On the afternoon of Saturday, August 22, Severin Films marked twenty years by handing out cupcakes in a movie theater on Fairfax. The occasion was the 2026 Super-Shock Pop-Up Film Festival at Brain Dead Studios in Los Angeles, presented with Cinematic Void and Rendezvous and built around four mystery screenings of unannounced titles. Surprise guests, a merch table, DJ sets between films, Severin’s international team in the room.
David Gregory, who co-founded the company in 2006 and runs it as CEO, was still pleased with the day when we spoke six days later.
“It went beautifully,” he said. “I think it was our best Super-Shock festival yet. The whole team came into LA, and it was a packed house, and we gave out cupcakes, sang Happy Birthday, Brent Huff was there.” Four features premiered. Shorts and trailers filled the gaps. “Overall, a very successful day.”
It is a pleasant image for a company whose day job is chasing forty-year-old negatives through foreign labs that no longer recognize the names on the paperwork.
From Three People to an Army
Ask Gregory how year one compares to year twenty and he needs a second.
“Originally it was just three of us,” he said. “It was me, Carl Daft, John Cregan, who founded the company. And now, when I look at the company picture outside the Silent Movie Theatre, or outside the Brain Dead theater, as it’s called now, and that wasn’t even all of us, it seems like we’ve got an entire army of people.”
That army now includes a warehouse in Arizona and collaborators across the United States and Canada, none of it planned. “I never expected it to be that big,” he said, meaning the staffing rather than the catalogue. About the output he has no reservations, with one exception. “I don’t think I could be happier, honestly, except for the amount of time it takes to actually put this stuff together.” Getting a title into production is slow. Turning around the physical elements is slower. “In this day and age, when everything’s available to click, it’s quite frustrating just how long it actually takes to make products like this,” he said. “The upside is that we still get to do this, and people are still interested in it.”
Bloody Moon Over Lawrence of Arabia
That Jess Franco and Joe D’Amato deserve the same technical care as canonized classics is close to received wisdom among collectors now. It was not in 2006, and Gregory’s explanation for building a company on it carries no mission-statement language.
“These are the films that I’ve always loved,” he said. “To me, I would rather see a beautiful edition of Bloody Moon, for example, or Anthropophagus, than I would Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane.” He added Bruno Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead to the pile. “I am more likely to put that on than I am to put Citizen Kane, or Breathless.”
He is careful about what he is not saying. “Not that there’s any reason not to restore those classic movies to the absolute maximum quality, but to me, these films are more important.”
The business rests on the assumption that he is not alone, formed while he was a teenager trading tapes in England. Gregory calls Franco “the patron saint of Severin Films, because we’ve done so many of his films.” D’Amato may not stay in second place. Counting everything signed for restoration and sitting in the pipeline, Gregory said, D’Amato “actually may overtake Jess Franco as our most popular director on the label.”
The Part Where It Turns Into Archaeology
Gregory walked me through what happens between deciding to release a film and shipping a disc, and the movie is the easy part. It starts with rights, then with a usable element. “The best would be the original camera negative in most cases, unless that camera negative has been censored or damaged in some way.” The element gets scanned, now usually at 4K. Severin does some of that in house in Los Angeles, but much of the catalogue is European, and those negatives tend not to travel. “The lab doesn’t want to move them, or the producer doesn’t want to move them to another city, because they’re irreplaceable, so it has to be scanned where that negative is.” A drive arrives. Picture and audio restoration follow, then color correction, then the extras, then manufacturing.
Color is where Gregory gets specific. Most of these directors are dead, or too old to be involved, or have long stopped thinking about a film they made in 1974. When nobody can supervise, the reference cannot be a surviving 35mm print, because prints fade and stop representing the timing anyone approved. “Usually we would have to go back to a VHS tape, or a broadcast master of the film to actually see what the color was when the film was done.”
His example of the failure state involves day for night. He had recently watched a streaming version of the 1971 Jason Robards and Herbert Lom picture Murders in the Rue Morgue in which that step was clearly skipped. “The killer looked like he was running around during bright daylight, and then he goes into the building, and all of a sudden it’s night.”
Timelines run from roughly two months to several years, and the variables are rarely creative. Scanning costs differ wildly by country. For the silent collection Severin is assembling now, a scan in Amsterdam runs about ten times what the same work costs in Paris, which turns into a blunt question: “Do we even do that film?”
Then there is the paperwork. A negative may have sat in a lab since 1975 under a company name that means nothing now, while the film’s current owner is several transactions removed from whoever paid the processing bill. “Sometimes you have to go and get all this paperwork together to try and figure out what the chain is between these two entities in order to access the film.”
Sometimes what turns up is a wreck. For Night of the Demon, the video nasty Bigfoot movie, the only thing available was an answer print the producer had kept in his garage. It had gone red. “A lot of the color had gone out of the film,” Gregory said. The fix was a colorist who specializes in pulling color back out of faded elements, working slowly, getting the picture as close as that print allowed.
When a Bonus Feature Gets Out of Hand
Gregory’s history with folk horror predates Severin. His featurette on The Wicker Man was one of the first he made as a special features producer for Bill Lustig, and it landed on the Anchor Bay DVD. He puts that film alongside Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General as the subgenre’s three tentpoles.
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror exists because of the middle one. “It was because we were doing an edition of Blood on Satan’s Claw that Kier-La Janisse started on Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched,” Gregory said. “Originally it was just going to be an extra on folk horror, on British folk horror specifically.” Then she kept interviewing people. “We decided this is its own thing, and folk horror is something so much bigger than those three movies.” The extra became a feature, and the feature led into the two All the Haunts Be Ours box sets she curated.
That escalation is the house pattern. “All of our feature documentaries started out as small extras,” Gregory said, naming the Al Adamson, Clones of Bruce Lee, Suzzanna and recent Grand Guignol films. “Once the interviews start, and you realize that there’s a bigger story to be told, that’s when we realize this actually needs to be its own thing, like its own feature film. That needs a festival life, and then we can actually build a box set release around that.”
Preservation at Severin includes the testimony, gathered while the people who were there can still give it.
Another Twenty Years
Severin’s audience has not aged into wanting new movies. Attempts at brand new narrative titles have mostly not worked, Gregory said, though the label has put out films made this century, including The Autopsy of Jane Doe, the Maniac remake and Baskin. “For the most part, people are still wanting films from the 60s, 70s, 80s.” The 90s, less so, which he puts down to a weak decade for genre film. The oldest thing in the pipeline goes much further back: a box set whose first film dates to 1895.
Asked where he hopes Severin is in twenty years, Gregory said he hopes it is still going, then explained what could stop it. Not demand. “It’s not showing any signs of slowing down with any kind of rapid pace at this point.”
“The really only immediate concern is if the players stop being manufactured, or the technology to actually do what we do,” he said. “There are less and less people doing film restoration now, because so many films are not made on film. There are less and less film labs. Even Technicolor and Deluxe, the biggest ones in the world, have gone.” Finding elements eats more time every year. “It’s things like that that are actually going to affect the longevity of this business more than the demand from the customers.”
What energizes him is how far afield the work keeps going. He had not heard of most of the titles Janisse assembled for the folk horror sets, films from Estonia and the former Yugoslavia, and that was the appeal. The opposite job appeals too, taking something much-released like Dario Argento’s Opera and building an edition that has to prove itself a significant upgrade.
Twenty years in, a company that saved a lot of movies from disappearing is watching the equipment that makes saving them possible disappear instead.
Before we hung up, I asked which decade gave genre film its best run. It drew the longest pause of the interview.
“I think the 70s is the best decade,” he said. “Closely followed by the 80s, though, and the 60s.”
