80's Horror Book Aesthetic Deviations Signing with Author Vincent Albarano (2023)

Forbidden Planet New York City is hosting an in-store signing with author Vincent Albarano for his book Aesthetic Deviations from Headpress Books. Aesthetic Deviations is the first serious critical overview of American shot-on-video horror films from the years 1984 through 1994.

Filmed with consumer-grade camcorders and other analog video formats, amateur SOV efforts are generally regarded as the lowest-common-denominator of genre films by fans and scholars of paracinema, if acknowledged at all. Long considered the dead-end of genre cinema, Shot-On-Video (SOV) horror finally gets its due as a serious filmmaking study.

Using classic fanzines, promotional materials, and especially the theories of several important film scholars, Vincent Albarano brings SOV horror into critical focus for the first time in print. Prior to this moment, Video Violence, Twisted Issues, Alien Beasts, and more have never been mentioned in the same breath as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, despite their common ground.

Aesthetic Deviations: A Critical View of American Shot-on-Video Horror, delves deep into several of the most famous SOV horror titles to give credit for their unique and singular contributions to independent genre cinema. Informed equally by a fan’s passion and the studied approaches of scholarly analysis, Albarano offers the first-ever detailed examination of the SOV horror cycle, proving that this strain of amateur filmmaking is deserving of proper appraisal. Sure to enlighten and provoke thought among fans and converts to the unique charms of SOV cinema, as well as inspire newcomers, Albarano’s book proves an invaluable resource for a neglected area of cinematic inquiry.