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 | |
| Industry | Entertainment |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1997 |
| Headquarters | Romulus, Michigan , |
| Products | Motion pictures |
| Website | synapse-films |
Synapse Films is an American DVD and Blu-ray label, founded in 1997 and specializing in cult horror, science fiction and exploitation films. It is considered a boutique DVD label. [1]
Synapse Films was owned and operated by Don May, Jr. and his business partners Jerry Chandler and Charles Fiedler, the catalyst being May's longstanding interest in and passion for TV and cinema. May explained, “I caught the laserdisc bug while working at a local laserdisc store while I was in college. I was selling laserdisc players and buying products and I pretty much spent every extra dollar I had on laserdiscs. I loved movies and the disc format and knew this was a business I wanted to be in.” [2] May became a part owner of Elite Entertainment after leaving his aforementioned job in laserdisc retail. [2]
The Synapse catalog ranges from European horror touchstones like Vampyros Lesbos , and Castle of Blood to important genre documentaries including Roy Frumkes' Document of the Dead, from drive-in favorites like The Brain That Wouldn't Die to Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi film Triumph of the Will .
In 2004, Synapse released the controversial Thriller – A Cruel Picture on DVD, followed by a Blu-ray release in 2022. A competing 4K UHD release by Vinegar Syndrome is set for later in 2022, raising questions as to which company has a current and valid license to the title.
Detroit film scholar Nicholas Schlegel released his documentary The Synapse Story in its entirety on YouTube. The documentary details the history and vision of the label and its founders.[ citation needed ]
In 2016, film critic and author Maitland McDonagh was nominated for a Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Commentary for her work on Synapse Films' DVD release of Dario Argento's film Tenebrae . [3]
Suspiria is a 1977 Italian supernatural horror film directed by Dario Argento, who co-wrote the screenplay with Daria Nicolodi, partially based on Thomas De Quincey's 1845 essay Suspiria de Profundis. The film stars Jessica Harper as an American ballet student who transfers to a prestigious dance academy but realizes, after a series of murders, that the academy is a front for a coven of witches. It also features Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé, Alida Valli, Udo Kier, and Joan Bennett, in her final film role.
Dracula is a 1931 American pre-Code supernatural horror film directed and co-produced by Tod Browning from a screenplay written by Garrett Fort and starring Bela Lugosi in the title role. It is based on the 1924 stage play Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, which in turn is adapted from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Lugosi portrays Count Dracula, a vampire who emigrates from Transylvania to England and preys upon the blood of living victims, including a young man's fiancée.
The Criterion Collection, Inc. is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinephiles and public and academic libraries. Criterion has helped to standardize certain aspects of home-video releases such as film restoration, the letterboxing format for widescreen films and the inclusion of bonus features such as scholarly essays and documentary content about the films and filmmakers. Criterion most notably pioneered the use of commentary tracks. Criterion has produced and distributed more than 1,000 special editions of its films in VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray formats and box sets. These films and their special features are also available via The Criterion Channel, an online streaming service that the company operates.
Rondo Hatton was an American journalist and actor. After writing for The Tampa Tribune, Hatton found a career in film due to his unique facial features, which were the result of acromegaly. He headlined horror films with Universal Studios near the end of his life, earning him a reputation as a cult icon.
Timothy Ray Lucas is an American film critic, biographer, novelist, screenwriter and blogger, best known for publishing and editing the video review magazine Video Watchdog.
Street Trash is a 1987 American black comedy body horror film directed by J. Michael Muro. It won the Silver Raven at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film. The film has acquired a status as a cult classic independent horror-comedy and is one of a number of films known as "melt movies".
Jonathan Rigby is an English actor and film historian who has written several books. Video Watchdog magazine described him as occupying "a proud place in the advance guard of film researchers, writers and critics," and in 2020 he was inducted into the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards Hall of Fame.
David J. Schow is an American author of horror novels, short stories, and screenplays. His credits include films such as Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Crow and The Hills Run Red. Most of Schow's work falls into the subgenre splatterpunk, a term he is sometimes credited with coining. In the 1990s, Schow wrote Raving & Drooling, a regular column for Fangoria magazine. All 41 installments were collected in the book Wild Hairs (2000), winning the International Horror Guild's award for best non-fiction in 2001.
Arrow Films is a British independent film distributor and restorer specialising in world cinema, arthouse, horror and classic films. As Arrow Video, it sells Ultra HD Blu-rays, Blu-rays and DVDs online; it also operates its own subscription video on-demand service, Arrow Player. Since 2017 Arrow have had a dedicated podcast hosted by film-makers Sam Ashurst and Dan Martin. Arrow Video is considered a boutique Blu-ray label.
House of Horrors is a 1946 American horror film released by Universal Pictures, starring Rondo Hatton as a madman named "the Creeper".
Maitland McDonagh is an American film critic, writer-editor and podcaster. She is the author of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (1991) and other books and articles on horror and exploitation films, as well as about erotic fiction and erotic cinema. In 2022, McDonagh was inducted into the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards' Monster Kid Hall of Fame. She is the founder of the small press 120 Days Books, which became an imprint of Riverdale Avenue Books.
Grindhouse Releasing is a Hollywood-based independent cult film distribution company led by film editor Bob Murawski and co-founded by Sage Stallone. Grindhouse digitally remasters, restores, and produces bonus materials and video documentaries for cult film DVDs and Blu-rays which it distributes on the CAV label.
Glenn Erickson is an American film editor and film critic. A graduate of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, he started in the film industry in 1975 as an editor of low-budget films and later worked in minor technical crew capacities for the major films Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and 1941 (1979). As an editor, his credits include supplemental documentary materials for DVD releases of films, including The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Buckaroo Banzai (1985) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). He was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2001 for his editing of the Jack Cardiff montage tribute screened at the 73rd Academy Awards presentation. In 1997, he produced the restoration of the original ending to Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
The Brute Man is a 1946 American horror thriller film starring Rondo Hatton as the Creeper, a murderer seeking revenge against the people he holds responsible for the disfigurement of his face. Directed by Jean Yarbrough, the film features Tom Neal and Jan Wiley as a married pair of friends the Creeper blames for his deformities. Jane Adams also stars as a blind pianist for whom the Creeper tries to raise money for an operation to restore her vision.
David Del Valle is a journalist, columnist, film historian, and radio and television commentator on horror, science-fiction, cult and fantasy films. Described by Entertainment Weekly as "Something of a cult celebrity himself," he was inducted into the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards' Monster Kid Hall of Fame in 2016.
The House That Screamed, also released as The Finishing School, is a 1969 Spanish slasher film written and directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, and starring Lilli Palmer, Cristina Galbó, John Moulder-Brown, and Mary Maude. It follows Señora Fourneau, the strict headmistress of a nineteenth-century French boarding school for girls where the students begin to disappear under unusual circumstances.
Severin Films is an American film production and distribution company known for restoring and releasing cult films on DVD and Blu-ray. It is considered a boutique Blu-ray and DVD label.
John Walsh is an English filmmaker and author. He is the founder of the film company Walsh Bros. Ltd. His film work on subjects such as social mobility and social justice has received two BAFTA nominations.
The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award, often called the Rondo Award, is an annual award founded in 2002 that honors journalism, scholarship and film preservation in the horror genre, particularly of classic horror film and their modern-day counterparts.
Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster is a 2021 American-British documentary film about the life and career of English actor Boris Karloff, who was known for his roles in horror films. The documentary was directed & written by Thomas Hamilton and co-produced with Ron MacCloskey. The film features interviews with such subjects as Guillermo del Toro, John Landis, Joe Dante, Christopher Plummer, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Perlman, Leonard Maltin, Christopher Frayling, Sara Karloff, Roger Corman, Dick Miller, biographer Stephen Jacobs with artwork specially created by artist Joe Liotta, and music score by Laura Forrest Hay.
