Gremlins Online!

Growing up, I had a video store about 3 blocks away from my house named Nord Video. This was essentially my home away from home, and it captured my imagination something fierce, especially when it came to horror movies.

I loved browsing the movies at Nord video, it was your typical 80’s video rental store, with awesome standees and posters all over the slightly too-small space and floor-to-ceiling shelves of movies.

Usually you would find me there browsing the video games or renting the My Pet Monster VHS Movie for the 27th time, but while my mom was looking for something to watch I would peek around the corner and see the horror section. I say peek because the covers absolutely terrified me as a child. Something about how they didn’t really tell you much but seemed to hide a terrifying experience that I imagined would be a million times worse than what it was.

When thinking of movies that triggered that fear response for this article I realized this batch is exclusively movies from 1986.
’86 seems to be my year. As much as I love 1984 thanks to Gremlins and Ghostbusters, 1986 is a huge year for me in movies; Trick Or Treat (featuring Sammi Curr, Rock’s Chosen Warrior), My Pet Monster, Little Shop Of Horrors, The Fly, Maximum Overdrive, Invaders From Mars, Rawhead Rex and so many more.

1. Critters

Right off the bat, we have Critters. This cover confused and scared me because of the Krite grinning right at me, but yet it seemed reminiscent of a Gremlin. Like some sort of distant cousin. The back of the video was just as confusing, since it didn’t actually have shots of the creatures, but random pictures of the main cast. The shot of April Brown being attacked by the giant Krite’s arm always seemed to be a snake-type creature to me. It still looks odd to this day.

2. Chopping Mall

I remember this cover vividly being more unsettling than anything else to young me. I was drawn to this because I could not get my head around the image for the life of me. I was a teenager before I actually saw the movie and then realized it was a bag of body parts, instead of some weird bug-eyed troll creature with feet-like hands and unusual ear placement. Yeah, I was a weird kid. This is still one of my favorite movies of all time, I can only imagine how much I would have loved it as a kid if I could have gotten over the cover.

3. Troll

So here we have Troll. This was the big one that kept me from going all the way down the horror aisle. I would watch this cover from the corner of my eye, then when I got within a few feet, I would run around and go to the other side. I would not cross Torok’s gaze. Again it goes back to the stare, similar to the Critters cover, it just seems to follow you, even if you hide behind the Mickey Mouse standee on the end by the kids zone! To be fair the tagline just enhanced the terror as it beckons the potential viewer to “Come Closer”. Nope big ol’ nope there.

4. House

Again the tagline did wonders for my young brain, much more effective than the movie was itself at being scary. Like there is no comparison for the cover vs the actual film. There is no hint that the film is a weird horror-comedy (the original one I saw as a kid didn’t have the review on the cover) but instead a movie about disembodied zombie bionic hands coming to kill people after ringing their doorbells.
Seriously I had no clue what to expect, and the funny thing is when I finally saw the film around the age of 12? maybe 13? I discovered that I had seen parts of it on TV or at a family member’s house, I just never knew that it was this film.

Thanks for joining me in this journey of nostalgia and video cover related fear. I am going to go curl up under some covers and ignore the fact I just stared Torok the Troll in the face for nearly 10 minutes straight.