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)

Merry Christmas! I just released another edition of the Saturday Morning Cartoon Fun Times VHS compilation. This one is overdue! The arrival of Thundercats in 1985 was the first time my love for all things Masters of the Universe was questioned. I remember the two shows playing back-to-back after school. He-Man’s economic animation did not hold a candle to this new show.

Did you collect any Thundercats stuff? My favourite toy was the full-size Sword of Omens that my godmother got me for my birthday. The cat-eye lit up with the press of a button. I only had a few of the figures, one of which was Jaga. I lent it to a friend and apparently his neighbour stole it. I did have a good collection of the mini figures, including the mini Cat’s Lair. And the Panini sticker-book was tops.

A massive six hour compilation! I’ve been sitting on a stack of Christmas tapes for some time now and put together a holiday-themed comp. It’s a mix of animation and live-action — stuff that I watched a lot as a kid.

It features A Garfield Christmas Special (1987), A Christmas Dream (1984, with Mr. T & Emmanuel Lewis, the Koopa Klaus episode of the Super Mario Bros. Show (1989), Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978), A Chipmunk’s Christmas (1981), Christmas on Division Street (1991, featuring the original commercials) and The Christmas Raccoons (1980). Plus a solid hour of holiday commercials from the 80s in between the segments!

Just released the 7th edition of my En fin de nuit VHS compilation of ‘80s and ‘90s late-nite soft-core programming.

Two things remained popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s: drive-in sex comedies and a ‘50s nostalgia revival on-set by American Graffiti (1973). Slumber Party ‘57 (1976) manages to sh-boom sh-boom them both, and a few years before Bob Clark’s Porky’s (1981) at that.

Mostly forgotten, Slumber Party ‘57 is a rather pedestrian sex-ploitative flick, where questionable cinematic decisions and a fun ‘50s soundtrack featuring The Platters and Jerry Lee Lewis keep you going. I only ever saw this run once on Bleu nuit.

There are also a slew of trailers for other period sex comedies and some really weird late-night commercials.

This was digitized from my Selectavision disc, an analog video technology developed by RCA that failed spectacularly but I find charming. It technically looked better than VHS but the wear-and-tear on the cartridges means there are some glitchy moments in the presentation.

Just put the finishing touches on a new En Fin de Nuit mixtape. This one deviates from the usual recreating-a-late-nite-softcore-porn broadcast and is instead inspired by that night as a teen when the hardcore porn channel was mistakenly un-scrambled. The tape features three hardcore films, one from the ‘70s, ‘80, and the one I recorded that fateful night in 1999.

But this wasn’t a brand new BASF videocassette thrown into the VCR — you’d be right to assume other stuff had already been recorded on this tape, so the features are haunted by the analog ghosts of newscasts, talk shows, ‘80s music videos, resulting in a unique document of… well, tapes that existed in many homes during that era, usually hidden under a floorboard, a mattress, or in my case, a Star Trek board game box.

The ‘70s and ‘80s films feature some legendary performers but are mainly fascinating because of the music mimicking some big hits… and in the case of American Pie (1980), I’m pretty sure licensing wasn’t acquired in certain cases. The third film, The Lover Girls (1985), doesn’t hide its imitations/homages/copyright-circumventing of “We Got the Beat”, “Into the Groove”, “Boys of Summer”, among numerous others popular ‘80s songs.

I had two volumes of my late-nite compilation series En fin de nuit in the can for some time and just uploaded it today. One is an ode to Laura Gemser and the Emmanuelle/Emanuelle films of the ‘70s and ‘80s, although this particular film is an unofficial entry into the various series.