After a brief delay Garagehouse Pictures is finally unleashing their latest trailer compilation Trailer Trauma 3: 80s Horror-Thon onto the masses. The comp, currently available exclusively through Diabolik DVD, contains 258 trailers and is an exhaustive look at the horror genre in what most will argue was one of its best decades — the 80s. Running approximately 7.5 hours, the retrospective is presented chronologically and pulls a few choice trailers from each year giving the viewer a Cliff’s Notes of the releases for that particular year.
In anticipation of the release I spoke with Harry Guerro, the curator/owner of Garagehouse Pictures and one of the founding members of Exhumed Films. Garagehouse has quickly become a favorite of genre fans thanks not only to their Trailer Trauma series, but their efforts rescuing lost and forgotten films from obscurity, making them available to fans. It’s that eclectic mix that provoked this discussion to see just what goes into putting together one of these releases.
So what was the genesis behind starting a home video distro?
Harry Guerro: For the last 15 years or more I’ve been helping out various labels with hard-to-find prints, trailers and TV spots for masters. In 2012, I acquired a large collection of rare prints that included a number of thought-to-be lost titles. I had never thought of forming a label before this point, but I felt, as the custodian of some one-of-a-kind film prints, that it was down to me to do something for these movies if anyone was ever going to. Movies like The Satanist and Ninja Busters would never have been available otherwise.
How do you choose films to release? And given the rarity of these titles, is it hard to track down the filmmakers for permission?
HG: In this first year I’ve just been concentrating on titles I have access to that have never had any kind of release. It’s exciting to distribute films that have never gone out into the wild before, or haven’t been seen in thirty-forty years. It was a great pleasure to get the amazing poster art Stephen Romano came up with for Ninja Busters. The film only had a sales brochure made for it in 1984. It never had a trailer either, so it was great fun to think up a script for that.
Helge Bernhardt, who has been cutting all our trailers, has been doing incredible work. Working on these obscure “lost” movies gives us the latitude to get creative with how we advertise the releases. Tracking down rights holders for clearances for the films we’ve been interested in has been has been a quite a chore, but so far we’ve had some luck. Ninja Busters couldn’t have been a nicer experience; the producers were very supportive of the project and were very grateful to see the film out there finally. In fact, the people behind Ninja Busters made another film a few years later that never got anything but a regional release… we’re looking at it for 2017.
Your titles have a very film-like quality to the transfers, what are your thoughts when prepping a film for Blu-ray release, presentation-wise and deciding on what extras to include?
Film should always look like film and not as if it was shot digitally. We have no interest in trying to remove normal film grain, etc. from a transfer. We do the best we can, obviously, with the transfers. Most of what we’ve done so far has been sourced from 35mm release prints with various degrees of wear. You have more grain, and more “film look” when you transfer from a print than from a negative. A nice comparison are the scans we got of The Satanist (from a rough 35mm print) and the feature we paired it up with on the disc, Sisters In Leather, which was from an immaculate original camera negative. The reduction is grain structure is well evident.
As far as extras go, everybody loves extras, so packing as much additional content on the releases as possible is always a plus. Of course it always depends on the title you’re releasing as to what you can find… and your budget.
So you’ve released more than a few trailer compilations with Trailer Trauma 3: 80s Horror-Thon up next, what’s your approach to curating when you tackle one of those discs?
When I put together Trailer Trauma I tried to put together a smorgasbord of oddball, rare trailers that for the most part hadn’t been available before in HD. I consciously tried to avoid anything included on another set before. The idea was to put together some fun and interesting titles and introduce people to movies that they might not have previously known before.
Trailer Trauma 2: Drive-In Monsterama was inspired by a regular drive-in horror movie weekend that I regularly help my friend George Reis out on that’s held annually at the Riverside Drive-In in Vandergrift, PA. A lot of the trailers on the compilation belonged to George, and we curated it to reflect the drive-in horror movie era of the 60s and 70s, while also programming as many of the lesser known titles we had access to, and again, preferring trailers that hadn’t previously been available in HD.
Trailer Trauma 3: 80s Horror-Thon is very ambitious in scope. The idea was to present an exhaustive overview of horror released theatrically in the US. With 258 trailers, we cover most of the films released over the decade, and at almost 7.5 hours, it’s certainly an endurance test if one attempts to take it all in in one sitting. Part of the fun in doing these releases is tying the theme of the project into Stephen Romano’s artwork. In part one, we introduce the concept of these evil demons growing out of old movie trailers. Next we have the trailer creatures transmitted from the drive-in screen… in the TT3 the monsters attack attendees at horror marathon. In the next installment, evil will invade the home!
Being a collector of trailers and curating these discs I have to ask what do you think makes a good trailer and what are some of you personal favorites?
A good trailer for a movie should do what it’s supposed to do: sell the movie. It should never be boring or overlong or give too much away. They should be precise and get the tone of the movie right and leave the audience wanting more. I always prefer trailers that hardly show anything from a film, or have specific footage shot for them that doesn’t appear in the movie. How terrific is the trailer for Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive that doesn’t have any footage from the movie in it, just a camera slowly circling around a baby carriage until you see the claw, and a quiet voiceover telling you that the only thing wrong with the Davis baby is… it’s alive! So effective, and it resonates so much more than shoving everything into the trailer to the point one doesn’t need to buy a ticket to see the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS8jqKiO1RY
So do you think the art of the trailer is lost when you watch the way films are marketed nowadays?
I think the art of the trailer has been lost nowadays as much as the art of cinema has disappeared. The two go hand in hand. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about movies that offer so little. All art should engage you in some way; when you water something down so much it has no flavor, what’s the point?
Back to Trailer Trauma 3, how much thought goes into the pacing on a trailer comp and making sure the trailers flow into one another and keep the viewers attention?
I agonize over the order of the trailers more than I should. I do attempt to make some sense to the flow of the trailers however tangential it may be. I don’t want the compilations to ever feel too random.
Finally, what do we have to look forward to next from Garagehouse Pictures?
We’re working on a number of titles for 2017. After Trailer Trauma 3: 80s Horror-Thon, we will have Ralph Hirshorn’s long unavailable ghosts and gangsters oddity The Disembodied, which was shot locally in the Chestnut Hill, PA in 1960. Then we’ll be putting out Chris (STANLEY) Robinson’s proto-slasher The Intruder, which has never had any kind of release before despite having Mickey Rooney, Ted Cassidy and Yvonne DiCarlo in the cast. Robinson is in the middle of preparing his commentary for it now. Beyond that, we’re working on a half dozen other projects that we’re very excited about, but I’m not got to announce just yet. I will say that there will be a Trailer Trauma 4 for sure!