The criterion collection, cult-art films and Japanese horror: DVD labels as transnational mediators?

This article considers the circulation of Japanese horror titles in the
West, focusing on how this is informed by increasingly heterogeneous
uses of the term ‘cult’ employed by specialist DVD and Blu-ray
companies. The article focuses on the ways in which the celebrated
high-end distributor, The Criterion Collection, has framed a number of
Japanese horror titles as a kind of cult cinema that can be termed ‘cult-art’.
Through this case study, the article considers how the cultification
of East Asian genre films, as they enter Western markets, can impact
on the cultural canonisation and elevation of such titles, but in ways
that draw productively on their original contexts of production rather
than de-contextualising such titles through strategies of othering or
exoticisation.