#hackolantern

[frighteningflicks]

🧌Day 3 #hackolantern #80s #horror #movie #pumpkin #devil #blood #cult #grandpa #31daysofhalloween #31nightsofhalloween #31scarymoviesin31days #frighteningflicks https://www.instagram.com/p/CjUS6rkjhgI/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[pierppasolini]

Hack-O-Lantern (1988) // dir. Jag Mundhra

[nostalgia-party-massacre]

Hack-O-Lantern (1988)

[jamest541975]

HALLOWEEN-A-THON 2022 VIDEO 30: THE LAST DRIVE-IN WITH JOE BOB BRIGGS - HACK-O-LANTERN. #halloweenathon2022 #halloweenathon #hackolantern #TheLastDriveIn #joebobbriggs #darcythemailgirl #dianaprince #shudder #ShudderOriginal https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf2Reu4vtFq/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[wolffoflamancha]

Hack-o-Lantern, a film by Jag Mundra, starring... #frightfall2021 Day 29 #horrormovie @retrosupply . . #digitalart #drawing #art #illustration #digitalartist #procreate #makecomics #comicart #indiecomics #artistsoninstagram #sketchbook #ipadpro #hackolantern #hypyke #rlm #redlettermedia #inktober #drawloween #drawtober #halloween #retrosupply #frightfall #retrosupplyco #retrosupplycolorlab https://www.instagram.com/p/CVn4_R9vD7k/?utm_medium=tumblr

[embracethefilm]

The time off was nice… But you all know I couldn’t miss Halloween! And what better way then to hack my way back then with this painfully cheesy cult slasher. Hack-O-Lantern - Movie Review https://youtu.be/xCoTC_cOZcY #hackolanternmoviereview #hackolanternmovie #hackolantern #etf #embracethefilm #oli #oliverbuckley #youtubepuppet #youtubereview #youtube #youtuber #youtubevideos #horrorpuppet #horrormovies #horroryoutuber #culthorror #culthorrormovies #80sslasher #80sslashermovies #80shorror https://www.instagram.com/p/CVdJOUoFB83/?utm_medium=tumblr

[horrorpaingoredeath]

I'm heading to VHS Fest @ Mahoning Drive-In ... Show Mike transforms into Camp Mike! Come say to myself and @olsentwintowers #driveinvhsfest #mahoningdrivein #hackolantern #backwoodsmarcy #blooddiner #mahoning #vhs #campmike #showmike #videomike #yo (at The Mahoning Drive-In Theater)

[gvk2012]

Time for some so bad it good Halloween movies Hack-O-Lantern #hackolantern #Octobermoviewatchs #31daysofhalloween #halloween #October #horror #horrormovies #horrorfanatic #horrorfilms #horroraddict #horrornerd #macabre #sobaditsgood #cultcinema https://www.instagram.com/p/CG9AyT0gXoD/?igshid=cb0e7ec3qqef

[dreammatter]

day twenty-five of @drawlloween 🎃 #HackOLantern 🧙🏽‍♀️ Igor has found a new hobby in carving pumpkins. He spends all day and all night carving and soon the tea shop is overrun with all his different jack 'o lanterns! 💕🧙🏽‍♀️ #drawlloween2020 https://www.instagram.com/p/CGyVwxHB6s3/?igshid=19oevwmd0suj5

[thestevestrout]

I'm totally counting tonights #TheLastDriveIn /#HalloweenHideaway movie for my #31NightsOfHalloween movie! Watching Hack-O-Lantern with my #MutantFam! #ComicBookSwapMeet #SteveAndCryptoShow #HackOLantern #spookyseason #HappyHalloween https://www.instagram.com/p/CGthkWqJQXF/?igshid=ihb12rpfwxre

[batswithsplinters]

Out for a week so here’s one of my Halloween, popcorn bucket, cream-of-the-crap grab bags. Don’t watch alone, unless you’re as alone as me, and probably don’t watch them sober either. #31DaysofHorror #PuppetMaster #TromasWar #Frankenfish #HackOLantern #Carnosaur #BadChannels #NightOfTheDemons https://www.instagram.com/p/CGY-6oWDRUtVSVQDs8Zc11GdwHEGdmOL-pVbRI0/?igshid=qsg1v2u6afce

[pierppasolini]

Hack-O-Lantern (1988) // dir. Jag Mundhra

[moriareviews]

A bizarre film involving Halloween killings and devil worship that seems made without a clear script. Everything is wrecked by a astonishingly awful  performance from Hy Pike

Full review at http://www.moriareviews.com/horror/hack-o-lantern-1988.htm

[adamroberthaug]

HACKING UP ANOTHER LIL RIPPER. 🔪🎃 #letsrip #horror #vhs #vhscu #vhstapes #vhswave #videovore #vhsaesthetic #producer #beat #hackolantern #beatmaker #spbeatmaker #sp404sx #instrumentalist #omaha #ripper #darkbeat #hauntedgauntlet #yee (at Omaha, Nebraska) https://www.instagram.com/p/BuaRhQ9A2uY/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=141uaomn0lxew

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/12/2021: BOARDINGHOUSE (1982)

Yesterday was a day of trying to confront certain trending topics in horror discourse that I find continuously challenging, to see what I could find to say about them. I'm not sure if I've come up with anything of value to contribute, but at least no one can say I didn't try!

When the Nightstream festival came around this year, the AGFA logo hypnotized me into grabbing a virtual seat at a rep screening of BOARDINGHOUSE, soon to be honored with a two-disc blu-ray release. I've seen this 1982 LA production referred to as the first shot-on-video horror feature, and also more specifically as the first shot-on-video horror film to be blown up to 35mm and released theatrically; I can't tell if these two claims are equally true, or if the latter amends the former, but the point seems to be that it is historically important. Whether it is also artistically important is a highly subjective matter. Writer-director-makeup artist John Wintergate (who looks alarmingly like Malcolm McDowell to me) stars as a telekinetic gigolo who converts the site of a mysterious tragedy into "a bachelor's paradise" where he rents rooms exclusively to "beautiful women with no ties". Their never-ending pool party activates the entity that previously drenched the boarding house in blood, and then everybody's in trouble. And not just because of the cheapo party magician who appears at the end, though if HACKOLANTERN and TERROR TRAIN have taught me anything, it's that variety performers can be a huge red flag for a movie.

In many ways, BOARDINGHOUSE typifies how I think of SOV horror. Its visual language is unpredictable and at times incomprehensible, with ill-framed inserts of random images and unsteady zooming in and out on mundane details. The effects are a mix of the surprisingly ambitious and the insultingly lazy. The cast is mostly made up of women who appear to be professional hot chicks of one stripe or another, and men with a cartoonishly sleazy or "hardboiled" disposition; some people have awful made-up accents, for some reason, clashing with the completely flat affect of others. The movie feels less like a story with a beginning middle and end, than like collection of random scenes and genre elements; strands of science fiction mix with gory slasher gestures in what is ultimately a supernatural situation with incestuous underpinnings. Or something.

Re: my intro, I don't meant to call this 40 year old form of production a "trend". But, I think it's fair to call it a trending topic, with serious analysis of shot-on-video genre movies being a recent development, relative to how long they've been around. The SOV-focused journal Bleeding Skull has been gaining volume and visibility since 2004, with further validation coming from their participation in the Alamo Drafthouse's Video Vortex programming series, and their collaboration with the American Genre Film Archive on meticulous restorations and deluxe disc releases of select SOV titles. For their 2018 relaunch, Fangoria gave bad boy S. Craig Zahler an all-SOV review column called "Malignant Growths"; it was big of them to do so, as in the first half of the first page, Zahler decries Fango as a slight, shallow rag he stopped reading when it had nothing left to teach him. In the same long blowhard breath, he also equates viewers who don't enjoy SOV production with philistines too stupid to understand modern art, and takes down Bleeding Skull for being too glib and ironic to really give these movies their due. Essentially, he positions himself as being exactly what genre journalism has been missing, and perhaps the only person qualified to speak about SOV fare appropriately...and if that's true, maybe I'd just rather not hear about SOV at all.

Wintergate with his co-starring spouse Kalassu, and her band 33 1/3 who also feature in BOARDINGHOUSE.

But on that note! PHEW. Ahem. I didn't come here to talk about Zahler, who should stick to the lucrative business of selling "a lot of screenplays to the Hollywood machine", which he finds time to brag about in his column about deep-underground movies. I came to say that in spite of the amount of reasonably intellectual attention that has come to SOV in the recent past, I think I still don't completely "get it", and I'm in a constant struggle to explain to myself why that is. I keep my ears open; I think the work Bleeding Skull does is great, and even important. (Their more qualified review of BOARDINGHOUSE is here) I read Zahler's column, even when I felt like using it for toilet paper (the actual discussion of the movies seems generally useful). I try to listen to fans...although a dip into SOV reviews on Letterboxd is not always that revealing, sometimes it only increases my confusion when they start passionately listing qualities they don't care about—storytelling, acting, production design, sound and image quality, et al—without really clarifying what they DO care about, and I have to stop exploring when I hit randomly-inserted hot takes about how like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is actually a vampire movie, not a zombie movie, and this universal misunderstanding is a result of filmgoers being too lazy and uneducated to know the difference. ...OK, so I'm unfairly picking on a crazy outlier, but that actually leads me to what I *think* is my point: The average SOV fan just has different DNA than I do. They feel different things for different reasons, than what moves me. They are an entirely different kind of viewer.

That said, can I really generalize about what I think moves this breed of movie lover? Not all SOV movies are as chaotic and incoherent as BOARDINGHOUSE. (And of course, I do like plenty of movies that are legitimately chaotic and incoherent) Some of them are colorful and inventive enough to hold my attention, like Pat Bishow's THE SOULTANGLER, while some have real focus and rigor, like J.R. Bookwalter's OZONE. It's embarrassing to admit that some of what keeps me at arm's length from SOV cinema has simply to do with the texture of early video images themselves, which always gives me a sense of extreme artificiality. And that may feed into the larger issue for me: My personal desire, as a viewer, is to feel at least somewhat absorbed into the picture. There has to be some level of illusionism for me to feel satisfied. I feel that this is NOT a matter of budgetary resources, as movies from MARTIN to EVIL DEAD can attest, but the ethereal glow of celluloid is a part of what draws me in, for better or worse. There is something about video that gives me a feeling of distance and abstraction; maybe it's the obvious homemade-ness of most video production, no matter how seriously the filmmakers take their work, that makes me feel constantly aware of who is pulling what strings. My focus on such work is inexorably drawn away from its fictional and metaphorical content and toward the backend of things, as if I were watching a complicated stunt or magic trick. It's like the difference between traditional theater, and performance art. One isn't necessarily superior to the other—and possibly, the two aren't even fairly comparable, in spite of their use of essentially the same materials. Connoisseurs of one form won't necessarily be satisfied by the achievements of the other, and that doesn't not constitute a condemnation, only a contextual problem.

Full disclosure: I first encountered SOV horror when I didn't even know it was a whole thing, through THIS movie, which at the time made me so angry I thought I might become violent. Maybe Mary Whitehouse was right, horror CAN turn you into a murderer.

If any SOV fans are reading this, they might be thinking of how limited my analysis is. It might apply to some types of "homemade" or "backyard" video features, and there might be scores of others that really do compete successfully at the same game as more traditionally illusory feature films. And you know what? I'd love to hear about it! Feel free to reach out with your recommendations and alternative theories. I am still puzzling over this, and I hope you find that the present article is more frankly about my own ignorance and subjectivity, than it is about these movies themselves. I recently took in a Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies lecture by perennial SOV hype man Anne Choi, in which she discussed her work with Bleeding Skull to illuminate her favorite form of filmmaking. During the Q&A, some brave soul asked what movie or movies were the biggest chore during the completion of Bleeding Skull's new book, and while she was appropriately reserved in her answer, she allowed that the hardest thing about her gig is watching movies where "guys in trench coats play vampires". During a certain internship, I saw a LOT of movies of that description—Why are there so many of them? Why are they all exactly the same?? And why are they all fifty hours long???—and the pain in Ms. Choi's voice let me know that, despite all my consternation and confusion, maybe I'm not so different from SOV fans after all.

[sinfulcelluloid]

#MorningMovie #HalloweenNight aka #HackOLantern 1988 A kindly old grandfather is actually the leader of a murderous satanic cult which sacrifices its victims on Halloween. #31DaysOfHalloween #Horror