Bad Prints of Old Films

[Mr Sausage]

My copy of Night of the Living Dead, which I've had since I was about ten or so, is an old VHS tape recorded in EP mode; the white lable on the VHS itself reads "if you experience picture problems, adjust the tracking control," literally anticipating its poor quality. The picture is a bit muddy, a bit soft in places, harsh in others; it basically looks as you would expect a VHS of an old low-budget horror movie to look.

There have been a couple of really good editions of this movie on DVD, one of which I saw and whose transfer impressed me. I will never buy those editions. I cannot watch this film, my favourite horror film, and enjoy it to its full extent without my old VHS copy. Its murky, grainy quality so adds to the grittiness and the bleakness--indeed, it reduces what I now know to be visible backgrounds in some shots to inky blackness out of which the whitish zombies rhythmically lurch to horrific effect--that to watch it in any other manner seems absurd. Anyway, to rewatch the movie in the same manner as I first experienced it maintains a rare continuity between my former selves and my current self (not to mention cementing a number of reoccurring nightmares that continue to plague me).

[patrick]

I certainly agree with this, seeing Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain on a luminous-but-still-worn print a few months ago was akin to a religious experience.

I also have a weird fetish for old Mystic Fire VHS tapes, there was something about discovering Anger and Jarman through those that made the whole experience seem even more occult.

[BenCheshire]

Yeah, but it was be nice if I could actually hear the dialogue in the Universal Marx Brothers without straining. Does anyone know if the Silver Screen Collection prints are any different to the previous DVD of Duck Soup/Horse Feathers/Animal Crackers came out in 1998 originally, looked like this.