Editorials
Beware of Bootlegs When Navigating the Blu-ray Market
By now we’ve all been beaten over the head repeatedly when it comes to the pirating of movies via illegal downloads and streams. Typically these discussions about pirating seem to revolve around newer films from the big studios. What we don’t hear about as often is how pirating and releasing illegal copies of Blu-rays and DVDs impacts the little labels. These are the labels responsible for bringing all these weird, obscure cult movies to Blu-ray that I’m sure most of us never expected to see beyond the VHS days. Bootleggers can severely damage these companies by releasing illegal Blu-ray and DVD version of their titles for pennies on the dollar.
Sascha Imme, the CEO & Head of Acquisitions over at OFDb Filmworks in Germany, recently took to the OFDb website to tackle the issue of bootlegging. Sascha wrote a wonderful piece talking about the variety of issues that arise when someone makes illegal copies of a movie and tries to pass them off as legit. I wanted to pass some tidbits from Sascha’s blog onto the Bloody Disgusting readers because I know that much like myself, many of you are avid collectors of physical media. And when these bootlegs happen, it hurts the collector just as much as the labels.
Special shout out to BD reader Horst Matuschek for bringing this blog to my attention. I translated Sascha’s article from German to English using Google Translate so it’s not a perfect translation but you should be able to get the gist of it.
The situation is different, however, when the fictional teenagers (or below rather an adult) is Downloading and burning on a 20 cent blank and sold for 25 euros. And here we are in business of bootleg traders: take a foreign DVD or Blu-ray, the German soundtrack pack to then burn the result on a cheap blank – and hope for as many buyers.
This form of crime is a completely different caliber and harms not only the film industry, but ultimately also the inexperienced buyer who can not tell the difference in a legal publication (or want?) [and a bootleg copy] Bootlegs appear natural…and in some cases even [available] in commercial online stores.
Could we not be indifferent? No! After all, are we now a film label. We pay money for licenses, money for bonus material, money for beautiful packaging – Bootlegger make [none of] that. They steal diligently. And that bothers us not only “because it a matter of principle ‘, but currently also again very concretely: Two published by us tracks are brazenly offered as Bootleg – earlier on DVD and recently even as a burned Blu-ray.
This isn’t the whole blog and again the translation isn’t perfect, but I think you can see the very valid and important points Sascha brings up. From a buyer perspective it can be very difficult to tell the difference between a bootleg copy and a legit copy, especially when you’re looking to buy something online. Once you get the copy in hand you can usually tell pretty quickly if it’s a bootleg. A lot of bootleg Blu-rays come on BD-R’s for example. These can still be dolled up to look very nice, but at the end of the day they’re still a BD-R. To further complicate the matter however, some legit releases can be BD-R. Just depends on the release and the label releasing it.
Adding to the difficultly is a lot of the times these bootleg copies are the random one-off horror titles. The stuff we usually have to go to a foreign market to get. Given that there could be a language barrier this makes things all the more tricky. And, as Sascha pointed out, these bootleggers are sometimes able to get their stuff onto legitimate commercial sites like Amazon, so even if you buy from a site you trust you’re not entirely safe. These bootleggers do not care either. They’ll illegally release a movie even if they know someone already has the rights and is planning a release. This actually happened with OFDb and their upcoming release of Humanoids of the Deep that someone bootlegged.
We’re not going to be able to get rid of bootlegging entirely. That’s just not possible. But we can do our best to limit it and make sure it isn’t a successful and profitable approach for those trying to make a quick buck off someone else’s product. As I’ve said it’s not always easy to spot a bootleg right away, so you may buy one unknowingly. The key once you know is to not buy from that person or “label” again and make sure everyone you know that purchases Blu-rays and DVD does the same. Not only does it help the real labels, but it’ll save you from wasting your hard earned money on an inferior product.
There’s plenty of great companies out there – Arrow Films, Synapse, Kino Lorber, Scream Factory, OFDb Filmworks, Umbrella Entertainment, Criterion, Vinegar Syndrome, Shock, Koch Media, Illusions ULTD, Severin, Blue Underground, Artsploitation – the list goes on and on. We have lots of options for cult film on Blu-ray. Keep supporting labels like these while shutting down the bootleggers and they’ll continue bringing us the films we love.
You can read Sascha Imme’s full blog on bootlegs here.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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