Horror & Me pt 1

The first post about my long relationship with horror will set the social-historic frame...

Living in a country so close to the US, but being the borderline of Region 4 (DVD speaking) back in the early 80's, when the horror bug bite me, wasn't the best setting to watch the classic, cult or blockbuster horror films, even in the bloom of the VHS era.

Back then, Televisa (the monopoly of media)owned the main chain of video stores: Video Centro, and the suburbia version: Video Vision. As a monopoly, they owned the distribution rights from the major movie studios with their Video Visa label (hey, they already owned rights for cinema distribution, so why to let someone else eat from the big cake?)

The only big competition for Video Visa was Videomax (and thanks someone it still exists), so most horror films were distributed by this brands, but there were also a lot of short-lived independent distributors, with the same amount of small and independent video stores.

This spread the video horror offer through so many different labels, and also through a hunting-chase in different video stores, to made a good horror rental, or at least a fun one.

This was the cause that many horror franchises were spread around the town, and sometimes it was impossible to keep track, and watch the films in the correct order... from the vault of my brain I can remember:

Friday the 13th was never available in VHS, it actually was released for the first time (on DVD) last year, but from part 2 to part 8, it was distributed by Video Visa, part 9 was offered by Videomax.

The first 4 chapters on the A Nightmare on Elm Street saga were also from Video Visa (via the CBS deal, I own part 4 on this VHS, also as a side note, the box for part 3 had the ugly cover of Freddy surrounded by Will's green magic rays)... 5 & 6 were Videomax... New Nightmare, I don't remember right now

The most fun/rare case was the Sleepaway Camp trilogy, part 1 was released in it's beautiful original art by Video Visa... Part 2 & 3 were released by different independent labels; for part 2 a pic from Angela's cabin with all the dead bodies was used, but for part 3 not only a really weird pic of a guy in a hockey mask with a a neon green background was used as the cover art work, it was re-titled as 'Martes 13: Día de Sangre', as I mentioned, since Friday the 13th was never released in VHS I rented it thinking it was the 1980's Jason-less classic, but no, it was Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland!!!

So back in the day, I started to rent horror films, at the tender age of 8 [:)]

I was able to watch, thanks to diverse offer of distributors, tons of horror films from all over the globe... I still have some notebooks where I kept rack of all my rental!

And now with the DVD technology, and a new batch of distributors (Video Visa is officially dead, almost all major studios release their own films as in the rest of the world), I can own some of those oldies and the new features: cheap or big budget, crappy or classic...

I <3 horror, I live horror!