Today, Kino Lorber is excited to announce that they have partnered with Giant Pictures to launch Kino Cult, the new free ad-supported streaming destination for genre lovers of horror and cult films. Featuring hundreds of hours of curated, theatrically released films all in High Definition, with new titles added monthly, Kino Cult launches widely in the U.S. and Canada on October 1, 2021, across web, mobile devices, and connected TVs, with VOD apps on all major devices such as Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Google TV, iOS, Android, and more. From the art house to the haunted house, the channel will dive deep into unapologetically weird genre cinema, blending recent art house discoveries fresh from cinemas with high-quality restorations of notorious grindhouse gems.
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Kino Lorber brings 40 years of experience as a leading theatrical and home entertainment distributor of award-winning international and American indie films to Kino Cult, where the focus will be on the wild and the weird of genre cinema. Horror consistently ranks among the top VOD genres, serving a fanbase that is strong, loyal, and engaged. Kino Cult plans to super-serve this audience with a deep catalog of hundreds of relevant titles, many of which are streamable for the first time, all in HD, and all completely free for genre fans. The channel will offer the best in cult cinema across action, horror, comedy, and sci-fi, both new and rare vintage hits of genre cinema, and ensuring that adventurous movie fans will have access to films that have not been easy to find in the streaming age.
Giant Pictures, a leader in the Free Ad-Supported (FAST) channels space, is the technology partner for Kino Cult, responsible for the device apps, channel distribution, and ad-tech in the new venture.
“Kino Cult will stream the darkest thrills of visionary midnight cinema to fans at home,” says Kino Lorber CEO Richard Lorber. “With our vast library built over 40 years and key partner labels in many genre specialties, we have enormous potential to hyper serve genre audiences, the most passionate of all film lovers, with a selection of both new and rare films that they can’t find anywhere else, in incandescent HD. You no longer need to live in a big city with a great repertory theater to have access to the kind of curated cult gems we’re able to offer now for free!”
“Kino Lorber has been steadily assembling a massive library of deliciously strange cinema, and we are delighted to unveil it in one destination,” says Kino Cult curator and Senior VP Bret Wood, “And this is only the beginning. Playfully curated and continually expanding, Kino Cult is a cinematic funhouse where both devoted genre fans and curious viewers will find the films they love while getting the chance to expand their palettes toward something more exotic.”
Among the recent cult treasures, Kino Cult is excited to offer theatrical hits like director Ana Lily Amirpour’s visionary black-and-white vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; Academy Award-nominated Dogtooth, a bizarre and absurdist comedy directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite); Lynchian occult nightmare Welcome To The Circle; South Korean neo-noir crime thriller Beasts Clawing at Straws; Guy Maddin’s phantasmagoric ode to lost cinema The Forbidden Room; the heartfelt and oddball comedy Chained for Life starring Jess Weixler (Teeth) and Adam Pearson (Under the Skin); and weird and stunning Western Let The Corpses Tan, all available to stream free without a subscription for the first time.
Those looking to add some European flavor to their horror this Halloween season can dive into the films of macabre master Mario Bava, like A Bay of Blood, Black Sabbath, and Black Sunday; the vampire films of Jean Rollin; as well as the strange obsessions of filmmaker Jess Franco in films like Daughter of Dracula, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (previously unavailable!), Female Vampire, and more. Examples of curated categories include Golden Age of Exploitation, ’60s espionage films in Crime & Suspense, ’70s and ’80s Flashback, witchcraft, and devil worship in Occult. Nearly all of these titles are streaming for the first time free without a subscription, with some making their streaming debuts on Kino Cult.
Following the launch of the VOD apps, before year-end, Kino Cult will also launch as a linear channel experience, with its free ad-supported programming running 24/7 across multiple streaming devices. An expansion to the library is also planned to include more genre greatness from other venerated cult labels like American Genre Film Archive, Code Red, Scorpion Releasing, Severin Films, Something Weird, and Vinegar Syndrome, in addition to the current offerings from Kino Lorber partners Artsploitation Films, Palisades Tartan, Raro Video, and Redemption Films.
