Why Grindhouse Matters:

Because I was born during the mid-seventies in the Mid West, I never had any first hand experience with the grindhouse phenomenon. You know, those pervy theaters that showed low-budget movies designed to shock and titillate the metropolitan underbelly? Of course, here in the fly-over states we had to catch those films as they rolled through our drive-ins, but even though there might have been a little more privacy in the cockpit of your Ford Maverick, the experience was essentially the same. By the time I was aware of the world around me, video tape had toppled the once mighty world of independent shock cinema and the theaters that had once given these misfit films refuge had almost unanimously made the (more profitable) switch to hardcore pornography.

Flash forward to... oh, I dunno... 1983. It's still the early days for video, and movie companies are in the middle of a particularly rewarding game of catch-up. After quickly rolling out cassettes for the most popular titles from their back catalogues, all they had to do is sit back and count the money coming in from films which had previously been degrading on a dusty shelf. A few enterprising scallywags outside of the movie mainstream saw the money making potential in the new home video market and began to release some of the forgotten films from the grindhouse heyday. To compete with the majors, these video outlaws adapted many of the same tactics used by the pioneers of exploitation cinema to market their outrageous videos. They often used those oversized vhs boxes (usually reserved for adult films) to maximize the impact of their shocking box art.

My first video store experience was at a shady little appliance store in Muncie called, Loker's. I was quite young at the time, but looking back, I kinda remember it as a predatory rent-to-own type of place that specialized in leasing things to people who couldn't afford them. It just so happened that they also had a ramshackle section of videos for rent, displayed on shelves cobbled from two by fours. It was in their horror section that I had my first contact with films such as Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs. I didn't rent them, mind you. But I was always infatuated with the artwork on the box covers. The image of an underwear clad Astrid Olson staring blankly with her bloody mouth agape stuck in my seven-year-old craw and eventually led me to seek out these and other classic "video nasties."

If it had not been for these early exploitation features, originally shown in the grindhouse theaters or drive-ins and later stocked in the shadiest of shady video stores, I most likely would have never taken an interest in film and storytelling in general. What started out as a quest to seek out the most shocking and over-the-top films imaginable, eventually blossomed into a sincere reverence for great filmmaking. Sure, as a kid I loved many of the same movies that other children of the 80s were crazy about, but these movies were primal storytelling. Spielberg and Lucas? Sure they were great, but H.G. Lewis... George Romero... Lucio Fulci these were the workhorse auteurs I adored. These are the men that infected me with the movie virus. I can only hope that, if nothing else, Grindhouse the film might introduce these sorely overlooked geniuses to a wider audience than they already enjoy.