Slashback Video - Part 2

Promotional art for Slashback Video exhibit at Bearded Lady's Mystic Museum in Burbank, CA

Continued from HERE...

Crozet, Virginia.  1991.  The first video store I visited in my new hometown was called Sandridge A&H.  It was one part general store, one part appliances store, one part video store.  I struck up a deal with the owners whereby I would help them organize the store in exchange for free rentals. Pretty great, right?  I promptly re-organized their video collection by genre, and started pulling my rentals from the horror section. 

Sandridge A&H was a “family” store, which meant it didn’t have an overwhelming selection of horror titles.  What it did have was a solid collection of the modern-day “classics”: the EXORCISTS, the AMITYVILLES, the HALLOWEENS, the FRIDAYS, the ELM STREETS, the EVIL DEADS, the HELLRAISERS, the Stephen King adaptations.  The owners weren’t horror enthusiasts, so they took their cues about what to order from VHS retailer catalogues.  If the box office numbers for a movie were high enough, they ordered it.  And box office numbers looked impressive for sequels, because VHS retailers often touted numbers for the entire series. 

Although the cover art was routine and boring, I began to see the oversized Warner Brothers boxes as reliable branding—simply because they released so many great titles.  

 

Still, I was more impressed with the gory stuff.

Once I’d exhausted the horror section of Sandridge A&H, I crossed the street to The Crozet Record Shop.  I’m not sure where the name came from, but The Record Shop was purely and simply a video store.  Once again, the owner of the store didn’t know much about horror movies—but he had a pretty great selection of them, because most of his VHS stock was on loan from a more eccentric store in nearby Charlottesville called Sneak Reviews.

This is where I became aware of the overwhelming influence of Freddy Krueger on the entire genre.  After the success of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, horror movies in the late 80s became increasingly abstract, surreal, and darkly comedic.  It would be years before I encountered the term “rubber reality”—Wes Craven’s phrase for “hallucinatory horror films that are not restricted by day to day reality”—but this is the type of horror film that I was drawn to at that time.  Conveniently, it was also the type of horror film that The Record Shop specialized in. 

 

The Record Shop is also where I learned to appreciate filmmaker Larry Cohen—beginning with the IT’S ALIVE trilogy.  Once again, those oversized Warner Brothers boxes weren’t much to look at… but the brand held up. 

In contrast, there were some forgettable movies with truly sublime cover art.  Some of the tag lines alone were worth the price of admission… 

Then there were the ultra-gimmicky VHS boxes—with literal bells and whistles! 

And… zombies.  Lots and lots of zombies.  This is where I first saw DAWN OF THE DEAD, and I was thrilled to find it sitting there on the shelf.

How can I explain the excitement of “discovering” a film like this to horror fans who have grown up with everything available at the push of a button?  If I try, it will sound like I’m claiming that “things were better” when movies were harder to find.  That's ridiculous, of course, because what fan of horror movies wouldn't want to have access to more horror movies?  What I’m really saying is that I think people used to appreciate films more because they were harder to find.  Because of their relative scarcity, watching these movies became an occasion.  And an obsession.

For me, DAWN OF THE DEAD opened up the door to dozens of lesser-known zombie films (mostly Italian, although you’d never know it by looking at VHS cover art). 

 

 

This brings me to the third video store in my hometown.  Videos Etc. was the farthest away from my house, but it was worth the trip for two main reasons.  #1. Rentals were 50 cents each on Mondays.  During the summer, me and my best friend Ben would rent our limit (seven movies each) and binge-watch horror movies for days.  #2. Videos Etc. was a bastion of grindhouse glory.  I don’t even know where to begin, so here’s a random sampling of titles that were too sleazy for the other stores in town. 

 

 

Thanks to all three video stores—not to mention various other retailers and libraries that played a supporting role in my corruption—I developed a pretty comprehensive knowledge of horror movies. At that time, I never dreamed that I would ever do anything practical with all my trivial knowledge fo the genre.  Then in college, I started making a list of every horror film I’d seen, and taking notes on story patterns, filmmaker bios, etc.  That was the beginning of my book Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. 

Continued HERE