By ROB FREESE
Although movies made to premiere in home theaters rather than the cineplex are commonplace in the world of streaming, 40 years ago, it was an innovative concept. Back then, movies were made to be seen in a theater. (Most people were suspicious if a flick didn’t at least play as part of a double feature at the drive-in.)
In 1985, more than 15,000 mom-and-pop video stores dotted the landscape of North America. (That does not include all the convenience stores, supermarkets, comic book emporia and head shops that also rented tapes.) Blockbuster Video and Movie Gallery opened their first stores. Most households had a VCR, with millions sold each year. Home video was no longer in its infancy. It was rocketing toward adolescence.
A theatrical release was still vital to a film’s success. Many video distributors required a movie to play in a theater, even if it was limited to one weekend on a handful of screens, before they picked it up for video. Home video created an instant and insatiable demand for more films – not necessarily blockbusters or films with recognizable casts or based on bestselling books, just more films. Film catalogues thought to be played out were suddenly new again, and a new generation of cinephiles discovered American International Pictures, New World Pictures, Dimension Pictures Incorporated, Crown International, Independent-International Pictures, Hammer and more via Betamax and VHS cassettes.
Horror benefited greatly from home video, and the horror section in many neighborhood video stores was usually the most well-stocked. Older fans have fond memories of visiting the video store on Friday night and perusing the horror aisles, basking in the glow of those glorious video boxes, each screaming for attention.
The combination of home video’s success and horror’s popularity initiated an idea to bypass theatrical and broadcast television and distribute genre films directly to the home video market.
Not long after Francis Ford Coppola filmed his adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Rumble Fish in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma, Bill Blair approached Christopher and Linda Lewis with a script titled The Sorority House Murders and $25,000 to make a movie. They felt they could put it together, then had the idea to shoot the picture on video, since soap operas were videotaped, and they could cut down on the equipment needed.
Gifted two Betacam camcorders and editing equipment from Sony, which were betting on the future of home video, Christopher and Linda brought a bit of Hollywood to Tulsa and filmed their first feature, BLOOD CULT.
BLOOD CULT tells the simple story of a creeper chopping and dismembering limbs from nubile college coeds to be assembled into a body for a cult sacrifice.
Running a bit over budget, BLOOD CULT was completed for $27,000. United Home Video then spent $120,000 promoting the film as the first movie made exclusively for home video.
This is not to say it was the first movie shot on video. It wasn’t. Most will quickly point to 1982’s Boarding House as the first SOV feature. Before that, AIP experimented with shooting on videotape for the 1977 comedy Record City. The difference is that both those earlier efforts were made for theatrical distribution, despite being shot on video. BLOOD CULT was shot to exclusively premiere on home video with no intention of a theatrical run.
It should also be noted that David A. Prior’s SOV Sledgehammer beat BLOOD CULT to the direct-to-video punch by a couple of years. Prior’s film was distributed directly to home video in July of 1983. The difference between the two films lies in how they were marketed.
Sledgehammer did not have a marketing campaign promoting it as being produced exclusively for home video. Further, by 1985, the video boom was exploding, and the increased demand for films created the perfect opportunity for any movie to take advantage of such exclusivity.
The gamble on the straight-to-video market paid off. United Home Video sold $450,000 in orders the first day it was available in May of 1985, reaching over a million dollars in sales within a couple of weeks. Whatever artistic merit it had (or lacked), the film proved there was a demand for smaller films shot specifically for direct videocassette release.
Encouraged by the success of BLOOD CULT, the Lewises set out on their second SOV slasher adventure, this time with a budget of $75,000 and a horror star that ensured its success.
THE RIPPER followed, telling the story of a reincarnated Jack the Ripper tugging the guts out of coeds on a college campus in Tulsa. Promoting make-up effects master Tom Savini as the star, it arrived in video stores in November 1985.
Although structured like the popular slasher whodunits of the decade, once the killer is unmasked, Savini is only on screen for the film’s final moments, which caused many fans to cry foul. Word spread quickly that the film was a dud. Regardless, most fans still watched it. Love it or hate it, the flick delivered on the slasher antics, and Savini was the best actor in the cast.
It made a mint.
Christopher and Linda Lewis closed out their video horror trilogy with REVENGE, a sequel to BLOOD CULT. It hit video store shelves in March 1986. A $150,000 budget allowed them to hire stars Patrick Wayne and David Carradine as well as shoot on 16mm. More ritualistic cult killings plague the Tulsa area, with more elaborate gore and monster effects.
For less than a million dollars, three films were made and distributed to video stores to great success in a relatively short time. Unfortunately, today’s “blockbuster-or-bust” mentality is not impressed with those numbers. Consider this: If you spent $147,000 on a project and it earned over a million bucks within the first few weeks of its release, you’d be having a pretty nice day, right?
Also, consider these movies thrived in video stores all over the country, continuing to generate revenue for years after their initial releases. They are certainly not “high art,” but they were never meant to be. They paved the way for other filmmakers to pick up a video camera and make their own films.
The Tulsa area continued delivering such home-grown horror and science-fiction epics like Mark Mason’s slasher Party Crasher: My Bloody Birthday and Larry Thomas’s gory alien invasion flick Mutilations. (SOV features continued maturing and enjoy a devoted following today of fans who appreciate the unique aesthetics of films shot on videotape.)
Companies like AIP Home Video, Alternative Cinema and Full Moon Features built catalogs of movies released directly to home video, based on the example of these films. Today, because of streaming, movies with $3-million budgets and huge stars are made to be watched at home, proving that wherever independent producers find success, the studios follow. With video stores all but gone, and physical media an echo of what it once was, fans should understand the history of these flicks and their legacy in horror cinema.
As for the films themselves, Degausser Video released both BLOOD CULT and THE RIPPER on VHS and Blu-ray, and REVENGE is included in Vinegar Syndrome’s Home-Grown Horrors Volume 3.
For more about Christopher and Linda Lewis and the Tulsa film scene, I highly recommend the 2024 documentary TULSA TERRORS (streaming exclusively on VCI Classics). Co-written by producer and former Fangoria contributor John Wooley and directed by Bryan Crain, it delves into the era with copious interviews from the people who made the films. It answers the “whys” and “hows” most fans have regarding these films and depicts a world 40 years in the past, when a group of people could grab a camcorder and produce a horror movie about cultists chopping up coeds.
