Late night horror, '84 and '08

Yesterday I used the Netflix "watch it now" utility to watch one of the great classics of cinema, Don't go in the Woods, aka Don't go in the Woods Alone.

How I love the horror genre! Everything from the more well known slasher fests of the 1980s, like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street (not technically a slasher, of course) to the b-movie knock-offs of them like all of the "Don't do this or that" movies. (So many things we weren't supposed to do: Don't go in the woods, don't go in the house, don't answer the phone...) And then there were the zombie movies, the cannibal movies, the Italian horror movies that gave birth to all these movies, and the various other European sleaze/art horror films that appeared.

I've always loved these movies, and I can't say why. I remember, even when I was particularly young, finding these films as great entertainment to relax in front of after a long day. As a younger child, I didn't have access to all the movies to which I have access now. Before the whole Internet and DVD revolution, some movies were quite hard to come by. If I wanted to get a copy of, say, Cannibal Holocaust, I would have to order a bootleg VHS version from some company in Tennessee that specialized in making bootleg copies of movies. But even before that, I was confined to what was on all those UHF stations of yesteryear. My only outlets were the weekly Creature Double Feature on WLVI-56 in Boston (inexplicably hosted by someone called Uncle Dale), and of course Elvira's Movie Macabre, which had better movies, but was on a station that came in much worse, a lot more snow. This was from back in the days when it was actually common for movies on TV to have hosts--remember that?--and Elvira was the perfect host for most of the movies she played. Of course, now the techniques used for the show (cutting from the movie to the reaction of the hostess and back) would probably offend my sense of integrity for the film, but it seemed great at the time. And I think it was this show that introduced me to Tombs of the Blind Dead, part of the great Blind Dead trilogy. (What is more bad ass than blind zombie-knights who still ride on horse back and use eerie-sounding sonar to guide themselves?!)

So, in any case, I spent yesterday evening in a darkened apartment, watching a low-budget 80s slasher movie on my computer. There must have been some sort of subliminal connection-making going on, because I fell asleep halfway through the movie (as I used to do almost each week when I stayed up late to watch Elvira's stuff), and when I woke up, I instinctively reached for the light switch... the one that would have been there if I was in the same room in which I used to watch horror films in 1984. What a trip.

Now it's easier to get the movies I want, but I miss those old hosted horror shows as well as the independent UHF stations that seem to have vanished in the 1990s.