Blue Underground is an American company specializing in releasing authoritative editions of cult and exploitation movies on Blu-ray Disc

Blu-ray Disc

Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...

 and DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

.

It was originally formed as an shell company

Shell (corporation)

A shell corporation is a company which serves as a vehicle for business transactions without itself having any significant assets or operations. Shell corporations are not in themselves illegal and have legitimate business purposes. However, they are a main component of the underground economy,...

 to oversee 'making of' documentaries during founder William Lustig

William Lustig

William Lustig , also known as Bill Lustig, is an American film director and producer who has worked primarily in the horror film genre.-Movie career:...

's time at Anchor Bay Entertainment

Anchor Bay Entertainment

Anchor Bay Entertainment is a U.S. based home entertainment and production company and is a division of Starz Media, which is a unit of Starz, LLC. It was previously owned by IDT Entertainment until 2006 when IDT was purchased by Starz Media. Anchor Bay markets and sells feature films, series,...

, but became an independent entity in late 2002. The company has released a broad range of cult movies to disc, but leans toward European (particularly Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

) horror

Horror film

Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

 and exploitation. Blue Underground goes to great lengths to feature restored transfers from original vault elements (a process that occasionally leads to substantial delays with their releases, given the age and obscurity of some of the titles they select), and to include extensive extras (such as commentary tracks and new documentaries) where possible. Each title is released uncut and with a choice between the original audio track and usually a lossless 7.1 remix.

As of October 2009, Blue Underground had issued more than 160 DVDs and in 2008 they started to release films in HD on the Blu-ray Disc format.

External links

• Blue Underground
• Interview with William Lustig @ PopImage
• Cultfilms en Kutfilms Interview with Bill Lustig (April 13 2007)