“Shall we put the heart in now?” A comparative analysis between creature features and their single reel abridgements

Single reel abridgements of commercial feature films are entering moving image archives because home movie collections that contain them are slowly increasing in archival representation. The abridged commercial films occupy a liminal space in between sustained preservation efforts that focus on studio films and the current interest paid to preserving home movies. As a result, the abridged films are being neglected. The films’ liminal status stems from a dearth of information regarding their relationship to the original films and a clear definition of what they are narratively and aesthetically. After analyzing fourteen abridged horror and science fiction films found in the Ryerson Moving Image collection and comparing them to their original counterparts this project finds that the abridged films are heavily altered in terms of narrative, characters, and causality, and should be treated as individual objects instead of derivative works, thus absolving their liminal status.