How Did the Obsession Begin for You?

[Frankie Teardrop]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

I too have no nostalgia for the format. The art works were in many cases rather fine but they took so much space to store them.

Don't get me wrong i love having all these titles on disc, even the worst disc is preferable to some of the transfers of Island of Death doing the rounds in the early nineties.

In a way this step up is one of the reasons i'm not fussed about blu-ray, especially when you read the fuss about grain, noise issues etc. That always makes me smile to myself.

Yeah, I haven't gone over to Blu-ray either. I had an acquaintance who would only ever watch BDs, but frankly I couldn't accept that kind of self denial. Loads of stuff which comes out on DVD will never get a high definition release - it's not the same situation as the VHS to DVD route, because the amount of horror films made on a cheap vid cam and churned out in limited numbers these days is about ten times the number of grindhouse quickies released on a given day in the seventies and eighties, and they probably couldn't withstand the upgrade anyway. Who knows how things will go in terms of streaming, too? That's a different debate. Anyway, my eyes are usually quite blurry for one reason or another, so I'm not too hung up about seeing the likes of 'The Slayer' et al in immaculate detail.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

I'm not too hung up about seeing the likes of 'The Slayer' et al in immaculate detail.

I was surprised at how decent The Slayer Vipco release actually is. Sure there are one or two faults but i certainly wouldn't upgrade it.

[dallywhitty]

The first horror film I remember seeing was Stephen King's It. I guess I was seven or eight at the time and as I started to get increasingly interested in film (thanks to my father's various film guides), my passion for horror cinema grew. By the time I was nine, I'd already watched and fallen in love with The Evil Dead, The Exorcist and Hellraiser, having watched them on VHS. I also discovered an article in one of my father's film mags which was dedicated to banned films. Images from The Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave leapt out at me and so began my fascination with video nasties. I also used to watch a lot of the Horror Channel over the Summer holidays so I was heavily exposed to fifties/sixties horrors like A Bucket of Blood and The Terror.

I'm only twenty so I missed the video nasties scandal, but for over half of my lifetime, I've adored horror films.

[Baron Mynd]

I started with Tarantino flicks, collected the majority of his films, found out his favourite was Battle Royale... decided to get that like a huge fanboy, really enjoyed it. Picked up Requiem which i still haven't watched actually... found some Tartan Asia Extreme DVD's, started collecting those too... the list is endless. I really need to narrow it down to one branch or w/e of the movie family tree and stick to it. There's too many cousins once removed etc and you end up buying complete madness haha!

[Frankenhooker]

My parents had a dodgy copy of Dawn Of The Dead on video. My brother and I used to sneak downstairs during the night and watch it, I remember watching it four or five nights on the trot. Eventually we got caught, but rather than give us both a bollocking, they started to introduce us to horror movies, there was a video van that used to drive around our town and my dad used to take us out and let us pick, we always used to pick the nastiest looking film.

I was about ten or eleven, so that must of been around 1985.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

How Did the Obsession Begin for You?

What obsession?

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

How Did the Obsession Begin for You?

What obsession?

I love your new avatar.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs

I love your new avatar.

The raven's gone on holiday for Halloween.

[JoshuaKaitlyn]

Grew up watching BBC2 saturday night double bills of the the old Universal horrors looking forward to finding out what was going to be on the following week. Got our first VHS around the same time that 'The Day After' was first screened on British TV, it was the first film that I recorded on good old tape! Had a collection of two movies, the previously mentioned one and 'Firefox' before we had a burglary and gone was my precious collection. Nevermind! We got a new tape player and started renting movies from the infamous 'man in a van' most of what we rented I kind of forgotted now, 'Terror Eyes' was one that my Dad rented and he complained thinking that it had been labelled wrong and should have been called 'Terrorize'. Xtro was one that I kept asking for having seen the poster in a London underground station. But the guy always said that said tape was taken by the police. Eventually I started collecting Redemption VHS, mainly for the amount of female flesh that was on offer, and it was here that I discovered Jean Rollin and Jess Franco. The Rollin ones were as wierd as hell but I quite enjoyed them. But as the 80's became the 90's my tape collection, (both pre-recorded and off of the TV) just exploded I was recording everything from TV shows to Mini-series). Then DVD came along and I had to make room for this new wonder and so the tapes went....some I should have kept such as two pre-cert Naschy movies 'Werewolf Shadow' and 'Werewolf Vs The Yeti' For a long time I was just watching mainstream movies then a chance encounter with a Fopp Halloween sale and some discs that were curiously in yellow boxes caught my eye and I was hooked again, from there I found this place and from there my collection now includes all sorts of weird and wonderful items....

[Demoncrat]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

This is an interesting thread. I remember my first experiences with horror - I was one of those cliché kids traumatised at a young age by so-called video nasties. I was less exposed to them than I subjectively recall, but even glimpses of my cousin's collection of horrible shit (at that age) like ZFE etc left an indelible impression. Even the covers had me enthralled - 'The Thing', 'The Deadly Spawn', 'Zombie Creeping Flesh' - all so innocuous now - seemed incredibly potent at the time. By the age of ten I was a regular in a dodgy house where cannibal movies flickered in the corner of a room full of smoke and cider bottles, courtesy of my friend's obviously doting parents. Not that I'm judging - I was into it. Later on in my teens, nineties horror seemed largely vacuous and safe, but the underground scene in the UK was thriving, and like Dem said there were always certain contacts, people in the know who used to procure the goods. I wasn't massively involved, more a leech taking in what I could on the back of other people's bootlegs. It was a certain kind of era with a certain kind of aesthetic - local kids in run down terraces trying to recreate a Butthole Surfers show with surgical footage, porn, f*cked up bits from f*cked up films and LSD, Throbbing Gristle groaning in the background (ie we were pretentious goths). Later I went to uni, then more uni in London, and whilst I kept my oar in a bit my passion simmered down a little. There were some highlights, like seeing Salo at the ICA, but it wasn't till I headed back up North and got a job that I noticed the DVD explosion and thought "wow, I can get everything that used to seem really distant and transgressive and weird in a two disc set with pristine picture quality". So my horror fixation has really taken hold again over the last ten years. I know I've said it before, but it's so odd thinking you could only ever get these scuzzy, horrible movies on some icky tenth generation copy VHS devoid of any identifying marks apart from something illegible scribbled on a half torn label. If you had told me twenty years ago that 'Cannibal Holocaust' would one day be on the high street, I would've been sick on your shoes. It's pretty strange now thinking 'Nekromantik' will be in HMV!

Cough, sounds familiar.
I know. I feel like rushing out in the street with a megaphone when I think about it really.....