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NIGHT OF THE CREEPS
Written and directed by Fred Dekker.

Night of the Creeps

I never could muster up the courage to rent Fred Dekker’s 1986 cult classic Night of the Creeps as a kid. My loss. Creeps is such a love letter to horror films that I regret not having encountered it sooner. Though it is a far more innocuous cover than such brutal movies as Cannibal Apocalypse, what Creeps offered was a certain level of narrative interplay that I couldn’t help but feel, as a ten year old, uncomfortable engaging in.

The image is this: A window-paned door. We are ostensibly inside a house, our house, looking out through the window. Just on the other side – there is a young man. Dead. Zombified. In a tuxedo. His otherwise clean-cut and attractive face is laced in blood. His eyes have milked over. In his hand – a bouquet of roses, their petals drenched in blood. He has thrust the bouquet through the window, towards us, shattered glass in mid-splinter showering everywhere.

The tagline: The good news is your date is here. The bad news is… He’s dead.

Campy? Most definitely. But it’s that level of interplay that made these sleeves so much fun. If you were willing as a kid to play along, to allow your imagination to engage with the cover – any horror was possible. It all begins with the raw visual and textual information from the sleeve – but from there, it’s up to the non-renter to take this data and extrapolate upon it however their imagination feels fit, stemming off into any number of offshoot narratives that encompass the vocabulary of the video.

First off – I am presumably not the intended target of this attack, given the fact that I’m not this zombie-dude’s date. That said, however – I’m the one being attacked here. The title itself proved confusing for me as I tried to comprehend just what these creeps were and why exactly this was supposed to be their night. Is my date a creep? Is our evening on the town a part of this proverbial night of creeps? Creeps, plural – as in, there are more creeps out there tonight. So where are the rest of them right now? Suddenly, I’m looking over my shoulder in hopes of making sure that I’m still alone in the horror section. I had a part to play – and here I was, playing it. All of a sudden, I’m some eighteen year old girl (presumably), waiting for my date to arrive and pick me up, only to discover he’s one real big creep. And there are more creeps coming, as I’ve been told by the helpful and informative VHS cover.

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES
Written and directed by Neil Jordan.

The Company of Wolves

Somehow I did get the chance to catch Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves when I was younger – though truth be told, most of its soft-core art-house meanderings went right over my ten-year-old head. All for the better, frankly. I remember thinking this movie was a little too mushy for my pre-puberty tastes. That said, the video cover’s fusion of Grimm’s fairy tales and lycanthropic-horror was such an assault on my senses and sensibilities that I still can’t shake it.

The image stems from the film’s model of werewolf transformation. Rather than the human body altering itself into the beast, in Wolves the skin is literally shed like a rubber suit in order for the wolf to manifest. It lives within the individual, independent from the individual – and therefore, far more uncontrollable.

What the picture on the VHS sleeve displays is a bare-chested man in mid-transformation – his neck cricked back, eyes wide open in extreme agony. His lips are peeled disproportionately back as the snarling snout of a wolf slowly reaches out from the tight confines of the man’s mouth. The beast must rip itself free from its fleshly detention – and here we see it tearing this man apart, from the inside out, as a busty young woman in a Little Red Riding Hood outfit watches on in distress.

There’s a palpable sense of violence in the image. Incapable of embracing the sexual metaphors of this image as a kid, I did pick up on the notion that brewing inside us all is something far more primal than our individual exteriors can oftentimes express. Here, relenting control over our own body is an excruciatingly painful endeavor.

Is there something like that brewing inside of me?

EVIL DEAD II: DEAD BY DAWN
Written by Sam Raimi and Scott Spiegel. Directed by Sam Raimi.

Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn

Full disclosure: My enthusiasm for this movie will never wane. I want to believe I’m a star pupil of Sam Raimi’s School of Gonzo Film Pastiche Appreciation, taking to heart one of his film’s primary lessons that horror and comedy can go fluidly hand-in-hand – blending Romero’s Night of the Living Dead effortlessly with The Three Stooges.

But before I was old enough to rent the movie, there was its cover to contend with – complete with its intense close-up of a bare skull, a pair of eyeballs settled into its sockets staring right back at me, sans eyelids, sans flesh, sans all that much distance between us.

Its tagline: Kiss your nerves good-bye!

Seemed like the guy on the cover sure had. His nerves had long since been stripped. There was nothing left of him but the bone. The eyes were all that remained – and here they were, silently accosting me. I couldn’t tell if this decimated individual was in pain or in a fit of horrific ecstasy – but the eyes continue to stare, boring their way into my psyche while their intent remains a mystery. There was no way, no power imaginable in my possession that would allow me to let go of those eyes. They followed me through the video store. Stepping back, they kept staring. Stepping to the left, they only rolled with me. And there was never any flesh left over the bone to twitch, no eyelids left to flinch. All they could do was look – look at me, watching on as I ran out of the aisle. Grinning.

—

Sadly, the demise of VHS cassettes inevitably brought along the decline of this level of horror film interplay. Once DVDs overtook the market and video chains spread across the country, cover art began to matter less. Quantity was now key. Multiple copies now crammed the shelves. Rather that have a video facing outwards on the shelf, most video chains chose to stock their older movies in a library-style, exposing their spines and nothing else. The eye had nothing to latch onto but the title. There was no visual image to engage with. The imagination was lost.

Another offense brought along by DVD was the sacrilegious decision to redesign a movie’s cover art. When most films made the transition from VHS to DVD, often their own packaging was rebranded, doing away with the original iconography of the film in favor of some new whitewashed, Photoshopped image.

But the final nail in the coffin was Netflix. Blockbuster may have helped hasten the decline of VHS cover art, but the true death blow was dealt by Netflix’s ubiquity. In a single swing of the mail-order axe, Netflix has left us to drown in a river of red, an endless stream of bloody envelopes shipped directly to your very door. Individual packaging no longer exists, thanks to Netflix’s insistence on mailing movies in their own generic, type-written sleeves. All I see now is red. Red, everywhere.

I can’t hop on my bike and ride the five minutes to Video World now. They shut their doors years back. As did Blockbuster. Now, thanks to Netflix – the movies come to me. But in the process, I lost my imagination. Video stores have been rendered utterly obsolete now, replaced by virtual video stores that privatize the decision making process so much, too much – all I’m left with is the movie the filmmakers intended for me to watch, rather than the movie their covers manifested inside my mind.

I can’t help but feel sad for the subsequent generation of ten year olds hoping to find their horror films. The horror section no longer exists at the back of the store, hiding – waiting for them to enter at their own risk. Now it’s only a click away. They no longer have to engage with a tangible product, taking the cassette into their hands (if they dare). A jpg of death just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Our fear stimulus is dwindling due to this digital distancing-effect. There’s no threat in front of the computer screen. There is no longer an image in which our subconscious can adhere itself to because the value of an image has been diminished by Netflix’s persistent packing-brand, diluting the impact of the movie in our own memory.

We no longer have opportunity to manifest our own horror movies based upon the visual vocabulary of a video/DVD’s cover, losing a level of engagement that actually enhanced the movie-viewing experience.

We no longer walk through that dark woods at the video store. That element of threat on the shelves found in the horror section, the very immersion into violence and horror – is long since dead.

Heaven pity you children, too young to rent these movies. How will you film your own nightmares now?

You’ll just have to find another way of frightening yourselves.

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