Hi hotties - I'm back after a very busy events week at work and boy do I have some sexy stuff for you today. This blessed Wednesday, we’re going to talk about home video. VHS, handheld cameras, found footage, the tapes you fed into the whole that went whirr.
Also a big thank you to everyone who has contacted us about the zine so far - I’m really sorry if I haven’t got back to you yet, the past couple weeks have been very busy and I’m still working through it all <3
If you haven’t submitted anything yet but plan to, do! We’re essentially full up for zine 001 but will be planning zine 002 soon-ish so we’d love to hear from you anytime.
Stick around until the very end too for a special announcement…
Mouse (1997)
Produced by skateboard brand Girl Skateboards, Mouse from 1997 is a fun short full of cool, sick and/or gnarly tricks bro dude! But it also features some skits written and directed by Spike Jonze including a Charlie Chaplin silent movie skit and a sequence that replicates the style of a trailer for a Blaxploitation film, while the actual skating footage is shot from a fish-eye type street level perspective. It is the variation in style, music and perspective that keeps this short interesting and unique.
Each skater also got their own animated intro as seen above which really adds to the personality of each section, showcasing the skaters own style. What interests me about this video is how it pays homage to different eras of filmmaking, from silent films all the way up to the ever-encroaching use of special effects by the late 90s. We see Chaplin skating haphazardly in a slapstick fashion, while later a modern skater the size of an insect skates with a boombox, hiding from mice and large smokers.
I’d recommend Mouse as an example of an iconic home skate video from the peak of that era, and as a reference for how skate culture and the skit had an influence on young DIY filmmakers at the time. You can see how the silly parodies of popular films and movie moments bled into the stunts pulled on Jackass just three years later, a show co-created and produced by Spike Jonze himself.
They Killed Gas Money Kid!
Content warning ahead for: blood, gore, violence.
The VHS franchise of horror films provide a lot to choose from in terms of homemade, handheld found-footage horror. As some of the schlockiest, netflix-y stuff to come out, VHS gets a modicum of credit from me for having a Black Mirror approach to horror, exploring silly/unique concepts in shorter form. I’ve chosen the closing segment of VHS: Viral (2014) which has a reputation for being the shittiest of the anthology of films. Bonestorm follows a trio of skaters in Mexico who are set upon by a demonic cult or something.
It’s erratic, the hectic motion lacks any cohesion as the short mashes cuts between images that will never appear again, like a weird demon guy in night vision camera (who has night vision? Or is it just inexplicably green?). You can’t tell who is fighting who or who is injured. We have no idea who the characters are or their names, but maybe that’s the point, because it’s quite funny. As the demonic skeleton men descend on our dudebros, they proceed to skate around bashing their heads in. One of our dudes pulls a glock out of nowhere and starts blasting. One of them gets his arm ripped off and set on fire. But throughout, the cameras keep cutting to close-up GoPro camera angles of their faces as they take it in turns to say “what the fuck!”, like a Connor O’Malley character. Watching a guy decapitate a skeleton using a skateboard? Also a net positive in my opinion.
While the shaky, handheld low res aspect of this helps mask the underwhelming visuals and direction - as with much found footage horror - it also accentuates the comedy of this short burst of bloody blunt action. As the oddly quiet skeleton men politely get twatted by our skaters, we see Mexican police hover above in a helicopter, before promptly saying “fuck this” and flying away. The whole thing is silly, and feels more like a YouTuber horror project than something that would premiere in cinemas.
But it’s self-aware in its shitty-ness - the surviving characters lament the loss of “gas money kid” and “camera guy”, you appreciate its cheap, directionless nature is a deliberate decision that lightens the tone of the ensuing violence and death. It’s just guys hitting skeletons with skateboards and that’s pretty fun for eight minutes! There’s also some semblance of experimentation - just as Mouse (1997) had made use of low-budget special effects and animation, Bonestorm was shot during the peak of the GoPro craze - GoPro as a company went public in 2014 and was reporting record profits - and took advantage of the camera’s mounting capabilities to provide close up POV footage that freed up the hands of the characters in a logical way. The year after, POV action film Hardcore Henry (2015) was shot on GoPros mounted to the actors head.
While this GoPro era of filmmaking didn’t have a seismic impact on the industry, Bonestorm is a fun, bite-sized exploration into how GoPro horror footage feels. Unlike VHS camcorder footage, a GoPro is less specific and thus less intense or scary - it’s less about what the person chooses to point a camera at, than what the camera can naturally see. It takes in a wider perspective, it cannot be manipulated easily and it shifts focus on its own - images as a result look uglier and less stylised, less directed. If we compare it to the tighter, handheld focus in Mouse, the stylistic result is night and day. But contrasting the two approaches to handheld/DIY footage is a fun exercise and by jove, we’ve done it!
She Skin on A Ma Rink Til I
At this point, we’ve all heard of liminal spaces. You go to a swimming pool at off-peak hours, or a supermarket just before closing. You see an office space with all the lights still on at 2am. It’s liminal as fuck man! It’s totally liminal!! But what does it mean? Being in a liminal state is defined as being in a state of transition, or uncertainty. Divorce for example, is liminally coded. But what it means visually is typically a landscape that is empty, indescribable or repetitive and sometimes maze-like. Liminal spaces exist without the comfort of context and often contain noises or lights from inexplicable sources.
The most iconic of such spaces is of course, The Backrooms. Originally an image prompt on a 4chan thread about spaces that just feel ‘off’, the backrooms became a space with evolving lore and different levels, though some of these were rejected from canon by a group of Backroom experts or should I say, random people who happened to be online at the time. The Backrooms resemble empty office space, with the yellow overhead lighting and tiled ceiling panels. To be lost and forgotten in any space, let alone one that houses the capitalist horrors, triggers something in us.
But the Backrooms took on a new dimension that truly kickstarted the liminal Tik Tok craze, when YouTuber Kane Parsons (known as Kane Pixels online) produced this:
To many the definitive rendition of the Backrooms in terms of the visual aesthetic and sound design, this video released in 2022 now sits at 52 million views, sparking a series of follow-up videos from the creator. Just 16 years old when the original video was published, the production value is actually good, harnessing a late-90s fuzzy VHS aesthetic that Parsons wouldn’t have even experienced first hand given, ya know, he was born in 2006. My joints hurt just thinking about this (no offence younguns). Why does The Backrooms lean into the VHS aesthetic?
What is it about the 90s which inspires the use of liminal space? The surprise indie hit horror Skinamarink (2022) evokes a similar vibe; two children are left alone in a dark house, the only source of light an old fuzzy box television set and sparse lighting, which slowly goes off completely. One of the most iconic shots from the film, a Fisher Price toy telephone, dates the film to the 90s, as does the grainy VHS aesthetic. Liminal horror and VHS seem to go hand in hand, perhaps because VHS feels like such a corruptible format; it ages poorly, tapes can become distorted and warped, they’re susceptible to catching fire and it’s possible to lose segments of VHS tape without losing the whole thing.
Thus the format lends itself to an incomplete or unreliable narrative, distorted visuals and a fuzzy grain to the audio which can conceal dialogue (a potential source of comfort in an empty space) or emphasise unnatural sounds. The appeal is also the nostalgia factor, a warped nostalgia for childhood anxieties, nightmares about being lost in a world that doesn’t make sense, without parental supervision. Skinamarink makes you feel like a child and the TV is cracking up. You’ve wet the bed and your parents are missing. The lamp on your shelf is casting a suspicious shadow that looks like Gilgamesh.
The look and feel of VHS video conjures how people of a certain age first remember processing images. Watching Doctor Doolittle on VHS after renting it from Blockbuster, your parents running around with a camcorder filming you walking for the first time or shoving jam sandwiches into the video player (I did not do this it’s just an example. You weren’t even there anyway). It’s a nostalgic lens for how everything seemed to look at the end of the twentieth century. The obsolescence of VHS also adds to its aura, as a relic that will one day cease to exist completely. Those in the backrooms cannot be saved, those Skinamarinksters are stuck in the void, because it’s already happened. The memory of it fading, stored on devices less and less of us use, keep or even understand.
Our relationship to the ephermal, material nature of VHS tapes makes the concept of falling into these kinds of liminal spaces even scarier. While you live or die in it, it is being temporarily seen and remembered by everyone else. And one day, they’ll stop remembering at all.
Goody gumdrops! That’s the end of this letter on the VHS, the home video, the humble camcorder! When you think of home video, what springs to mind? Blair Witch? Nam June Paik? Lucy flipping Dacus? Hopefully this letter conjured up some cool images in your noggin there.
Speaking of cool images, you may have seen on the Instagram already, that we’re BACK BABY!
Rat Depot presents….Evil Dead 2
We’ll be hosting a halloween screening on October 28th in Leeds, accompanied by the launch of our first ever zine, a raffle to win another unique poster from depot designer Mia Proctor and a halloween costume competition! For more info, head to the Instagram post (above) and make sure you follow us for the most complete updates.
You can buy tickets direct from us, right here.
See you there?
Love,
Paulie xx