Aesthetic Deviations: A Critical View of American Shot-on-Video Horror, 1984-1994

INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK, IN its present form, began as my master’s thesis at The Ohio State University. Somewhere near the end of that process I became aware that I had overshot the length requirement by a good deal. I had a book on my hands. As much as I wanted to blow open the doors of academia with this strand of trash filmmaking, that isn’t where my real interest rests. In reality, it goes back several years prior, as I immersed myself in shot-on-video (SOV) horror films through the latter half of my undergrad years. I was well-rounded in my appreciation of genre films by that point, so it seemed a good time to move onto the next realm of cinematic refuse. Long averse to the peculiar pugnacity of analog video, this was largely uncharted territory. But something clicked for me; I was finally able to appreciate the unique look of video, and the alternately ugly and average images captured on magnetic tape. The last decade or so has been one of continued discovery and immersion in the video netherworld, one whose encouraging discoveries and more frequent displeasures don’t look to let up. So my own journey with SOV horror films has largely mirrored my time in and out of academia, for better or worse. Every new idea or theory I was exposed to, every course, regardless of subject matter or focus, I’ve found myself trying to apply those concepts to the world of video horror. More often than not, I’ve found that they fit in fairly well, despite their wholly un-scholastic origins and ambitions.

What was it about these terrible, hideous-looking movies that captivated me so much? Why did the images in Black Devil Doll from Hell stick with me and so many others longer than more competent celluloid obscurities from the same year? Plenty of people love and appreciate SOV horror, and there’s no shortage of passionate work on the films. But I always found the commentary to be lacking, like nobody was quite willing to take them as seriously as I thought they deserved. The enthusiasm is there, but not always the articulation, and if I was going to overthink these throwaway movies, then I may as well get my thoughts down on paper. Much as I have a distaste for the formal restrictions of film theory and find it often inaccessible, I can’t deny that there’s some ineffable quality to a lot of SOV films that merits a more thorough analysis. Over the years, I’ve convinced myself that I’m taking these movies too seriously, but time and again, I find some details there to remind myself that they really are as strange and thought-provoking as I’d always believed.

In a lot of ways, SOV horror seems like a parallel universe to mainstream horror, the dark sibling to the celebrated independent horror wave of the 1980s that saw films like Re-Animator, The Evil Dead, and Street Trash celebrated in every corner of the genre press. SOV horror titles shared the same video shelves as those films, but they weren’t of the same world in any realistic sense. These films aren’t underground in the sense of the 1960s experimental film scene, or even the Cinema of Transgression and its various offshoots. As an alternative to the more visible independents of the 1980s and 1990s horror film scene, however, they stand out as a decidedly subterranean sort of film culture, even when they received wide release, as in the case of Video Violence or Blood Cult.

Many of the films discussed in the following pages are among the most popular, visible, and talked about SOV horror films around. I could go on endlessly about the various obscure offshoots and aberrations of this film cycle, and do at some points as asides, but the fact remains that the most notable titles are popular for a reason. They offer the most to work with, and there’s more material available to study their histories. Even where the critical approaches I take may be unfamiliar, the films themselves will likely strike a chord. I also largely stuck with films that I know best, have seen the most and am comfortable with elaborating on. As much as I’d love to perform a theoretical deep dive on Matthew Samuel Smith’s Blood Summer, I just don’t think it holds up the same as the Polonia brothers’ Splatter Farm as an example of SOV slasher style. That’s a project for another day. I wouldn’t be writing this if I weren’t a fan foremost, regardless of whatever academic experience I’ve had, and one thing that I found strange in the small bit of academic material addressing SOV horror was the outsider’s perspective taken to the films themselves.

This isn’t the definitive history of SOV horror, nor the direct-to-video era of genre filmmaking. This is one obsessive fan’s notes on what ticks beneath the surface of a handful of exemplary features. There’s still a lot of work to be done with SOV horror, and even plenty of obscurities deserve to have their day. Hopefully this is one step in the right direction for SOV horror to generate some serious discussion.

01

AMATEUR CINEMA AND THE DAWN OF SHOT-ON-VIDEO HORROR

AMATEUR CINEMATIC EXPRESSION dates to nearly the beginning of filmmaking technology itself. As outlined by Patricia Zimmermann, amateur cinema has always been differentiated and removed from industrial practice as marginalized, yet integrated, production wedged within the private sphere.1 This prioritizing of subjectivity was also championed by avant-garde auteur Stan Brakhage, one of the most notable proponents of small-gauge filmmaking as a means of independent expression. Despite the intellectual rigor associated with his work, Brakhage was open in his writing about the vital ‘clumsiness’ of continual discovery demonstrated in amateur works.2 While Brakhage worked extensively with 8mm and Super 8 film throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these projects were later ensconced within the walls of academia and the accepted avant-garde underground, achieving notable respect for their innovations. The distribution of narrative works utilizing the format, however, was rarer until the 1980s, when a new generation of fan filmmakers honed their craft and began to pursue their visions of independent cinema with more serious dedication.

Discussions of amateur art are often woven with commentary on fan cultures, particularly pertaining to genre and expression regarding film. Horror fandom has long been one of the most inspired and interactive subcultures in the United States, and it’s logical that horror cinema saw one of the most distinctive and fertile outgrowths of amateur filmmaking in the late twentieth century. The availability of consumer-friendly mediums set the stage for a previously unparalleled explosion of untrained film production. This isn’t to say that other genre fans themselves embraced this development, however. Bill Landis’ Sleazoid Express, the first and most important modern trash cinema fanzine, savaged Sam Raimi’s classic 1981 debut The Evil Dead (one of the foundational inspirations for later amateur horror cinema), attacking the film with the headline Exploitation Cancer and bemoaning its stamp collector mentality. This early example of the underground horror community’s aversion to amateur productions distinctively affixes an outsider status to works of this caliber.

Cover of Sleazoid Express vol. 2 no.11 (1982)

Long Island filmmaker Nathan Schiff perhaps best exemplifies the amateur-fan tendency in 1980s horror cinema. Beginning at age seventeen and working between 1979-1991, Schiff produced four feature-length Super 8 gore films around his Long Island neighborhood. Inspired by George Romero, and especially groundbreaking gore auteur Herschel Gordon Lewis, and cast with friends and family members, Schiff’s films were amateurish in every sense of the word. Reveling in cheap but extensive butcher shop gore effects, teenaged non-actors portraying scientists, cannibals and police detectives, and unsupervised use of power tools, Schiff’s gore epics redefined small-grade cinematic carnage for the gorehounds of the 1980s. Working in obscurity, Schiff’s profile was elevated by notice in popular zines of the day, including Chas. Balun’s Deep Red and Rick Sullivan’s The Gore Gazette, the latter of which organized screenings of the films in Manhattan.

Gore Gazette film series featuring Nathan Schiff’s Long Island Cannibal Massacre (#80, 1986)

Contemporaneous to Schiff’s work was the most productive development of underground horror cinema, sharing many of the same concerns and aesthetics as his creations but effecting a utilitarian appropriation of the video format. While scores of amateur horror filmmakers in the 1980s experimented with Super 8 and 16mm film, analog video revolutionized the course of independent moviemaking, allowing them to realize their visions and build followings among fellow horror fans. At no previous point in history had there been such an egalitarian economic process of film production and distribution, and amateurs would benefit from this revolution first and foremost. Shot-on-video (SOV) horror has gained much traction with fans and cult audiences in recent years but has yet to attract much serious attention from critics and academics. This despite the fact that works produced on analog video and made for direct release are inextricably linked to the technological advent of home video technology, long a scholarly area of focus.

While magnetic videotape has a history dating back to the 1930s, the first significant development bearing on video horror is the 1976 introduction of the VHS format. Initially prohibitively priced and rivaled in popularity by Betamax, VHS quickly gained traction as a luxury media format.1 VHS technology, especially the VCR player, was at the center of much controversy and legal wrangling in its earliest years, a result of major studios’ fear of the potential for Japanese-produced goods to subvert their intellectual property via time-shifting (recording programs for later viewing) and piracy or duplication. This concern, exemplified via the groundbreaking Sony v. Universal suit, marks a distinct line between corporate and industrial interests in consumer desires. Video technology was immediately cast as a benefit to the consumer population, something inherently subversive (yet commodified) before Hollywood harnessed it as another profit-making device.

VHS was slow to infiltrate beyond the upper-middle class, with only twenty-five percent penetration into U.S. households by 1985. By 1987, however, as the technology became more available and affordable, over fifty percent of American households owned VCR equipment.2 This growth was also reflected by the proliferation of independent video stores throughout the country. In their initial resistance to video technology, major studios miscalculated, allowing independent outfits to promote their B-grade exploitation product in the growing free market of mom-and-pop video stores.3 This, as well as its ever-present status as popular entertainment, bolstered especially by the lucrative slasher and creature film subgenres of the period, partly explains why returns on horror videocassettes were so substantial throughout the 1980s. It also offers an answer for why so many would-be filmmakers took influence and inspiration from previously limited run features with garish titles and low production values. VCR technology promoted a second life for obscure genre works, while planting a seed for the next generation to begin their quiet revolution of democratic cinema.

Camcorder technology developed more slowly than did the VCR following the release of the first single-system device in 1983.1 Previously, video equipment was available only as dual-system Betamax and VHS, cumbersome devices with separate mechanisms for recording audio and video. Ultimately, VHS won the format war over Betamax due to its cost and content efficiency relative to Betamax cassettes.2 Lucas Hilderbrand connects this development, much like the burst of successful pre-recorded tapes, to pornography’s embrace of the video medium.3 Homemade pornographic films were the initial amateur output of the video era, an important point given that horror and pornography have long been equated by critics for their supposed lack of redeeming social function. Many studies on genre filmmaking and the home video era fail to consider the fully realized potential of these devices to promote and foster an alternative cinematic lexicon. In fact, very few scholarly texts, even concerning the subject of home video technology, acknowledge shot-on-video features as a legitimate form of amateur expression. Serious consideration of SOV horror has lagged much in the way that video technology did in its first decade, leaving the appraisal of these films largely to fans, collectors, and hobbyists.

Stan Brakhage was a film loyalist, so his conceptions of amateur cinema never extended to analog video, even as he worked throughout the medium’s rise to prominence. In her 1995 survey of camcorder technology and prime time television, Laurie Oullette omits the role of video in giving a voice to amateur filmmakers without economic resources or industrial connections. William Brown’s survey of noncinema points toward a larger acceptance of amateur works utilizing digital video technology while resisting the conventions and expectations of traditional good filmmaking. His focus is limited to the twenty-first century, emphasizing the political elements of the technology around the world. Hilderbrand’s work restricts its focus on video production to amateur pornography and bootlegging. These texts constitute a wealth of work on the emergence of VCR/VHS technology and the importance of the camcorder’s operation by untrained artists. Only recent works by Daniel Herbert and Johnny Walker have mentioned SOV horror as a legitimate outgrowth of video as cinema, but they too are concerned with the economic aspects of recent re-releases of VHS-lensed features and the financially-motivated works of United Entertainment International, respectively. None of this writing considers the homegrown cinematic world developed by a network of enterprising amateur filmmakers using little more than their family camcorder and their passion for genre features past. That these films made a significant economic impact, saw nationwide release, and quite literally laid the groundwork for the current manifestation of underground horror cinema today is reason enough to merit a deeper look at their contents.

First, the technical specifics: Video is immediate, and unlike film there is no need for processing or development; once filmed, a tape is ready for review instantly. This also reflects the ease of shooting procedures themselves, as video requires a fraction of the light needed to shoot even high ISO Super 8 film, enhancing the portability and utility of the camcorder device itself. Still, camcorder technology did indeed lag as noted above, with even the earliest SOV features relying on Betacam technology, commonly known as broadcast standard video, before being transferred to film for post-production.1 The full infiltration of camcorder-shot features was delayed, with a handful of direct-to-video examples appearing sporadically throughout the early 1980s, each significant in some way.

Video experimentation within celluloid filmmaking was not a new phenomenon by the dawn of the 1980s. Fernando Arrabal’s Viva La Muerte (1971) utilized Betacam technology to film several surreal dream sequences for its narrative, later transferring the video inserts to film to impart a jarring visual discontinuity. Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) likewise used video to capture its protagonist’s startling hallucinations in more experimental sequences throughout its runtime. These integrations demonstrate an awareness of the raw appearance of video itself and its potential for serious creation, but also suggest a hesitance at embracing it in a fuller capacity.

On the other side of the production world, avant-garde artists and filmmakers took video far more seriously as a medium from the 1960s forward. Rather than simply capture high-concept and highbrow happenings, however, a portion of the established cinematic avant-garde turned to the format for its honesty and versatility, with George Kuchar in particular documenting his life through an endless series of video diaries throughout the 1980s-2000s. These covered everything from his storm-hunting Oklahoma vacations to his daily bowel movements and romantic partners. From its earliest usage, video was split between the virtues of easy expression, immediacy, and the high/low divide in subject matter.

Arguably the first SOV horror feature is 1982’s The Toxic Slime Creature, which was hopelessly obscure until at least 2017, when it was uploaded to YouTube.1 It’s worth mentioning only as a precursor to the most well-known of the early SOV horror features, though it does display many of the charming missteps which have come to define SOV films as a broad category. Occurring in a single office park location and rarely offering a glimpse at its monster, the film instead centers on the meandering efforts of the building’s staff to survive. More important to its footnote status, however, is the fact that even the earliest-known SOV horror film existed in absolute obscurity for thirty-five years. The subgenre remains overlooked and neglected—not to mention obscure by its very nature—so that even a notable milestone in technical advancement is without any notoriety due to its marginality.

Boardinghouse (1982) was the first major SOV film with a demonstrable impact on the genre film world. Shot on Betacam and later transferred to film by director John Wintergate, and intended as a low-budget horror comedy, the film is a bizarre mess of banal group scenes in the titular abode, grotesque scares, and confusing Eastern mysticism. Boardinghouse is also notable as the only SOV horror feature to see national theatrical release, playing on the exploitation circuit of inner-city grindhouses and rural drive-in theaters in 1983.1 Bill Landis reviewed the film after it played New York’s 42nd Street, noting that it defied all expectations of being another fanzine movie in the mold of The Evil Dead, and even recalled Arrabal’s debut in its bizarre video-to-film look.2 Noting its strange production history and the realistic depiction of its unknown cast’s motivations, he claims that the movie defines the narcissist fantasies of fringe mindfuckers.3

Discussing Boardinghouse nearly twenty years later, Landis zeroes in on the bizarre qualities that make it stand out despite its many failings, capturing as it does a microcosm of tacky early-1980s Americana.4 Due to the singular personalities of Wintergate and partner/star Kalassu, Boardinghouse harnesses formal experimentation, cinematic naivete, and uncontrolled strangeness to offer a portrait of personal amateur expression in defiance of all prior conceptions of acceptable genre cinema. While no film to follow matches Wintergate’s surreal romp for outright strangeness, its approach and clear demonstration that format