The Midnite Film Society — Vol. 15 — Abbreviated Horrors
The Midnite Film Society dives into the pre-VHS era with a look at three Super 8 digests from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Before the commercialisation of home video in the 1980s, one of the only ways you could watch horror flicks in your home (other than late-nite TV) was by project these condensed adaptations of classic horror films on your living room wall.
They usually ran 8-10 minutes (roughly the length of a 400ft. reel of Super 8 film) and featured select scenes from the films. Some of them were really well edited: Castle Films, owned by Universal, did a really awesome job adapting the classic Universal horror flicks into an abbreviated format (see: The Mummy). Others, like Ken Films, cut them more as ‘highlight’ reels, which were still pretty cool.
You could buy them in drugstores and camera shops, order them from the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, or rent them from a local library.
While the digest era is most often associated with classic horror like Universal’s Dracula, Frankenstein and ‘50s sci-fi, many horror flicks from the ‘70s also got the Super 8 treatment. Many of them were also edited onto 400´ reels, meaning 18-19 minute cuts. The Exorcist, John Badham’s remake of Dracula, Alien, among others were released, and are all pretty wild. The one for The Exorcist quickly sets up the story and then goes straight to the gross stuff.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy on Super 8 (1972)
I’ve been collecting these for years and luckily managed to get quite a few of these scanned. So I’ve assembled a mixtape with three of them: the aforementioned demonic possession film, one of John Carpenter’s first films, and a Universal monster-mash flick. Interstitials courtesy of some 16mm TV spots and 35mm drive-in snipes. (Running time 1:13.13, 594.1mb) Download
