As I have noted recently, it seems these days that no week goes by without the appearance of some film that I thought I’d never see turning up on DVD.  Home video insiders have worried over the past few years that the medium of digital versatile discs has gone about as fer as it kin go, doomed by streaming video and torrent shares that allow fans of the obscure and the arcane to share files (legally or otherwise) over the Internet.  Nevertheless, the rare titles keep popping up, which is fun.  And yet.  And yet.  I find myself thinking of days gone by, in which most films, whether big ticket, classic or cult, were hard to come by… back when you had to rely on fate, the Furies, your local late night TV listings and the generosity of your closest repertory cinema, if you were even so lucky as to have a closest repertory cinema.  Thirty, thirty-five years ago, well before the advent of home video and the VHS boom, you counted yourself lucky if you could obtain any piece of a cherished or hotly anticipated film… a novelization of the screenplay, the published screenplay, a photo-novel, View-Master reels, a poster, the soundtrack or the holiest of holies (well, among my circle of idiots, anyway) the 8mm or Super 8 cutdown.

By “cutdown” I mean a sort of Reader’s Digest condensed version of a feature film.  The length could vary from 50 feet (just under 4 minutes) or 200 (about 6 minutes); some lucky stiffs had the 400 foot reels, which ran for 12 minutes but I was never so fortunate.  Most of these mini-movies were silent, complete with intertitles to impart pertinent plot points and key lines of dialogue, and most were in black-in-white regardless of the color palette of the original feature.  I had between 1974 and 1984 quite a collection of old horror and science fiction films on 8 mm and Super 8 reels.  I got my start back when my Dad bought our family an 8mm movie projector.  I can’t tell you exactly when this was, at some point after 1968 when we moved into our own home and suddenly needed a lot more electronic devices (an arsenal which included, but was not limited to, a color console TV, a four-slice toaster, a Bearcat III police scanner, and a belt vibrator).  When he picked up the projector, he also bought a tester movie (presumably so he wouldn’t burn up one of our precious 8mm home movies when threading same through the gate), which turned out to be a condensed version of Jacques Tourneur’s classic spooker NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957).  I hadn’t yet seen NIGHT OF THE DEMON, or CURSE OF THE DEMON as it was called in the United States, but the cover sure looked promising to me.  I can’t give you specifics on my reaction at the time, though I remember pretty vividly the moment of the family sitting down together as a group, the drawing of the curtains, my father raising that 40×40 tripod screen (smelled. so. good.) and the almost magic lantern prestidigitation of the projector coming to life.

I guess I should spend a minute talking about film gauges, especially for those who have never shown themselves a movie on anything other than tape or disc or taken a picture on anything other than a digital camera.  The movies that you go to see at the movies are, generally speaking, projected from 35mm film and that has been the case throughout the hundred year history of cinema.  (There were some earlier, smaller gauges such as 13mm but 35 became standardized in 1909.)  This means the film and the negative from which it was printed is 35mm (or 1 3/8 inches) wide.  This was also the standard gauge for still photography, whether you were a professional shutterbug on assignment or an amateur with a disposable Kodak.  Larger film gauges are sometimes employed – 70mm, for example – but 35mm has withstood the test of time.  Educational films or feature films prepared for home viewing were often converted to 16mm, which it doesn’t take a mathemagician to figure out is essentially half the width of 35mm.  And while there have always been the ambitious types who filmed their family events on 16mm (like PEEPING TOM’s father), the film gauge for home movies used to be 8mm and later Super 8 (which had smaller perforations, permitting a larger image).  8mm/Super 8 film is thin and delicate, with only one perforation per frame as opposed to the four on 35mm.  Handling 8mm film when I was a kid taught me to be cautious and even professional.  At some point I even got my hands on an 8mm Moviola, on which I ran my films (less dangerous than still framing film in the projector) and spliced broken ends.  Projecting and editing movies was the first process I ever learned… I wonder now why I never pursued it later in life.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Return to flashback…

Whatever my fleeting, initial reaction was to that first home theater experience, of watching 4 powerfully encapsulated moments from CURSE OF THE DEMON, it wouldn’t take long before I was hooked.  Though the projector belonged to the family, it was really all mine, even if nobody knew that but me.  I kept the unit in my room, screen and all, as my collection of little horror and sci-fi movie cutdowns grew to include such titles as BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (curiously, I never had the original), DR. CYCLOPS, REVENGE OF THE CREATURE and THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US (but never the original THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON), THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN and its sequel WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, THE SPIDER, THE MUMMY’S TOMB, WAR OF THE WORLDS, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, a bit of HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN retitled DOOM OF DRACULA, a bit of FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN retitled THE MOON KILLER, THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA and, later, STAR WARS.  I loved to run the projector forwards and backwards, burning out more than a few projector bulbs and savoring such moments as the disintegration of Count Dracula in DOOM OF DRACULA, the horrific (but compelling) deaths of Taylor and Brett in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, the cotton ball smothering in DR. CYCLOPS, the incineration of Kharis in THE MUMMY’S TOMB and Blackie Lagoon’s Sea World freakout in REVENGE OF THE CREATURE.  As I sat there, hour after hour in the dark, slack-jawed, my eyeballs drying in their sockets, I was learning a few things about editing and the power of montage and becoming in the process, of course, a full-blown monster goon.  I’ve never had a cinematic experience quite like my time in the dark with those wonderful little movies from Castle and Ken Films.  I probably never will.

I never owned a sound version of these films but this clip should give you something of the ambiance of watching these films that I enjoyed in those arguably more innocent but unarguably less media-soaked days.  Of course, at this late date, the charm of watching a miniaturized, reedited and (in the case of the Technicolor DR. X) black-and-whitened version of a classic film might very well be lost on you… but give it a shot.  If you’ve read this far, you just might by the type who can appreciate the forgotten, the archaic, and the fantastamagorical.  If you suddenly must possess your own 8mm and Super 8 cutdowns, they can be obtained online from a variety of vendors and Castle Films even has its own Facebook page.  I envy your first experience of setting up your gear, opening up your own screen (breathe deep, my friend), threading the strip of film into your projector and turning off the lights.  The hum of the projector, the heat of the bulb, and those silvery shapes dancing in the dark… this is the stuff dreams are made on.