LAS VEGAS - As noted in last week’s column on MCD DVD, the 2006 edition of the VSDA convention was clouded by the announcement of statistics suggesting the decade-old video market not only had matured, but also has begun to show signs of joining every other entertainment platform in an industry-wide “slump.” Report the same results to a gathering of General Motors or Ford stockholders and the bearer of such “flat” tidings would be given a promotion and multimillion-dollar bonus.

Unlike Detroit, Hollywood has never really been in any danger of sinking into the nearest large body of water. If the studios ever got serious about containing costs, you’d find purveyors of Armani, Humvees and organic muffins on the same bus leaving town as Wolfgang Puck and Larry King.

The companies represented by the MPAA and Digital Entertainment Group make the loudest noise in matters of commerce, piracy and content, and it’s their interests that most concern the media. It’s the independent and foreign-based companies that tend to generate the most excitement among movie buffs, critics and talent scouts. Sadly, they’re also the ones who get the least support from exhibitors, features editors and video-store chains.

Every Tuesday, dozens of new titles enter the DVD pipeline, far fewer than the half-dozen or so movies debuting each Friday. The trajectory of sales and rentals of DVDs tends to mirror that of the theatrical model, with films already familiar to viewers getting the most shelf space and advertising support. Typically, pre-marketed studio movies will ride on the backs of theirs stars to the top the charts for a week, maybe two, and then begin their inevitable freefall into the pre-viewed bins, where they’re sold for pennies on the dime.

Because the life cycle of children’s, cult, foreign and documentary titles tends not to resemble that of a mayfly - and many fewer are made available to consumers on release date - it’s less important for specialized product to demonstrate its worthiness within a two-week window of opportunity. If a merchant’s new-release section isn’t constantly tilled, last week’s crop of under-achieving “hits” would sit there and rot like so many un-harvested pumpkins or watermelons.

Come Friday, copies of V for Vendetta and The Shaggy Dog —.both of which did reasonably well in theatrical release - will begin flying off the shelves. Plenty of copies will be made available for customers of chain stores, and a goodly number will be sold, as well, in supermarkets and drug stores, big-box retail outlets, truck stops and kiosks in shopping malls. Overexposure is rarely a problem on opening weekends, but, as a rule, the demand for blockbusters not favored by parents of young children is short-lived.

There are certain things that distinguish the DVD business from its theatrical and video-cassette counterparts.

Shrinking release “windows” may be the scourge of exhibitors, but not having to re-launch a marketing campaign in its entirety has had nothing but a positive effect on DVD revenues. It helps explain how so many box-office disappointments are able to do well in their digital incarnation.

After only 12 days in video, revenues for Richard Shepard’s nifty black comedy The Matador already had surpassed those earned during its entire theatrical release. The same thing also recently happened to Basic Instinct 2, 16 Blocks, Annapolis, Firewall and Ultraviolet. This phenomenon isn’t likely to have escaped the attention of Hollywood’s decision-makers, who’ve had to construct new economic models for their expectations of a film’s afterlife.

How does one explain this anomaly?

Have the multiplexes of America become too scary for the adults who might normally have taken a shot on a movie starring Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford or Pierce Brosnan? Maybe. Have consumers become so savvy about the ways of Hollywood that they now routinely factor “windows” into their calculations of entertainments options? Probably. Are there enough loyal repeat-viewers out there — anxious to sample the bonus features and commentaries - to boost DVD revenues of a so-so picture that much? Probably, not.

It’s the closest thing the studios have to found money, and, for once, consumers reap the benefits, as well. They probably wouldn’t have to add a single supplementary feature for the same numbers to register.

But, that’s not what made the last two VSDAs trips worth taking, even considering the lack of a strong Hollywood presence.

The suites on the 3rd and 28th floors of the Venetian Hotel & Casino were populated with all manner of distributors of specialty product. It many ways, it resembled a video swap meet, with treasures competing with trash for buyers’ eyes. Many of the films were too obscure - or foreign — even to pop up in a search of IMDB.com. For every undistributed or under-screened gem, there were a dozen whose packaging suggested that what was contained there-in was too weird, too corny, too gory or too ineptly made to qualify for guilty-pleasure status.

This isn’t to say, however, that there wasn’t some gold to be found in them thar hills.

No genre is benefiting more from the expansion of the international video marketplace than horror, a category that also contains elements of sci-fi, slasher, fantasy, black comedy and soft-core porn. Sales are booming. More than 80 years after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Golem and Dr. Mabuse emerged from Weimar Germany, the flow of zombies, vampires, monsters, serial killers and mad scientists continues unabated. Anyone who’s recently wondered if screenwriters have run out of ways to deploy legions of the undead might want to consider Joe Dante and Sam Hamm’s made-for-Showtime - and new to video - Masters of Horror: Homecoming.

Adapted from Dale Bailey’s short story, “Death & Suffrage,” the hourlong Homecoming is an anti-war satire, in which soldiers killed in Iraq rise from the grave to vote in a presidential election. The zombies march to their local polling booths in tattered uniforms and with the aid of crutches necessitated by President Bush’s futile search for weapons of mass destruction. Republican strategists are unable to halt the advancing squad of soldiers, whose time among the living is limited to the moment they turn in their ballots. Maybe if these poor blokes had voted Democratic in the previous election, they wouldn’t have had to go to the trouble. Beyond that, though, “The Homecoming” is, well, a zombie movie.

Dante came to prominence at approximately the same time as the other directors represented in the “Masters of Horror” series: John Landis, John Carpenter, Stuart Gordan, Larry Cohen, Tobe Hooper, John McNaughton, Clive Barker, Tom Holland, Dario Argento. All were heavily influenced by George Romero’s ground-breaking (literally) The Night of the Living Dead, which, in 1968, proved that a tremendously scary movie could be made both on a shoestring budget and in Pittsburgh. A few years later, Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol would once again test the limits of an audience’s taste for gore in the 3D Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula.

Advances in prosthetics and makeup-effects artistry — pioneered by newcomers Rick Baker and Stan Winston - took horror, fantasy and sci-fi to new levels of suspense and gore. A decade later, digital technology would make almost any audio or visual effect possible, not always for the better.

Made for $35,000, using Hi-8 video and 16mm equipment, The Blair Witch Project proved to be a timely corrective an industry-wide dependence on million-dollar software tools and outrageous effects. By taking in an astounding $140 million in domestic box-office revenues, Blair Witch changed the way suspense movies would be shot and marketed in the 21st Century, It also convinced Gen X audiences that tricks played by the mind can be as frightening as those generated by knife-wielding lunatics wearing hockey masks.

By the turn of the century, several other trends converged simultaneously to drive a single economic juggernaut.

Most important, perhaps, teens and young adults had become the dominant box-office demographic target of the Hollywood studios, in spite of predictions kids would prefer to stay at home to play video games, watch videos and inhabit chatrooms. “Scream,” itself a homage to and parody of teen-slasher conventions, was replicating itself at an alarming rate, even inspiring a parallel series of parodies that would outlive the originals.

Websites dedicated to horror, sci-fi and fantasy were popping up like mushrooms, providing a non-traditional pipeline for reviews, dialogue, gossip and publicity. Global in reach and singularly focused, these sites also became valuable sources of information about new releases, thematic trends and talent from other countries. Fans and buffs no longer were forced to rely on the condescending opinions of print journalists, who, with rare exceptions, were as clueless about modern horror conceits as they had been about martial-arts and hip-hop movies.

Meanwhile, after a mere three years in the marketplace, DVD had emerged as the playback format of choice by savvy viewers. They appreciated the chaptering, reliable audio and video technology, and abundant bonus features (at first, little more than a potentially costly afterthought to manufacturers and content providers). Even the classic horror movies from Universal and Hammer, which were almost unwatchable on TV and VHS, looked and sounded great after a digital makeover.

In 1998, Hideo Nakata’s creepy video-age thriller, Ringu, became a huge hit in Japan, and word spread quickly on the Internet it would be re-made by an American studio using familiar English-speaking actors. By the time it was, the success of the original had already spawned several sequels and a TV series in Japan, and bootleg discs were easy to find.

Even so, Gore Verbinski’s Ring, which starred Naomi Watts, performed as well in its fifth week of release here as it had in the first, on the way to domestic gross of $129 million. Critics were lukewarm on the re-make, but the word-of-mouth made it a hit.

Two years later, Takashi Shimizu would re-direct an American version of his Ju-On: The Grudge, in Japan, with a cast that included C-lister Sarah Michelle Gellar. Budgeted at $10 million, The Grudge grossed $110 million here. Walter Salles’ decidedly western re-make of Nakata and Shimizu’s Dark Water (“Honogurai mizu no soko kara”) would barely recover the money it cost to film it.

Shimizu’s “Marebito” was accorded a very limited release last winter before being sent out in DVD by Tartan Video, one several companies that have taken the lead in genre distribution. At last year’s VSDA, the British-based distributor of arthouse films launched an American subsidiary, which would focus on horror, crime and fantasy titles primarily from Japan and Korea. Only a couple of titles were being promoted, but, by the end of the year, Tartan would score direct hits with several Asia Extreme releases. They included Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy, Lady Vengeance and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Tae-Yong Kim’s Memento Mori, Sang-Gon Yoo’s The Face and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Doppelganger.

The response from buffs, critics and college students helped make Tartan a recognizable label without having to resort to an expensive and elaborate branding campaign. Last month, it came stocked to the gills not only with Asia Extreme products but also films from around the globe, including Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven and Japon, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, Richard Jobson’s 16 Years of Alcohol and Cristi Pulu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

Down the hall from Tartan, such companies as Laguna Productions, Xenon and Ryko Distribution were loudly proclaiming there ability to provide merchants with a seemingly endless supply of genre movies from Mexico, South America, Italy, Spain and the African-American community. Xenon is best known for its deep catalogue of “blaxploitation” fare (Blackenstein, Disco Godfather), but it also promoted a line of White Trash Nation and Spanish-language material. Laguna’s focus was primarily on such Spanish-language genre titles as La Llorona: The Wailer and La Mataviejitas: The Silent Lady, both based on Mexican folk legends, as did Ryko Distribution supplier CasaNegra Films (The Witch’s Mirror, Black Pit of Dr. M).

These companies certainly weren’t lacking for competition, especially from such entrenched distributors of genre product as Anchor Bay (Master of Horror, Halloween 4: Divimax Special Edition, Tooth Fairy) and Lionsgate (Saw II, The Devil’s Rejects, Audition). Other companies with growing lists of genre titles include Palm Pictures (Demonlover, Breaking News, Bright Future); Facets Video (Vera, D.N. Angel); Allumination FilmWorks (Naina, The Covenant); Echelon Films (False River, Detour to Hell); Dark Sky/MPI (Henry II: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Eaten Alive); Magnolia (Dead Bodies, Dead Man’s Shoes); Showtime (Zombie Honeymoon, The Keeper); MTI Home Video (Twisted Sisters, Live Feed); Razor Digital (Chaos, The Camp Blood Trilogy); Indican Pictures (A Light in the Darkness, Gory Gory Hallelujah); Millcreek (Tales of Terror, Fright Night); Strand (Rooms for Tourists, Who Killed Bambi?); and Echo Bridge (Mortuary, Vampire Wars).

Then, of course, there’s the steady stream of horror films sent out by Hollywood’s major and mini-major studios, including Sony (Hostel, Resident Evil), 20th Century Fox (The Hills Have Eyes, Basket Case), Universal (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead), Paramount (Danger: Diabolik, Friday the 13th), Disney (From Dusk Till Dawn, Stay Alive), New Line (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Freddy Vs. Jason), Dreamworks (The Ring, What Lies Beneath) and Miramax/Dimension/Weinstein (Wolf Creek, Scary Movie ). These projects get accorded a great deal more respect and attention from critics, merchants and exhibitors - don’t be surprised if The Descent, Pulse, The Wicker Man and Snakes on a Plane, create a late-summer sensation — if only because the studios control mainstream distribution pipelines and can afford substantial marketing campaigns.

It’s for this reason - as well as the sheer volume of straight-to-video product released each month - that such genre-specific websites and magazines as Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Dark Horizons, Ain’t It Cool News, HellHorror, HorrorFind, Dark Horizons, GoreZone and Freak Out have become essential reading for fans. Once there, they find reviews, news, gossip, release schedules, trailers, interviews, links and the kind of display advertising once reserved for newspapers.

If one attempted to describe the primary difference between traditional American horror fare and the international body of work, a good place to begin would be the origin of the threat to life and limb.

Folk legends have provided filmmakers with storylines for more than a hundred years, including those involving vampires and werewolves. Frankenstein was a by-product of man’s desire to play God ... or Satan, take your pick. The mid-century was dominated by space aliens, body snatchers and overgrown birds, mammals and reptiles. Soon, technology would provide the threat, be it Hal in 2001 or the video cassettes in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. The fiends in Night of the Living Dead were as far removed from those in I Walked With a Zombie as the Freddy Krueger was from Peter Lorre’s serial killer in M.

From Topper to Ghost Busters, the presence of poltergeists and other paranormal apparitions often was played for laughs in American movies. Guillermo del Toro’s mournful ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone, was set against a background provided by the Spanish Civil War, while many Japanese and American films allow ghosts to communicate with the living via computers, televisions and radio. These ghosts don’t intend to scare people out of their wits, but to alert them to threats of impending danger and clues to solve mysteries.

Neither are hauntings limited to houses, remote villages and cemeteries, anymore. After Stephen King filled resorts and vintage cars with apparitions, other directors put them on ocean liners, trains, spaceships and among the general populations. Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spirits probably wouldn’t recognize Casper the Friendly Ghost, and M. Night Shyamalan wouldn’t have a career without them.

Today’s most imaginative and disturbing horror movies succeed because the threats no longer come from villains and fiends who approach their victims from outside pre-established security zones. They danger already is residing in a character’s psyche, waiting patiently to reveal itself in nightmares, everyday objects or smoldering anxieties.

As such, the new breed owes far less a debt to Boris Karloff than Rod Serling. The Twilight Zone created an environment in which the thought of losing one’s eyeglasses in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is far more horrific than coming face-to-face with space alien ... and that beauty could never be taken for granted.

Like Serling, today’s masters of horror understand that a lump felt in a breast can be scarier than an army of zombies, and wars waged half a world away present far less abstract threats to our well-being and security than any ax-wielding freak lurking outside, in the bushes. On a planet inhabited by a species so anxious to destroy itself — with or without the help of monsters and lunatics — it’s comforting to know that some demons, at least, can safely be eliminated during the course of a two-hour movie.