In 1983, Sam Raimi's inaugural independent feature film, The Evil Dead (1981), a film that was made for an estimated $375,000, was pitted against Steven Spielberg's big-budget, studio-backed action-adventure The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a film with a budget of $18 million.1 Both films were released on home video in the United Kingdom in 1983, and despite their vastly different budgets, they were sold side by side in the democratic space of the video rental shop, a level playing field in which packaging and posters would compete for the attention of the consumer and, irrespective of production budget, be afforded the same amount of space upon the walls and shelves. Promotional strategies varied, though most, including those of the major distributors, were not as sophisticated as one might expect, with few fully reflecting the established promotional strategies that had been developed from almost one hundred years of theatrical exhibition.

The majority of these early video promotions were mostly reliant on reproducing the film poster in-store and on the video packaging. This is particularly true within the independent video distribution sector, who were responsible for selling non-major studio films such as The Evil Dead. In this sector, even when a film had already been widely exhibited theatrically in other territories and an array of different promotional material was available to publicise it, independent distributors would invariably return to the default promotional strategy of the poster. The degree to which other forms of promotion, such as trailers, were used varied wildly: on occasions when trailers were circulated, they often took the historic form and literally trailed the main movie on the videocassette, rather than preceding it, meaning the original film had to be watched in order to access the new marketing material. Since distributors only ever promoted their own, often limited catalogues, the opportunities that these strategies provided were limited, with a small number of new films available to publicise. The success of the trailer as a viable form of promotion relied explicitly upon the distributors consistently releasing films that were successful, and if a film was successful, that ongoing circulation would ensure that the video renting public would see the trailer for their forthcoming releases.