TerrorVision (198X)

From http://www.p-synd.com/tv03.jpg

Directors: John Auerbach, Terry Hamad, Jonathan Heap, Alvin Merrill, Michael Murray, Mark S. Esposito, Millard Segal

Screenplay: Jonathan Heap, Jordan Horowitz, Nathan Klein, Philip Morton, James Percelay, Ann-Marie Pieters, Paul Segal, Leo Stuchkus, Virginia Watson-Rouslin

[USA]

In terms of the Abstract, special exceptions can be made for materials that in their original context and how one approaches them are innately weirder than just the premises. They develop a magnetism wondering why they existed, who decided to make them, how it was made and originally broadcasted, and how they can just disappear until this era of the internet and amateur cultural archiving where they reappear like ghosts.

The existence of TerrorVision, which I openly admit only knowing about in 2017 when a podcast Cancelled Too Soon, about one season wonders and failed pilots, disturbed its VHS necropolis, is absolutely weird. Horror anthologies are a dime a dozen in many mediums, and I love them like many, but one for the Lifetime Channel visibly shot on VHS and on a zero-budget, where we cannot fully confirm what year it actually came out and was once gone from existence, is perplexing. Ten minutes long per episode, when TerrorVision was screened between 1985 to 1987 (in theory) is as much spectre-like as it cannot be pinned down, the kind of work that just feeds a CreepyPasta story in itself.

You get a great primer for what to expect in the first episode, The Closet Monster, by co-director of Cafe Flesh Mark S. Esposito. Unknown actors, woodenly performing in ordinary middle class suburbia, shot on video now battered and distorted by time memoriam, in which the only son claims there's a monster in his closet. I forgot, returning to this series, that even for these ten minute long episodes that they still feel long to experience, a lot of TerrorVision drama with casual (even banal) dialogue scenes until you get to the horror twist, here the father talking about using video toaster technology at work and ignoring his son's claims of a monster in his bedroom. Stylistically as crude as you can get, the title sequence for this series is a skull with hastily added eyes, the type of no budget production that, whilst ridiculous, has a strange aura to it of low res video and with unknowns having to deal with scenarios which are both lame but eerily perplexing. In this case, a domestic drama where the parents think their son is disturbed, itself a dark psychological subtext to scratch the surface of, until the twist involves a costume that you'd laugh at in a costume store but here, in your closet and bug eyed, is still weird when worn by someone.

Final Edition, of a woman being stalked in her home at night, furthers this whilst also showing how the series could've also been legitimately good, the banality of the aesthetic actually able to be creepy as the style looks like a viewer's own home rather than a set, as something's out of the corner of one's eye catches your attention behind the protagonist's back or when a voice asks her over the phone menacingly whether she got the newspaper. MAJOR SPOILER, this culminates with the episode being in an ouroboros, where she is stuck repeating the same story over and over with it leading to her death each time, something which as the story has her as a hard working employee with a history of psychological problems including hearing voices actually has more nuisance than most of TerrorVision.

The Craving has as much nuisance, i.e. the completely opposite and what you'd expect from TerrorVision. A man gets a toothache and makes the ill advised idea to go to a dentist only open after night, a fat shaming caricature that eats insane proportions of food and the crass tuba score usually used for such character is recreated with a synth. The punch line is from a children's joke book I probably had in my youth, but its part of TerrorVision's charm (in spite of the cruelness of mocking the episode's protagonist) how earnest this all is. And clearly, someone was in on the joke as, among the bleeding colours and foggy atmosphere of the dentist's corridors, a side character has a newspaper with a mocked up headline of a couple fleeing a talking bear.

The short length means that these stories never get tiresome. There's Reflections of a Murder, about a corrupt lawyer who kills his business partner only to be haunted by his ghost, or One of a Kind, where elderly owners of a sinister fashion store steal wannabe models' "souls" with a special camera to sell them themselves as merchandise, both of which emphasis the presumed origins of the show in their emphasis on drama merely filtered through horror tropes, the lo-fi aesthetics (such as the transformation of models by the camera) having their own charm.

A Cold Day in July does emphasis how, throughout, these are moments of pure lopsidedness in the production, a drama of a sleazy weasel, his angry former model wife, ill advised horse racing gambling and ridiculous amounts of beef being bought, all of which is only supernatural, let alone horror, when someone abruptly freezes to death in a shower at the end. Rosemary's Lot, about the preserved hand of a crazed killer and the tribulations of a female pathologist having to put up with a chauvinistic colleague trying to woo her, does leave the series on a high. Same stupefied tone, a hand rising out a bowl of soup, and actual gristly material including an undead monster and bloodshed onscreen, but certainly memory to the show's credit.

It is all peculiar. In another context it wouldn't be abstract, just inept but compelling. In this one though it is stranger, both in execution and how the hell the series even came to be in the first place, more so as these seven episodes are all that (presumably) exist. The fact the series just disappeared into obscurity, only for a couple of decades later to spring out again to rediscover it in the 2010s, adds to this oddness.

Abstract Spectrum: Lo-Fi/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

As curious a television programme as you could get when witnessed. All depicted with a sense of an extremely low production that at time barely acts like a horror anthology, at times shot with a haze of a homemade production, always interesting in its oddness and how it's too short per episode to ever get tiresome. TerrorVision is an acquired taste, another example, but a really great example of how much is made for television and how much of it, if dug up again, could be this idiosyncratic.

From http://www.p-synd.com/tv53.jpg