Starting with this collection, the Best of HPLFF Short Films will only be produced on Bluray* (read more below)
Note: if other items are purchased in the same order, the whole order will ship when the pre-order item is ready.
The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival® in Portland, Oregon is the premier festival of Cosmic Horror in the world. For 29 years it has featured films of the Weird & Supernatural from around the world. This collection showcases 8 tales of terror (and hilarity) from the US, Canada, UK & Sweden.
Films on this collection:
- Robbie Ain't Right No More (US) dir. by Kyle Perritt
- Amygdala (Sweden) dir. by Oskar Johanssonv
- Shadows of the Dust (US) dir. by Ali Matlock
- Rejected (US) dir. by Rene Rivas
- A Caution For The Wise (UK) dir. by Gaius Brown
- The Patron (US) dir. by Avery Abigail
- The Color Out Of Space (US) dir. by Brice Brown
- The Neighbourhood at The End of The World (Canada) dir. by Shane Day
Runtime approximately 125 minutes
All Region
1080p HD
Color
Audio: English Only/Original version
Optional subtitles: English Only
The films contained in this collection are unrated and are intended for mature viewers
"H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival" is a registered trademark of Lurker Films, Inc. and used with permission.
These collections are not just a great way to enjoy short films from the festival at home, they're also a great way to support independent filmmakers. We pay royalties to the included filmmakers for each copy sold, and as far as we know we're the only film festival that evangelizes the works of short film creators with regular home media releases - to date, we've published over 130 short films from nearly as many filmmakers, with many more to come!
*Why only on Bluray?
We've reached a point now where the DVD standard is almost 30 years old (actually surviving a bit longer than the popular reign of VHS tape) and really can no longer do justice to most of the films we showcase. Most of you have HD TVs, and many probably big 4K TVs. A DVD picture is made of pixels that would fill only 1/4 the size of that HD screen, and about 1/16th the size of the 4K screen. A lot of detail in films is lost, especially background detail and shadows, and small text in books or on device screens in the films. Often the level of grain and color reproduction is also completely different. Even YouTube streaming retains more picture detail than we can pack into a DVD.
We think we've done an admirable job of making really solid low definition versions of the films on each collection. However, it takes a lot of time to fine tune each film, often scene-by-scene, to make a standard definition version that still looks good when scaled down to 1/4 of its size and compressed for DVD. It takes much much longer, and is much more complicated work than authoring a comparable Blu-Ray. Combined with shrinking sales every year (both in our campaign, and in the world at large), this means we individually put a lot more work and time into a product that sits on our shelves much longer than the Blu-ray (and with a minimum of 1000 each of DVD and Blu-ray, you should see our shelves! We are jam-packed to our gills with discs from years past).
We know that some of you will be upset that we're no longer supporting DVD and issuing these collections as physical media on Blu-ray only, and for that we apologize. If you don't have a Blu-ray player, playing this year's collection may mean investing in new hardware (though Blu-ray players are now very inexpensive, just as DVD players were a decade ago, and they also play your entire DVD collection), and having completely differently sized items for your shelf, when you already have a giant collection of DVDs. We do too!
Know that we've spent a lot of time seriously considering and debating the decision and its impact, and we've kept making DVD releases far longer than we imagined we would, in large part to continue to support it for our backers here as long as possible. But the time to move on from this format has arrived, from a quality standpoint, a time standpoint, a storage standpoint, and a sales standpoint. This makes the Best of 2023 collection our last available on DVD.
