The studio enters the horror-thriller direct to DVD arena with three small films on the grislyside.
Warner Home Video and a trio of established TV and film creators are targeting  sci-fi and horror fans
with three gruesome new movies — tto bypass movie theaters and go straight to DVD.
 
Very loosely inspired by the 1960s TV series "The Twilight Zone," the scary movie slate — released under
the banner Raw Feed — will be put together by men with proven track records for inducing fright.

Daniel Myrick, the director of the 1999 indie thriller "The Blair Witch Project," Tony Krantz, a producer on the Fox TV show "24," and John Shiban, a TV writer who has penned episodes of the WB series "Supernatural"
and "The X-Files," will direct a film apiece, each shot in L.A. for less than $5 million.

Krantz and his partners will work on each others' films and share crews and a common goal: a modernized homage to Rod Serling  "but with a different energy: raw, edgy, realistic."

With the fast-growing popularity of DVDs, it's becoming worth Warner Bros. while. to enter this market.
Last year, consumers spent >$22.8 billion< buying and renting DVDs, up about 8% from the prior year,
according to Digital Entertainment Group, a trade association. Of that, purchased DVDs accounted for 71%
of the money spent — or $16.3 billion. By comparison, domestic ticket sales in movie theaters in 2005
totaled $8.99 billion.

"You can really launch a new product on DVD without having the benefit of a theatrical release," said Jeff
Baker, a Warner Home Video vice president.

Raw Feed is confident that  direct-to-DVD distribution may be the next frontier for filmmakers eager to get their cinematic visions in front of an audience - casting new faces, with stories they'll be telling as fresh as those of big-budget movies. The first Raw Feed release: "Rest Stop," is about a young couple terrorized during a cross-country road trip. "The DVD market has evolved into its own art form," said Graham Taylor, the agent who put together the Raw Feed deal. "Filmmakers are interested in getting their stories made.

After "Rest Stop" is in the can, Raw Feed has more gore on deck. "Sublime" will be about an outpatient
who goes to the hospital for minor surgery only to discover his legs have been severed. In "Cult," a man
visits the religious community his brother joined and learns he has arrived on the day everyone plans to
commit suicide.

Scary movies are multiplying faster than ever, and getting increasingly sadistic. Why are audiences so
hungry for blood? Pull up a chair. Just be careful which one.

Once the credits roll and the theater empties, movie marketers go to the bathroom to eavesdrop. "That's where you
hear the good s--t," says Tim Palen, co-president of marketing for Lions Gate Films. Four years ago, after
a test screening of a nasty little horror movie called "Cabin Fever," Palen was lingering in the men's room
when he heard two pals dissecting the film. "I liked it," one said. "I just wish it was bloodier." Palen made a mental note: gore is good. He played up the carnage in his ad campaign, and "Cabin Fever," about a flesh-eating virus that chews through a group of friends, earned 15 times its budget and put first-time director Eli Roth on the map. When Roth finished his next film, about a pair of sex-starved American backpackers in Europe who wind up in a torture
chamber, Palen didn't blink. "Hostel," starring no one you've heard of and featuring some of the most brutal
violence in any mainstream film, debuted atop the box office in January and made nearly $50 million. A sequel is planned for early 2007. "We're now a big believer in blood," says Palen. In a risk-averse town like Hollywood, the high church of horror has become the one sure bet. Since last fall, seven horror movies have topped the box office.
Lions Gate's "Saw" franchise, the genre's current kingpin, has rung up $250 million worldwide; a third film is planned for Halloween. Three more creepfests are scheduled for the next month, starting with Universal's "Slither" this Friday. Even Disney has gotten into the act with the PG-13 flick "Stay Alive," which, alas, is not about the systematic slaughter of disco fans.

Every decade or so, horror gets hot in Hollywood. This latest shockwave, though, is larger—and much more
grotesque. You could sew together a whole new person from all the severed body parts in the "Saw" movies,
"Hostel" and Fox Searchlight's remake of Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes." It's not jokey violence,
either. "Filmmakers now have the ability to put viewers directly into the shoes of the victims going through these horrible things, in an almost documentary way," says Bob Weinstein, whose "Scream" franchise for Dimension Films launched the last horror fad in 1996.

Such films tend to look smarter with the passage of time. It's practically a cliché that you can tease out
a generation's subconscious fears just by watching its horror movies. Craven, the man who created Freddy
Krueger, says horror movies are "boot camp for the young psyche." (Sixty-five percent of the audience for
"Hostel" was younger than 25, which is par for the genre.) "I don't think it's an accident that it's always average kids who come to these movies," Craven says. "They're wondering, 'Just how violent is this adult world?' " Asked if he's got any theories aboutwhy sadism is in vogue, he laughs and says, "Because we're living in a horror show. The post-9/11 period, all politics aside, has been extremely difficult for the average American. We all know what's floating
around out there. That's big stuff, and it comes out in a million ways, from people drinking a bit more to kids going to hard-core movies."

Maybe it's pure coincidence that "Hostel" became a hit after two years of headlines about Abu Ghraib and the
rise of anti-Americanism in Europe. But here's the tip-off that the director, at least, knew exactly what
he was doing: his two protagonists are jackasses of a specifically American, "what happens in Bratislava
stays in Bratislava" variety. You'd want five minutes alone in a room with these knuckleheads, too. Craven's
"The Hills Have Eyes" in 1977 was about atom-bomb testing in the Southwest; if you didn't know that the
remake (directed by a Frenchman, natch) was a broader critique of U.S. aggression, the moment when the hero
jams an American flag through a mutant's neck really spells it out.

Right now, no one has better fingertips for this material than the people at Lions Gate. The studio just won the top Oscar for "Crash," but its executives make no apologies for the bloodier side of their business. "Have I no shame? Is that what you're asking?" says president Tom Ortenberg. "When we see a void in the market, we do our best to fill it. And we didn't feel that there were enough, or really any, R-rated, balls-to-the-wall horror films out there."
Without the yoke of a parent company, Lions Gate is free to unleash its inner provocateur, whether that means putting a pair of severed fingers on its "Saw 2" poster—which even Berney, a competitor, calls "a classic"—or playing up the fact that people passed out during previews of "Hostel." "I feel bad that some people had such an extreme reaction," says Palen, "but as a marketer, it was an opportunity to alert people who relish that kind of movie that we've got one for them."

If horror films have taught us anything, though, it's this: you can kill them, but they never stay dead.

LOS ANGELES - Warner Bros. will become the first major studio to distribute its films and TV shows over the
Internet using peer-to-peer technology developed by BitTorrent Inc., the home of a popular tool for trading pirated copies of movies.

The companies did not specify a date but said the service will be offered starting this summer. Pricing
is also undetermined, although individual TV shows could be priced as low as $1 and movies will be sold
for about the price of buying a DVD, BitTorrent said. Warner Bros., a division of Time Warner Inc., said it
will use BitTorrent's ability to speed the downloading of large computer files to rent and sell its films the
same day the movies become available on DVD. The studio also will sell permanent copies of films and TV shows online that can be burned to a backup DVD, although the copy will only play on the computer used to download the film and not on standard DVD players. The deal is aimed at converting some of the file-sharing users who regularly seek illegal copies of films and TV shows by offering them a reliable experience at a reasonable price on the same system used by online pirates.


Studios believe that offering reasonably priced legal alternatives will be preferable to downloading files
that could contain viruses or poor quality copies of films. "Those are the kinds of baby steps to offer
users a good trade off, a good alternative to doing things the wrong way," said Ashwin Navin, president
and co-founder of Bit Torrent.