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This chapter examines two horror films made by Splat Pack directors and released on DVD: Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension (released in France in 2003 and as High Tension in the United States in 2005) and Neil Marshall's The Descent (released in Britain in 2005 and in the United States in 2006). Haute Tension and The Descent are metacinematic exercises in horror film-making that have made Aja and Marshall darlings of more film-literate, ‘hardcore’ horror fans, a group of fans who have not necessarily embraced the rest of the Splat Pack. Lionsgate tampered with both films when they released them in cinemas in the United States. The DVDs retain evidence of this tampering in various ways, with this residue constituting what Timothy Corrigan calls the ‘material scars’ of a film's troubled production and/or release. The chapter considers the ways in which Aja and Marshall play with intertextuality as well as genre and gender conventions through their films.

This chapter introduces the reader to the Splat Pack, a group of contemporary horror film-makers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Neil Marshall, and Alexandre Aja. It examines how mainstream media hyped the Splat Packers, citing articles — including the one written by Alan Jones for the April 2006 issue of the British film magazine Total Film — that portrayed them as independent, subversive film-makers who operate outside the Hollywood mainstream. One of the ways in which journalists — and the Splat Packers themselves — construct the group's image of oppositional outsiderdom is by likening them to past horror directors like George Romero and Wes Craven from the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of subversive American horror films. This chapter suggests that the media hype heralding the Splat Pack's arrival offers an intriguing glimpse into how notions of independence, outsider status, and claims of subversion are used to sell films and the personalities of their directors.

This chapter examines the political economy that underlies the often celebrated horror films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Films by directors from the horror film's ‘Golden Age’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s set the standard for Splat Pack directors such as Eli Roth, Neil Marshall, and Alexandre Aja. The success of ‘politically progressive’ fare such as Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre reflected Hollywood's willingness to rely on independent productions during a time of transition for the film industry. While the studios were rebounding from a crippling recession, Hollywood was also making the transition from a film industry to a horizontal media industry. This chapter begins with an overview of the economic situation that gave rise to the ‘Golden Age’ of horror films before discussing the evolution of the American horror film. It suggests that horror films did not organically emerge from the progressive ethos of the counter-culture movement; rather, they were commodities well suited to the changes and realignments taking place in the industry at the time.