Curating Italian Horror Films in the Streaming Era

My article "‘I Found This Movie on YouTube’: Curating Italian Horror Films in the Streaming Era" has been published in The Italianist. It can be accessed here.

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. Through HD restorations, collector's edition box set packaging, and a presence on prestige streaming platforms, this once-reviled category is being 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 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.