What’s your idea with Jesse Nelson, owner of DiabolikDVD and Cauldron Films
For fans of physical media all over the world, Jesse Nelson (pictured above) of DiabolikDVD and Cauldron Films has played an essential role in connecting collectors with their favourite films.
Jesse Nelson of DiabolikDVD and Cauldron Films met with me to discuss 25 years of DiabolikDVD, Cauldron’s upcoming release slate featuring Lucio Fulci and Jess Franco, and what Jesse’s plans are for 2026 and beyond.
What’s the Idea: Hi, Jesse. Thank you for meeting with me today.
Jesse Nelson: No problem at all.
What’s the Idea: Congratulations on 25 years of DiabolikDVD. How do you think of the store compared to when you started it 25 years ago?
Jesse: In some ways, it's still just as chaotic as it was back then. It’s weird. When we started Diabolik, there were no out of the box websites that you could set up. There was no Shopify or Big Cartel or WooCommerce. You had to have a website built. It was a different era. We had a lot of trial and error getting things going.
Now we have tariffs that we didn't deal with back then. Credit card fees seem to be going up all the time. Everybody wants a piece of that. So while everything is much more manageable and I have employees and I don't run it out of my garage anymore, it's still kind of a crazy business. Every day I go in, I don't know what's going to happen.
What’s the Idea: In these 25 years, was there ever a period where it was stable and felt good, or has it been 25 years of people predicting it would be the last years of physical media?
Jesse: Don't get me wrong, I am overjoyed running my own business and having great people that I work with, and I get to talk about movies and work with movies every day. It's a dream, but it's still work at the end of the day. It's the best job, though. I couldn't ask for anything else. I worked for a long time while running Diabolik. I had a full-time corporate job and did Diabolik when I got home. I got up early in the morning and spent all weekend working on it. I know what it's like to work for someone else and work in a different environment and how soul-crushing that can be. Even my worst day at Diabolik is the best workday.
“At Cauldron, we really genuinely care about the movies that we release... We either go hunting for things that we really want to put out, or in a few cases, things have fallen in our lap.”
What’s the Idea: Was Cauldron Films more of a passion project? How did that come about?
Jesse: I wouldn't say Cauldron came about on a whim, but I have a partner in Cauldron, Brian Izzi. He's someone that was a customer, and we became friendly. He wasn't a local guy. He lived in Boston, and I'm New Jersey for life. He would come out and help me work conventions, and one day, he was just like, “There's some great stuff that isn't on disc. We should just do this.” And I was like, “I don't know. I mean, I have a million things to do.” He's like, “We should try it.” That's what our first release, American Rickshaw, came out of. That was actually the film that we discussed and said, “We should try it with this one.” We tracked it down and got the rights to it and released it.
We're certainly not the most prolific label, but at Cauldron, we really genuinely care about the movies that we release. We like the movies. We don't go searching for things just to release a movie. We either go hunting for things that we really want to put out, or in a few cases, things have fallen in our lap. For example, we just announced Lucio Fulci’s Conquest. Brian and I are both big Fulci guys. Absolutely love Italian horror. Fulci's the greatest. We share this passion. We did City of the Living Dead, Contraband, and the two Fulci movies from the Houses of Doom set.
What’s the Idea: You don't feel beholden to doing a monthly announcement or anything like that, right? You're releasing projects when they make sense, when it's something you actually care about?
Jesse: We went looking for a movie last year that we're not ready to announce yet, but we went looking for a movie and instead of that movie, we ended up with Conquest. It just fell in our laps. We weren't looking for it. It is probably the number one movie on my list of things I wanted to release that I didn't know would ever happen, and then it just did. It was the oddest thing the way it happened. We ended up with the movie we went looking for too, so now we have both. It seems to always work out like that.
What’s the Idea: Can you tell me a bit about how that happened?
Lucio Fulci’s 1983 sword and sorcery fantasy film Conquest is “going to look like the best mess you've ever seen” with the Cauldron UHD release.
Jesse: Usually, you don't talk to a licensor and come away with one movie. It depends. The movie that we went looking for was kind of an odd one. I'd love to discuss what it is, but in due time. When I brought this up, they got right back to me, and they're like, “No one's ever asked for this, but we do have it, and we have the negative, so if you want it…” And I said, “Yeah, let's definitely try to work this out.” And they said, “We also have a list of other things that we just put together, some new stuff.” And that's where Conquest came from. It fell into our laps.
What’s the Idea: Wow. So, just right time, right place, and you got them. Congratulations. I'm excited to get that one.
Jesse: I love it. I have literally watched Conquest eight times in the last two months. We've watched it in English and Italian with and without commentary, and then Blu-ray and UHD for all of those things. Everything is a lot of QCing.
What’s the Idea: What made Conquest your number one movie that you wanted to get out?
Jesse: Aside from just being a huge Fulci fan, I love that movie in particular, and I have a lot of nostalgia for it. It's just a movie I love.
What’s the Idea: Along with Conquest, you’re releasing Jess Franco’s Jack the Ripper. What's your relationship with Franco?
Jesse: I wouldn't say Franco's a blind spot, but I'm not as in tune with Franco as some other people are. After watching Jack the Ripper so many times recently, both Brian and I have started looking at other movies of Franco. Not necessarily to release, but checking them out, putting some more movies under our belt.
What’s the Idea: The spell has started to be cast over you.
Jesse: The way Ripper kind of came about was when we licensed Mad Foxes, the licensor also had Jack the Ripper. Of the Franco movies that I know, I really love Jack the Ripper. It’s a very coherent movie for Franco, but it's also got some wild touches. It's super gory, and the Ripper story is fantastic, especially with Kinski playing Jack the Ripper.
What’s the Idea: When I spoke to both Ryan Verrill and Will Dodson, they discussed recording the audio commentary for Jack the Ripper a while back. Can you explain what took so long for this release?
Jesse: When we're talking about movies that we have and movies we're trying to get out, the discussion is always like, the audio on this is terrible, or the video on this needs a lot of work, or we've got to find some new extras. That's how we ended up with Ryan. We were looking for somebody new to do a commentary for us. At the time, they hadn't done anything.
This is not a dig at anybody any other label, but there is a group of people that work on seemingly everything. We were just looking for some different people to work on things because there's tons of qualified people out there. We wanted to give some other people a chance.
What’s the Idea: That makes sense.
“We’re already looking to announce the next couple of titles. This year, we’re really gearing up to have a lot more titles out in the store than in previous years.”
Jesse: But back to your original question, which I didn't really answer, it's really a thing of we buy some movies and we take a look at them. We judge what kind of condition they're in and see where they line up on our schedule and what we can get done. Jack the Ripper just kind of fell by the wayside while we worked on other things, honestly, and that's what happens. Something jumped in its place that we wanted to work on, and then we also got a little behind on working on the Brivido Giallo set last year, so that took away a lot of our time. We seem to be back on schedule, and everything's already well on their way to being finished, which is something that we haven't done before. We usually announce things, take some pre-orders, finish them up, and they go to the replicator. That's bitten us on the ass a couple of times, so we decided that we were going to have everything ready this time. So we've got that wave kind of in our rearview mirror, and we're already looking to announce the next couple of titles. This year, we're really gearing up to have a lot more titles out in the store than in previous years.
What’s the Idea: It's really easy for projects to go off course or to take extra time. As soon as one thing happens, like a disc issue or replicator problems at the manufacturers, then every other project is going to fall behind right, and that can just continue happening.
Jesse: That's exactly what happens, 100 percent. Sometimes one little thing just throws everything off, especially when you're working on restoring something, because then you have to worry about both the Blu-ray version and the UHD version, which are two very different products to the market. They look different, they act different. If you're going to work on something as a UHD, you really have to look very carefully at everything, because it shows every little blemish.
What’s the Idea: It is an amazing format, but I kind of have a resentment towards it because I know it's taking you folks so much longer to perfect. I have to wonder how many more projects could be getting worked on if we weren't tinkering with UHD issues.
Jesse: It’s true, yeah. If we only did Blu-ray, it would be a lot quicker. But I took some flak for this on social media. I really don't think it's necessary. There are certain things that are just perfectly fine as a Blu-ray.
What’s the Idea: If everything was equal, I might feel differently, but with it being more costly and more difficult, it would seem to make sense to be really thoughtful about which titles get UHD.
Jesse: I agree. When you have new movies—we'll just say any Marvel movie—you put that on a UHD, it's a no-brainer. It’s been filmed to look that way. The sound has been recorded so that it's going to be amazing on home video. And then I've got Conquest, which was filmed with fog and grain and all these practical effects, and let's not forget that the entire movie looks like it was shot with Vaseline on the lens.
Cauldron Films (their logo above) “is not the most prolific label, but at Cauldron, we really genuinely care about the movies that we release.” - Jesse Nelson
Some people have asked, “Are you guys going to fix all those things?” I'm like, that's not our place to fix those things. That's how the movie looks. We're here to present the movie the way it was filmed in the best possible way.
What’s the Idea: It's not your place to fix it, right? It's to present the film.
Jesse: Yeah. The movie always looked like a mess. Now it is going to look like the best mess you've ever seen.
What’s the Idea: Some people are going to complain immediately because of grain or whatever else.
Jesse: But what am I going to do? Am I going to scrub all the grain out of it? Then people will be mad about that, too. You can't win the grain argument. And if you're scanning a 50 year old movie in 4K from the negative, it's going to be grainy.
What’s the Idea: Something I'm curious about, and this either is general or it could be a specific example. I assume you signed Jack the Ripper a few years ago. When it takes you several years to release a title, are you signing for five years or 10 years?
Jesse: We've licensed movies all different ways and for all different lengths of time. It’s kind of what the licensor wants to do. Five years is a pretty standard license, what people want. But I've also licensed movies where they were like, you can make this number of copies and that's it. I haven't cracked the code on that yet, as far as why licensors want this this way or that way. I've also come across some licensors who think that what they have is worth a lot more money than it is.
To answer your question, five years is pretty standard. Five, seven, 10. But I don't know that we're looking 10 years into the future. I'm kind of a mind that after 5 years, I'm ready to move on to something else.
What’s the Idea: So there's also that side of it. You don't know that you want to own a thing past a certain time.
Jesse: That's right.
What’s the Idea: So if you're in 2025, you sign a movie for 5 years, you have it until 2030. Does it just depend on how quickly you get it out to determine how long you can sell the disc for?
Jesse: I talked to a couple of people in the business that said that they always insist in their contracts that the five years starts from the day the disc is released. I have tried that trick, and I've always gotten a very firm no on it.
Ideally, we'd like to get everything out within, I'd say, a year, but I think people don't understand that most of your sales occur in the first year or so of a release. Unless something happens, you're putting all your effort and all your energy into announcing that title, getting it to reviewers, and then what? There's got to be something that generates more interest in that release after that first year, but it's hard to do.
We were really fortunate with our first release, American Rickshaw, that Best of the Worst did a whole show on it. We came in to work on a Monday and that broke over the weekend, and we had sold 500 more copies of it. That's the kind of thing that really helps generate word of mouth for a release. Breaking of that kind after a year with a title is something that is always a work in progress for us.
What’s the Idea: Apart from end of the year lists and Ryan Verrill’s Shelf Shock Rewind Awards, there aren’t many ways to look back at what came out. Everybody is always just moving forward. It's kind of unnerving how quickly, even as soon as a pre-order gets announced, that people are like, “Yeah, you’re putting out Conquest. What's next?” It's immediate.
Jesse: That's exactly what it is. Everyone is concerned with what the next great title is going to be.
What’s the Idea: I'm pretty sure if Diabolik just sold what was put out in the last five years alone, there would be plenty of titles for us all.
Jesse: I spent the last several weeks watching all of the new ArrowShawscope box set. I sat down on a Sunday morning before everyone got up and watched a movie from the set. If I was lucky, I watched two movies in a weekend, and there were 14 movies in that set. I kind of shocked myself watching that many movies. I have 10 times that number of movies sitting here in my watch pile. But for some reason, I sat and watched all of those.
What’s the Idea: Considering you can see it from the point of view of Diabolik and Cauldron, what do you think the customer wants, and how do you make that happen?
Jesse: I've been in the business a long time. Looking at both sides of it, the customer wants the best possible product at the lowest possible price. That is what the customer wants. They want every bell and whistle, and they don't really want to pay that much for it. To be fair, the pricing in the business has gotten a little out of hand. Buying boutique Blu-rays has become a very expensive hobby. There are a lot of very expensive products out there.
We were doing our best to try to keep the pricing down with Conquest. It’s something that we had a lot of discussion about, but at the end of the day, it's a four-disc set with a booklet, and it's in a hard rigid case. Every one of those things costs money. Every extra that we make costs money. We have to look at it as how many of these things do we have to sell and at what price to just break even on it? It's tough. It's tough math.
What’s the Idea: You can never really know what the sales are going to be, presumably. You can predict what Conquest will sell, but how confident are you?
Jesse: Shockingly, we expected Conquest to be as good of a seller as it is. It's what we wanted. We didn't think Jack the Ripper was going to almost keep up with it neck to neck. That's been around for a while. It’s had other releases. So has Conquest, but Conquest has also had a really troubled history of looking good on home video. We put a lot of effort into making sure that this was going to be the best possible product.
What’s the Idea: With Conquest, I imagine it might be a case where once consumers see that the reviews are good, more people are going to be willing to purchase it.
“I don’t understand why a label wants to immediately put something on sale that just came out... You’re being disingenuous to all the stores and all the customers that are supporting you. How can you possibly want anyone to pay full price [...] when they know that you can just get it next month for half price?”
Jesse: That happens a lot, too. That kind of speaks to what I was saying. The first wave is you announce it, everyone shares it on social media, people buy it, but you always have the people that are going to wait for reviews. So your second big wave is once it breaks and people read reviews, then people are posting on social media that they have it. That's your next big wave of sales. The third wave is the thing that's kind of a little elusive without dropping the price on it, because that’s inevitably what happens with everything. It’s out for a couple years, sales die down, you have some sales on it, and then you reduce the price.
What’s the Idea: Some companies are discounting products very quickly. If you know something is going to be at 50% within three or four or six months, why buy the film at full price? Others keep their prices low and rarely have sales, and then there’s everyone in between. Do you have feelings on that?
Jesse: I do have a big feeling about this because I see this from the Diabolik side, and I am so frustrated by sales. I don't understand why a label wants to immediately put something on sale that just came out. It doesn't make any sense to me. I have this discussion quite a bit, but if a movie comes out in January, it shouldn't be on sale in February. There's no reason for doing that. You're being disingenuous to all the stores and all the customers that are supporting you. How can you possibly want anyone to pay full price, or how can you expect anyone to pay full price, when they know that you can just get it next month for half price?
On the Diabolik side of it, when I organize a sale with a label, they're giving me a kickback for everything I sell. It's not like I'm just dropping the price and eating the difference. So, when Barnes & Noble does a 50% off sale, they've got to be making money on the other end.
They're really dropping the price on a new release to sell more copies. If they waited six months, they would probably still sell that many copies, but they've already sold X number of copies at a lower profit margin. I don't understand it. I guess there's the numbers game. We sold 10,000 copies of this, but at what price? Why don't you just make it cheaper to begin with if it's so important to sell that many copies?
What’s the Idea: There must be a way of finding that middle ground where the loyal customers who want to buy up front are not being gouged, while still making whatever profit you need to make. Why sell it at $65 to the most loyal of your customers and then sell it for $45 or $30 a few months later?
Jesse: The thing that Vinegar Syndrome, for example, is really good at is creating FOMO. People are so concerned they're going to miss out on it if they don't buy it now that it's not going to be on sale in two months because it's going to be sold out. But at the end of the day, for me, I'm mostly concerned with getting the movie. My collection consists of a lot of very damaged box sets and things that I just couldn't sell at full price. When we got the Shawscope 4 box set in, I opened one up. They come in their own little cardboard box, so you can't see the actual product. I opened it up and immediately dropped it on the floor and cracked the whole spine on it. So, yeah, that one's mine. My whole collection is the Island of Misfit Toys of Blu-rays.
What’s the Idea: I love the video quality we're getting now, the audio quality, the supplements, all that great stuff, but I didn't realize how nice it was for the expectation to just be a case for the disc with some cool art.
Jesse: We do live in an amazing age of home video where some of these titles are just mind-blowing that are coming out. It’s fantastic. I love it. Some of them probably deserved not to be found, but we really do have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the amount of titles that are available on home video. I keep coming back to the Hong Kong movies. Pre-COVID, no one was doing Hong Kong movies, and now all of a sudden there's five a month.
A glimpse into the DiabolikDVD warehouse, where thousands of titles are available for collectors around the world.
What’s the Idea: Like the Golden Princess library becoming available after so long.
Jesse: Amazing.
What’s the Idea: Any chance you’re planning any Hong Kong movies for Cauldron?
Jesse: This is a funny story. When we started Cauldron, we had a list of some Hong Kong movies that we really wanted to release. We started talking to licensors, and then COVID hit, and we lost all those contacts. The next thing we knew, they were all coming out. Everything we had on our list.
Honestly, I am such a fan of movies that whenever someone announces something, maybe it's a little bittersweet if it's something that was on my list, something that I really wanted to release, but I know that we're going to get a great release of this movie that I didn't have to fork out a ton of money for, that I didn't have to work on. Meanwhile, we still have a lot of great stuff coming. So it's all good. There's plenty of movies for everybody. I'm just happy that we're getting all this great stuff. It's crazy sometimes the amount of things when you look at a list.
What’s the Idea: I'm in Canada. Your commitment to serving international customers is appreciated by those of us outside the U.S. Is serving international customers of particular importance you?
Jesse: Listen, anybody that's excited about movies, I am so happy to be their source, but I'm also so frustrated with tariffs and shipping costs. It just gets to be a lot. It gets frustrating when I do my best to try to get the best rates out of FedEx. I'm trying to work on some software with this company that lets people see what their tariffs are going to be ahead of time. But all those things are so frustrating, not only for me bringing things in, but then shipping them out to people. I wish it was easier and cheaper for everyone to get movies.
What’s the Idea: You mentioned the rising cost of this hobby, and shipping is definitely a huge part of that.
Jesse: Shipping a single disc to California is over $6 now. When we started this business, there was a priority mail flat rate box that easily fit three or four discs. Whatever you fit in that box was $5 for priority mail to anywhere in the country. Now one disc is $6 to ship to California. Plus, the price of cardboard and bubble wrap has gotten out of hand. It's all those things. I'm kind of a hippie. I'll reuse anything that comes into the shop that we can, any kind of packaging, any box that doesn't look like an absolute nightmare, we'll reuse it.
What’s the Idea: That more sustainable option makes sense. I want to ask you about your loyalty program. What brought that about, and how’s it working out so far?
Jesse: So far so good. I've been working on it for a long time. In the business, I had a partner up to a point, and we always agreed that we didn't want to give away shipping. It was just something that stuck with me. But I ended up buying out that partner. I run things on my own and have employees now.
Giving away shipping sucks. There's just no other way to say it. It sucks. Shipping's expensive. And even the flat rate shipping of $6 that we were at for a long while, it doesn't cover the cost of shipping and the cost of supplies for a shipment. So, giving that away on top of that, it's a tough pill to swallow. But it was something that I had been planning and working on behind the scenes for a while, to get to a point where it was something that was going to be sustainable for the business. And with our twenty-fifth anniversary coming up, I decided I would roll this out as part of that.
“I am overjoyed running my own business and having great people that I work with, and I get to talk about movies and work with movies every day. It's a dream… Even my worst day at Diabolik is the best workday.”
What’s the Idea: People just really don't want to pay for shipping on principle.
Jesse: They really don't. I am so lucky in this business to have such great loyal customers that keep coming back. It seemed like the good thing to do. I could give an easy answer and say everybody else is doing it too, which is true, but I wasn't hurting for business charging shipping either. I probably could have continued getting away with it, but it just seems to be the way of the internet these days. Everyone wants free shipping.
What’s the Idea: For your program, you buy three regular priced products and then you get the free shipping, right?
Jesse: When I created the loyalty program, I initially said it was full price products only. In the five weeks since I announced that, and not really through any complaining, I thought it should just be everything, so I've already rolled that back. Everything qualifies for the loyalty program. I often look at these things as a consumer. What would I do here if I was looking at this as a customer?
What’s the Idea: Pascal from Rough Cut Video here in Canada cited you as an influence. I would agree that Diabolik is a gold standard. It’s impressive to be 25 years in business, so your consumer-focused mindset must be working.
Jesse: I don't ever take business for granted. I'm always thinking about what I can do and what I'm working on and what's next. I'm never happy just running things the way they are. Something's got to happen. I'm always working on it.
What’s the Idea: Is there anything that you can share about what you have planned for the rest of 2026 or things you're like to do?
Jesse: We are spending a lot more time getting titles out for Cauldron. We didn't quite do what we wanted to do last year. We're going to spend a lot more time making sure the titles are out this year. That’s very important to me and to Cauldron and my partner.
As far as Diabolik, I'd mentioned earlier that we are looking at some software that's going to help people see what tariffs are going to be if they order, so there's no surprises on the other end. That's a lot of work. At this very moment, it is one of those rare times where I don't have anything planned for right now. Something’s going to happen anytime now, but it's not running through my mind just yet.
What’s the Idea: It’s okay for things to be quiet for a moment. 2025 seemed to be a tough year for a lot of smaller labels.
Jesse: 2025 was not a great year. Listen, I'm not going to talk politics, and I try to keep that out of my business life, but these tariffs suck. We're paying, and I don't pass it all on to the customers. I just started getting tariff bills from FedEx for packages that I got six months ago that I thought I was in the clear on. Not only that, but the bills are saying, “So you imported Blu-rays, and those are free, but because they're coming from Europe, we're going to just charge you a flat 15 percent anyway.” I’m finding that out six months later.
2025 started out that way, and then we kind of got in the weeds with our Brivido Giallo release at Cauldron. It was a lot of things. It was not a great year, so I was really happy to get right into 2026, which so far has been much better, but still not the best.
What’s the Idea: Congratulations on your release of Mad Foxes. A lot of people loved that one.
Jesse: I love that movie. That was one of the movies that was on our list from early on. It’s great when that happens. We have a very long list in our brains, and I'd say at least once a month, we cross something off that list that somebody else is putting out. That happens. Fine. And then every couple of months, we get to check off something off the list that we're going to put out. So, it works out.
What’s the Idea: Does it ever happen that something gets crossed off your list and then you actually see the release, and you're like, “If this comes up for licensing again, we can do better?”
Jesse: Conquest was kind of that way. The last Blu-ray release that Scorpion Releasing put out was not amazing. I had a really good relationship with Walt, who owned Scorpion. Not so much with his brother Bill, but we did a lot of business together, Walt and Bill and I. Walt licensed that from Shout Factory, who owned the rights to it, and they had an old scan of it. It wasn't a newer scan from the negative, and the gore had been inserted in from another source. There was lots of room for improvement. We were thrilled when we scanned the negative and got it in, and all those little missing parts were in there and look great. The best it's ever going to be.
But since we've really been Cauldron, has there been something that we were like, “Boy, we wish we had gotten that, we would have done it better?” I think my peers do a really good job. The labels that are out there working today are doing great work. If Severin got that, for example, I'm sure it's going to be great. I feel that way with everything.
If it doesn't look great, there's probably a reason it doesn't look great, and it's probably not the label's fault. It's probably that the materials weren't great. We're dealing with something now that we licensed in Italy, and they told us the negative has vinegar syndrome, which we hadn't run into before. The negative is going rotten. They came back and told us that they had cleaned it and treated it, and they can run it through the scanner, but because of the vinegar syndrome, it stuck to itself, and it's got chemical stains on it now. We have to take a look and see if it's something we're going to even be able to clean. Who knows until we look at it. But exactly to that point, if something comes out and it's got a big scratch on it, that's not the label's fault. Sometimes there’s a big scratch down the middle of the screen that is impossible to fix correctly.
What’s the Idea: Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.
Jesse: It was fun. Good talk.
Thanks for reading this interview with Jesse Nelson!
Check out the Cauldron Films website along with DiabolikDVD to support Jesse and buy some incredible physical media.
The new Cauldron Film releases of Jess Franco’s Jack the Ripper and Lucio Fulci’s Conquest have an estimated street date of April 30, 2026.
Read more interviews from the “What’s your idea” interview series
The interview was recorded using Google Meet in February 2026.
The transcript was edited by Matt Long of What’s the Idea Editing
All photos are the property of Jesse Nelson.