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Mar 10, 2021 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

I’ve been a lapsed movie-goer—we’re talking before COVID began. Going from living in a city like New York, to moving to the countryside, where the closest theater is a thirty minute drive away, really puts the brakes on the number of movies you’re going to see in a theater. Having two children under the age of five doesn’t make that any easier, either.

I don’t miss the movies so much, though, as I miss the theater experience. Finding a seat in a dim, cavernous room, and sitting through trivia and Coke ads until the trailers started. The drive-in has even better build-up to the main features: there’s nothing like advertisements for a local car wash or pizza deal to tide you over between films in a drive-in double feature.

The AGFA Horror Trailer Show does away with the movies entirely, presenting an experience that’s all about the thrill of coming attractions. Basically a feature-length visual mixtape, The AGFA Horror Trailer Show cuts together a bunch of horror trailers and food court advertisements from the American Genre Film Archive’s prodigious collection. Unlike other trailer galleries such as the classic Something Weird sampler or the Garagehouse Trailer Trauma discs, the Horror Trailer Show was edited and printed to 35mm in a way that makes one preview flow into the next in a way that mimics the curated feel of a mixtape.

The trailers range from far-out oddities from the ‘70s – including quite a few that focus more on a movie’s effects on traumatized viewers than showing actual footage of the cheeseball trash they’re hyping – to cult features like Demon Wind and more well-known films like Hobgoblins and Splatter University. In many cases, the trailers are far better than their films – often, this is the best possible way to experience some of the films spotlighted in this megamix.

What really rounds out the trailer mixtape are the vintage ads that have been cut in, for things like the unfortunately-named “Flamer”—a glow-in-the-dark football—to canned milk and the world’s least appetizing-looking grinders. Even if you’ve seen many of the trailers before, you haven’t seen these – and they really complete the experience. For someone whose childhood, pre-movie theater memories are of eating oily popcorn while England Dan and John Ford Coley songs play overtop a slide show of re-heated pizza photos, these poke a nostalgic nerve.

The Blu-ray edition from Vinegar Syndrome essentially doubles your value by including a second, full-length mixtape from AGFA called Videorage, which does the same thing as its predecessor but focuses on shot-on-video horror from the ‘80s and ‘90s, with the occasional bits of Nollywood insanity laced in. The main feature on the disc is entertaining, but this bonus film is absolutely nuts – spotlighting some of the cheapest schlock shot on videocassette. The only film on here I’d already seen was The Last Slumber Party, and there were probably half a dozen I felt encouraged to seek out afterwards. Spliced in are the occasional, horror-themed local commercial – the most memorable of which being a zombie-themed pizza ad.

Included on the disc are a bonus short called Say Goodbye to Your Brain, which similarly cuts together old trailers, but in a way that’s more like a fast-paced media collage. The main feature has a full-length commentary from AGFA staff members, which goes into how the AGFA Horror Trailer Show was compiled, but is even more fun when it runs off-course and the crew start discussing other topics, such as the smells of their local video stores when they were kids, and the video covers which haunted their nightmares. All in all, The AGFA Horror Trailer Show offers a lot of bang for your buck given its two full-length features, and if you’re friends with other horror fans, it’s the perfect sort of thing to throw during a party.

(vinegarsyndrome.com/products/the-agfa-horror-trailer-show-agfa)