I Found This Movie on YouTube: Curating Italian Horror Films in the Streaming Era.

Abstract

This article uses primary data of Italian horror films’ distribution patterns across streaming services and physical media, to assess the contemporary status of their post-cinematic curation in the English-speaking world. An ever-increasing number of such films are afforded HD restorations, collectors’ edition boxset packaging, and a presence on prestige streaming platforms. In this way, this once-reviled category is being further assimilated into a ‘world cinema’ canon for the delectation of cinephilic anglophone audiences. Increasingly, however, a significant proportion of these same films are being uploaded to YouTube via free-to-view fan accounts, pointing to a considerably less regulated or curated distribution practice. The argument identifies and explores how Italian horror films continue to embody a tension between lovingly curated ‘art objects’ and disposable fragments of transnational ephemera, positing that attempts to categorize and contain them within boundaries of either national cinema or genre continue to be undermined by their positioning as open-access, shareable objects among a plethora of clips, memes and mashups. The article thereby examines the extent to which the repositioning of such formulaic exploitation films as culturally and temporally specific artefacts is perpetually thwarted by their perennial status as floating signifiers, ever susceptible to reappropriation and textual poaching.