These days the average home movie viewing experience likely involves some type of digital format. Whether it be a streaming service or downloading a digital copy, most people seem to prefer the convenience that digital viewing offers. These same people are likely to tell you that physical media is dead. Fortunately for us, horror fans aren’t most people.
When VHS took off in the 80’s it was because of us, the horror fans. We’re the ones that wanted to build libraries of everything we could get our hands on and because of us business was booming for those that released horror movies on VHS. The movie didn’t even really matter. Throw cool artwork on it and horror fans would eat it up. Sure, this resulted in lots of disappointment, but still we were proud to add to our collection.
Fast forward to now. The formats have changed, but the consumer really hasn’t. Yes, physical media in general may not be as popular, but to horror fans physical copies remain king. We want the box sets containing every movie from a franchise, even if half the movies in said franchise suck. We want extra discs and specials features and new artwork and limited edition releases. We eat all of that up!
The good thing is that even though streaming is all the rage, there’s still a lot of great companies out there fighting the good fight and releasing some awesome physical media. Because of this I wanted to take a moment to highlight what I consider to be the 5 best labels currently feeding our blu-ray appetites.
To help me narrow it down to just 5 I had to establish a couple rules. I’m looking at companies that deal mostly in blu-ray. They may still release plenty of DVDs, but the majority of their product (or at least recent and upcoming product) is blu-ray. The other rule is that for the most part that have to be horror/genre heavy. They don’t have to be exclusive to horror, but I only chose companies that have a strong focus on horror.
Now that you know the rules, here’s a few that made my honorable mentions, mostly because they fall just outside the rules. The most obvious is the Criterion Collection. Criterion does have a lot to offer horror fans, so much so that I made a top 5 horror list of their titles, however, that’s clearly not their focus. Everything they release is great, but they cover a much broader scope. Another one that pains me to leave on the outside of my top 5 is Grindhouse Releasing. They do great work and are awesome dudes, but I just don’t think they have enough of a blu-ray library yet to compete with the others. Eventually they’ll be there, just not yet. Blue Underground and Severin get honorable mentions as well. Both terrific, but not everybody can make it into the top 5.