenes of genuine animal cruelty in Seed (2007) are reminiscent of movies such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980); and Chaos (2005) purloins its plot from The Last House on the Left (1972). In sum, “grindhouse” lives on in the cultural imagination, despite the loss of grindhouse theaters.

However, tensions arise out of the transference from Forty-Second Street’s flea-pit cinemas to the consumption of “grindhouse”—movies, associated paraphernalia, and literature about the era in which grindhouse theaters flourished—in the home (mainly via DVD). If “grindhouse” is to remain meaningful in the twenty-first century (and clearly the term is still employed as a signifier), more needs to be done to account for the digital home-cinema context in which grindhouse is now principally consumed, particularly with regard to the move away from theatrical, analog distribution and the impact that shift has had on the concept of “grindhouseness.”

In some senses, DVD appears to provide a natural home for films that emulate a grindhouse aesthetic, especially those that share the exploitation sensibility that characterized grindhouse exhibition. DTV releasing is associated with “trashy” films that do not fit into the mainstream Hollywood multiplex/blockbuster production model. DTV is a cultural ghetto, providing distributors such as Shameless Screen Entertainment with an outlet for “fan editions” of niche interest films such as Almost Human (1974) and The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1970). Production companies such as The Asylum use DTV to ride on the coattails of mainstream releases such as Snakes on a Plane (2006) and Transformers (2007) with low-rent imitations such as Snakes on a Train (2006) and Transmorphers (2007). Micro-budget filmmakers such as Michael Todd Schneider and Ronny Carlsson have taken to self-releasing films on DVD via their own websites (maggotfilms.com and filmbizarroproductions.com, respectively), often in highly limited runs.¹ In these respects, DVD has taken the place of the grindhouse as a home to a shadow film industry, and so it is apt that both grindhouse “classics” and neogrindhouse pastiches are routinely released DTV.²

However, digital home-cinema technology changes the meanings of “grindhouse” qua concept. “Grindhouse” referred to a location. Since grindhouse cinemas have all but vanished, the term has become increasingly woolly...