It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Redemption label opened many doors for me – and I’m sure that is the case for many other film fans, too. Were it not for mainstream retailers taking a punt on a certain very visually-arresting array of…well, VHS cassettes, if you go back a bit, then would many of us have discovered the likes of Fascination and The Living Dead Girl? The man behind the label, Nigel Wingrove, is still going strong and rather than accept defeat at the hands of the slow decay of the high street, has diversified, now offering a select streaming service which offers a diverse and growing list of films. And there is much more to come…
Nigel was kind enough to take some time to speak to Warped Perspective about his career to date, his newest ventures and his future plans. Also watch this space for some important news to follow regarding RedemptionTV. In the meantime, over to Nigel…
WP: So the first thing I’d like to ask is – how are you doing in Lockdown number 3? What sort of impact is it having on you? Obviously, this hasn’t been the year anyone could have wished for…
NW: I moved out of London at the end of 2014 and that immediately made my life more insular, although for the next two or three years I travelled back to London so often I might as well have not moved out. However, the isolation and space I found in the countryside enabled me to start working on my art, something that I’ve wanted to do all of my adult life, and was in fact part of my motivation for starting Redemption in the first place. I had naively thought that if I could make it a success financially then that would allow me the freedom to do my art, whereas in reality Redemption took up all of my time; and while my commercial ‘art’ has come to define Redemption as a brand, my personal ‘art’ has pretty much stayed locked up in my head.
So when the lockdown started I was very much ‘locked down’ anyway, I had pretty much stopped coming up to London and was essentially dividing my time between running Redemption and working on two art collections and a book. So if anything, lockdown made little or no difference to me on a personal level. On a business level, however, its initial impact was negative and damaging as the closure of HMV meant a substantial drop to our sales income, but positively, it spawned RedemptionTV.net and soon, PurgatoryTV.net.
WP: Let’s talk about some of the ongoing projects which come under the Salvation Films umbrella: for those readers who might not be fully aware, could you explain the different subdivisions on the roster – how does a Sacrament title compare to a Redemption one, for instance?
NW: The Redemption label was conceived after my short film Visions of Ecstasy was formally banned in 1990. I had, up until then, made a living designing and redesigning magazines (Skin Two, Nursing Times, Actual) and creating dark erotic images which a girlfriend suggested I should film. That spawned Axel (an 8-minute short with a soundtrack by Danielle Dax) and Visions, both of which I had, or planned to, self-release on VHS as a way of getting my budget back. The ban on Visions had scuppered that and put me at something of crossroads in my life. I could either continue working in magazines and essentially settle down or I could fight the ban on Visions and let fate decide the rest.
Fate actually decided things very quickly by sending the UK economy into a major recession, which meant that publishers cut back on new titles and cut back on redesigns etc. So I was kind of pushed out of magazines and although I continued freelancing and doing general design work, I knew that I had to do something else if I wanted to do more than just survive.
I actually have no idea what made me start a film label, but at some stage in 1990 or 1991, I decided that if I couldn’t release my own films then I could at least release films that I liked and that was it, really. I had no idea how one licensed films, no idea how they were distributed, what the process was or anything? I knew nothing!
To cut a long story short I managed to get £10K together, and asked the British Film Institute how I would license a film, and they helped me to get my first five titles; Mario Bava’s Mask of Satan and Lisa and the Devil, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore with Charlotte Rampling, Killer Nun, an old, video nasty, and what was, and still is, one of my all-time favourite films, the Naziploitation sleaze epic, Salon Kitty which I’d seen when I was at art school and never forgotten.
As for creating a label, that, like everything else was an organic decision, as whilst I knew next to nothing about distribution I did know about design and the power of the visual image. I also collected things and having walked around the, then huge, video sections in HMV, Virgin and Tower Records saw that aside from the anime label Manga which had its own section, that films were essentially listed alphabetically or occasionally by genre. There was nothing like Penguin Books’ distinctive green or orange spines or anything to really distinguish one label from another.
So, given that I had no money for advertising, and in 1992 no internet as such, I fell back on what I knew: magazines and more specifically, fanzines. I had produced two zines, one called Stains devoted to punk when I was at art school, and the other, a more professional looking publication called Homage in the early eighties, which was centred around the then-emerging New Romantic scene. I had seen that there were literally dozens of self-produced horror zines available in stores like Forbidden Planet, and decided that I should produce one to tie in with my label.
So in the summer of 1992, I created The Redeemer and decided on a name for my video label: Redemption. With the Redeemer I decided to combine most of what I loved; horror, sex, exploitation and fashion, plus anything else that seemed to fit in. For Redemption, I wanted a look that was completely different to any other labels and used a mock-up I’d created for a new French magazine called Gloria. My design hadn’t been used in the end so I utilised elements of it for Redemption, namely a uniform black, red and white type style combined with specially created black and white cover photographs. I decided on shooting my own covers once I’d seen how poor the stills were that the licensors supplied, and knew that if I relied on them that my videos would look no different from any of the others on the shelves.
I was lucky in that the distinctive sleeves worked as a range and HMV and Virgin (the two main retailers) racked those first five releases together creating mini Redemption sections on the shelves. After about six months I’d been able to license films by Jess Franco and Jean Rollin and the head buyer at HMV decided to take a chance with Redemption and asked me to create dedicated Redemption header boards for their stores, posters and so on and they launched a campaign giving Redemption big displays in their main stores. Looking back, it was fantastic!
In 1994 I launched a sister label to Redemption called Jezebel, which specialised in sexploitation films, many of which had been made by directors like Rollin and Franco who were also represented on the Redemption label. Jezebel was at least as successful as the Redemption label and retailers displayed the two labels together to create even bigger sections within their main stores.
I followed with two more labels: Purgatory in 1996, which was devoted to strong adult erotica, essentially picking up where the Jezebel label left off, and Sacrament, which champions Japanese Pink Cinema, which followed in 2004. The only other label I have currently is the Satanic Sluts which kind of happened, like so many of my projects, organically. Basically, after the brouhaha surrounding the BBC/Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs and the Satanic Sluts died down it became difficult to control events in real life (I used to run a monthly nightclub called Black Mass centred around the Satanic Sluts which was sanctioned by the Church of Satan) and I decided to make films with key girls from the group instead. We’ve made six films so far, so it’s a mini-label, but a label nevertheless.
WP: One burning question I have, given the range of titles you currently carry, is – where on earth do you source them? Many of these titles seem to originate in a hidden world! Even your more contemporary horror titles are often wonderfully unknown quantities.
NW: In terms of the films we release, It varies: when I first started Redemption no one wanted these type of films; there were no other labels after the same films and even the producers who owned them seemed uninterested in them, so for me, I was limited by money, not the availability of content. Now it’s very different as there are lots of labels and companies, many with much deeper pockets all after an ever-decreasing number of films, so I’ve sort of allowed our content to evolve, as always with me, organically.
Much as I love the films of the sixties and seventies it was forty to fifty years ago and I don’t want Redemption to be like all the other companies essentially restoring and releasing the same films again and again. Exploitation cinema has an energy about it, and when a lot of the directors and producers were making these films they were either cashing in on the popularity of a particular genre which had become fashionable through a successful mainstream film, or they were exploiting sex and violence to make a quick buck. Films were made quickly and cheaply, some were crap, some were OK and some were brilliant and it’s the same now.
There are a lot of young and new filmmakers working at the moment and as before some are bad, some are good and some are brilliant and while physical media made it financially too risky to take chances with unknown films and directors, streaming is perfect because the costs are relatively low. RedemptionTV has enabled us to screen new films every week and that in turn makes it easier to pick successfully streamed titles and release them on physical media later on. And because RedemptionTV streams worldwide, we’re getting sent new material from all over the world and some of these films are really, really good.
WP: You are currently running a streaming service – Redemption TV – where the films we’ve just been discussing can now be viewed online. Tell us a little more about this project and how it’s going: how do you think it stacks up against the likes of Shudder, and Arrow, who have just launched their own TV service?
NW: RedemptionTV.net came about because of the lockdown, as simple as that. In March HMV and other retailers closed and our income dropped and I knew that if I just sat in lockdown waiting for the shops to open that we could go under: having kept Redemption going for nearly thirty years, I was damned if I was to be put out of business by some stupid bug! RedemptionTV was formed in April 2020 and was live and online by May.
We launched with about 50 films and now have 150 or so titles available with more added every week. We made Saturday our new film day and have consistently added two new titles every Saturday since we began, something I’m very proud of, especially as we’re a team of three and have to cover websites, social media and physical releases, both in the UK and US, as well.
I knew that RedemptionTV.net would take time, as you have to get people to go to a specific website and then when they’re there get them to pay money to stream a movie and that’s difficult. That said, our monthly streams are slowly building up and as we add even more titles we plan to move to subscriptions over individual PPV, and also get a presence on Prime / Roku etc . I’m also keen to start producing our own product and expanding our culture section to cover alternative art, fashion, music and, possibly, more radical areas… While the original Satanic Sluts have moved on, we now get contacted by a new generation of girls that have grown up online and who have very different ideas as to how they want to be presented, what they want to do and be called. They’re actually pretty radical and creatively dangerous, so expect fireworks – We just have to wait for the right moment to light the fuse…
WP: What are your own personal favourites on the Salvation imprint at present?
My personal fave genre films are Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty and Caligula, The Other Hell by Bruno Mattei, Immoral Tales and Behind Convent Walls by Borowczyk, and the exploitation masterpiece Deported Women of the SS Special Section, which was directed by Rino Di Silvestro, who, alongside Bruno Mattei, is a true Michelangelo of sleaze. I also love Gialli films. Sadly though, I don’t currently represent any of these cultural gems. However, we do represent some great titles at the moment, including Violent Delights which I just really like. It’s Mexican, is a bit confusing in places, but looks great and has a lot of blood and sex, so works for me.
Other personal likes, aside from Jean Rollin of course, are Renato Polselli’s Black Magic Rites and Luigi Batzella’s Nude for Satan, two of the most fabulously insane films ever made that I’m so proud to own. I also really like Grant McPhee’s Far from the Apple Tree which for some reason made me think of the TV adaptation of The Owl Service when I first saw it.
The other big genres for me now are Japanese pink cinema and strong erotica and both genres include some great titles, including S&M Hunter, which is kind of appalling but so ridiculous it’s OK, Whore Angels, Whore Hospital and Sexy Battle Girls which are all sexy and very funny. My current faves are The Succulent Succubus, Milk the Maid, which everyone assumes is pervy lactation porn, whereas in reality its a sexy comedy about a maid called Milk, and Naked Desire, which centres on a young nun whose chaste world is turned upside down by the arrival of a number of sexually deranged guests.
Finally, we recently signed a new director, Cosmotropia de Xam, whose work I really like. His films are pretty experimental in style and he began as a musical collective centred around Mater Suspiria Vision (his band) in 2009. They essentially pioneered and championed a style of music known as Witch House, which is described by Wikipedia as a ‘dark, occult-themed electronic music microgenre and visual aesthetic’ influenced by the occult, witchcraft, horror movies and, apparently, the visual style of Redemption. Bands associated with it include Crystal Castles, Holy Other and White Ring.
It’s a very visually-led genre and a lot of the visuals produced to accompany the music mix newly-created images with images lifted from horror films and occult books. This is, I understand, how Cosmotropia made the transition from music to film, by making long pop videos that transitioned into videos from which a narrative emerged, and from there, into feature-length films. As I said, his work is very experimental in style and will not be to everyone’s taste, but I genuinely like them and I love the way that they have evolved creatively. He has a team or collective around him and produces and releases his films directly to his fan base. Redemption will be the first company to release them to a wider, more mainstream audience and I’m very excited about it. The first releases on both RedemptionTV.net and physical media on the Redemption label include Acid Babylon, Phantasmagoria, Diabolique and Black Mass of the Brain.
WP: Following on from that question: what do you make of the horror and exploitation cinema we’ve seen in recent years? How much does the film scene continue to engage and interest you?
NW: I’m not really part of it. I don’t say that to mean that I’m in some state of splendid isolation but rather when I started Redemption I kind of clashed with a clique that sees itself as representing horror to the outside world and I knew that Redemption couldn’t or shouldn’t be part of it. So Redemption operates on the periphery of both the horror world and the film world. Sometimes, like the Ross/Brand/Sachs scandal or my earlier blasphemy ban, I or Redemption crosses into the mainstream, but then when things calm down Redemption moves back into the shadows.
That said, Redemption has fans and we also attract interesting and innovative people and when we do, things seem to happen of their own volition: I feel that is beginning to happen at the moment. In terms of the wider horror market, I’m not sure? It’s become quite corporate and formulaic like much of music has, but like music, horror attracts mavericks and rule breakers and I think that’s its saving grace. There are certainly a number of fantastic and innovative horror titles coming through on RedemptionTV – a high percentage of our new additions are very recent features and there are clearly some directors to keep an eye on in the mix.
WP: I always associate the Redemption label with two directors in particular: the late Jess Franco, and of course Jean Rollin. In fact, my first acquaintance with both of these directors came via your label, something for which I’ll always be grateful. If you would, it would be great to know how you came to know and eventually release so many of these long-lost, or certainly underappreciated gems. Particularly in the case of Jean Rollin: am I right in saying that you own the rights to his films?
NW: When I started Redemption, or actually before I’d even acquired or released a film I immersed myself in the genre, buying up not just fanzines but writing to and meeting up with the people who wrote and produced them. I read horror film books and pored over the Aurum Horror Encyclopedia and my own collections of Film Review annuals (I have every one from 1968 to 1984) and runs of Cinema X and Films and Filming and two directors emerged, again and again: Jean Rollin and Jess Franco.
However, when I tried to watch their films I found that they weren’t available, indeed in Rollin’s case, hardly anyone had ever seen his films as, aside from some really obscure video releases in France, they had never had a commercial release. Franco was similar with core fans trading and swapping poor quality bootleg tapes. What was driving the interest were the incredible images from their films: stills from Rollin’s films, in particular, had been reproduced in books like David Pirie’s The Vampire Cinema, an essential purchase at the time, and in the Aurum Encyclopedia etc and I decided that I had to make the unseen available and set about tracking them down.
When I first met Rollin, for some reason I had assumed, given his films that he would be dressed, if not in black, then be alternative in style but he was pretty straight and conventional and lived in a very modest apartment in one of the poorer arrondissements on the outskirts of Paris. I lived and worked in Paris for two years in the eighties so knew it pretty well, and Rollin struck me as someone who lived for his work and lived for it on his own terms. That also meant that by the time Redemption came along that he was struggling financially and lost to obscurity. He had fans of course, but to my thinking, they were a double-edged sword with some commenting that if people saw Rollin’s work that they wouldn’t understand it and might laugh or mock it. In a way, they wanted to keep Rollin in a sort of private ghetto for their personal delectation. Redemption changed that.
We licensed all of Rollin’s core films and the first one we released was Requiem for a Vampire and it sold really, really well; we followed with Shiver of the Vampire and The Nude Vampire and never looked back. The decision to buy and acquire the ownership of Rollin’s films came about because of piracy. Basically, as Redemption grew so did our problems. Essentially we were pioneers as no one had done this before; we had to establish the groundwork and one of our main problems was getting producers to treat these films with even a modicum of respect. Getting them to deliver good quality masters of the full, uncut version of a film in its correct ratio was a nightmare and expensive. So when we found out that people in the US were literally using our VHS tapes as masters to release the films in the states I decided that the only way to stop it was to launch Redemption in the US.
Again, at this time, 1997, only the majors launched in the US, certainly not small indie labels. We had to get a distribution deal and an advance big enough to acquire US rights. We did both and used some of the advance to buy Rollin’s films outright and so have been able to release and promote them ever since. I wish though that Jean had lived longer, as there is so much more that he could have done and I know, as well, that he would have been delighted with the increasing attention and recognition his work is getting.
Jess Franco was a different animal and problematic for very different reasons. My first Franco title was Succubus which was our seventh release, so a very early Redemption film and it was passed uncut by the BBFC, unlike many of our later Franco submissions, which were either cut or banned outright.
I only met him once and he said “Thank God for Redemption”, not because he thought we were great but, as with Rollin, he saw interest in his films skyrocket once we released them, or in many cases, tried to release them. He also smoked more cigarettes in the two hours or so we were together than I thought was humanly possible. At one stage in my life, I smoked between 20 and 60 a day depending on how hyped up I was, so I reckon he was on at least five packs a day! Phew.
The BBFC banned outright Sadomania and Demoniac (aka The Sadist of Notre Dame) and battled us on Female Vampire, and The Awful Dr Orloff, which was incredible given it was made in 1964. The Solicitor General even described scenes from Sadomania as part of their prosecution case against me at the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg during my blasphemy trial. They hated Franco almost as much as they hated me!
It was though Vampyros Lesbos, not me or the BBFC, that ultimately transformed Franco from an obscure exploitation director to a trendy cult hero. However, it wasn’t the film, great as it is, but the soundtrack, Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party by Crippled Dick Hot Wax which was released in 1995 to coincide with our release that just took off. It was amazing. After that, everyone wanted a bit of the Franco cake, but having made some 200 films there were plenty of slices to go around so everyone was happy, and Franco most of all.
WP: And finally – of course bearing in mind the given situation, as we roll on through this uncertain year – do you have any projects or schemes which you are hoping to work on? And anything else at all which you’d like to add: please feel free!
NW: Yes. RedemptionTV.net of course, and then PurgatoryTV.net and separately I have, amazingly, been asked to write and direct a follow-up to my nunsploitation epic, Sacred Flesh. I have to write it and everything but for once the funds are available for when I’m ready so I think realistically it’ll happen in late 2021 or early next year, which is exciting.
On the personal side, I am aiming to have completed all my ‘Believe Absolutely‘ exhibition artworks by the end of the year. There will be between 22 and 30 pieces when it’s all finished so that will be a big moment for me 🙂
Many thanks to Nigel Wingrove and Lou Ryrie at Redemption. You can find out more about RedemptionTV here.