EXCLUSIVE: Spectacular Optical, the indie publishing imprint of Canadian genre veteran Kier-La Janisse, has expanded its remit to include theatrical, streaming, and home video distribution.
The new label will distribute a selection of films curated by Janisse with a focus on landscape and design, music and counterculture, and experimental genre works. The new distribution label will launch this month. Wide distribution of Spectacular Optical’s home video releases will be handled in the US by Severin Films, where Janisse also serves as an acquisitions executive.
The company’s first release will be Christopher Morris’ 2023 film A Year in a Field, which documents a year in the life of a 4000-year-old Cornish standing stone. The rollout will include a special Earth Day TVOD release on April 22, followed by a collectors’ edition Blu-ray. The film was shot between the Winter Solstices of 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“For A Year in a Field to now find its way across North America is a wonder,” Morris said in a statement. “I hope this small, quiet film about one field in England finds a true home within such a vast and complex continent.”
Spectacular Optical will be partnering with Severin Films to co-release a new 4K restoration of Waris Hussein’s Melody. Featuring songs by the Bee Gees, this restoration from the original camera negatives will mark the film’s first official release in North America in nearly 50 years.
The company has also begun restoration on Bert Deling’s 1975 Australian underground feature Pure Shit for its first-ever North American home video release. Depicting 24 hours in the life of Melbourne junkies in search of a fix, the film was initially banned following a raid on the theatre where it premiered. Pure Shit is being restored with elements held at Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive.
Spectacular Optical is also handling Andrew Horn’s 1984 independent melodrama Doomed Love. The film will land its first worldwide disc release with a new restoration from the original camera negatives housed at the Deutsche Kinemathek. Elsewhere, Spectacular Optical has also acquired Paul Wright’s folk horror archive film Arcadia (2017).
Janisse is the author of the horror memoir House of Psychotic Women, director of the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, and creator of The Haunted Season, an annual Shudder holiday horror anthology series.
