Henryjenkins.org Website Review

for me, the idea of “super text” was my adaptation of catherine grant’s notion of the primary text – that is, the feature film – film.” so, in the case of splat pack auteurs like eli roth and rob zombie, their films on dvd blur into the secondary materials to the. platform to frame their films in a wide variety of ways” (142). what did you discover regarding such paratextual frames and what purpose do. they serve different purposes for different directors, i believe, and eli roth and rob zombie are two good examples. i believe roth used the paratextual frames afforded by dvd to do a couple of things. one, i believe he attempted to immediately canonize himself as a significant horror director. he was certainly not shy when it came to promoting himself. this is likely the reason that some folks found him a bit  grating. as for myself, i didn’t write about him to praise or da*n him. i just found it fascinating that dvd, as an industrial practice and a consumer product, gave this budding auteur a way to promote himself as a premier genre director. at one point i cited timothy corrigan’s claim that quentin tarantino was an auteur for the vhs age. i saw roth as the dvd corollary. and it just so happened that secondly, roth used dvd as a way to position himself as a political filmmaker. roth seemed enamoured with the image of a “serious” and this sort of valorisation of figures like romero that makes them into not just cult figures but almost folk heroes and how horror filmmakers attempt to evoke these figures to distinguish themselves. i believe roth saw dvd as a way to build a reputation for himself as a serious filmmaker in this mould. roth was obviously aware of various discourses – some of these “reflectionist” interpretations coming from academia – that read romero’s films (and the films by other directors like wes craven and larry cohen) as actually being about the vietnam war and the counterculture moment. roth attempted to channel the iraq war and the debates about to*ture through his films.