Last October, Ryan Graveface was manning a booth at the Massacre, a 24-hour horror-movie marathon at the Portage Theater, hoping to sell some stock he’d brought from his collectibles shop in Savannah, Georgia. A man in his 60s walked over and began inspecting an LP copy of the score to Chopping Mall, a 1986 flick about murderous mall security robots. “He picked up the soundtrack,” says Graveface, “and was like, ‘This is a fucking abomination.’”
At his Massacre booth, Graveface got to talking with Wynorski, who complained that he’d had no say in Waxwork’s Chopping Mall release. “Him and I talked for a long, long time,” Graveface says. “He created this thing, and he has no control over it at this point.” That conversation helped inspire him to get into the business of releasing horror-movie vinyl himself, and late in 2014 he launched an imprint of Graveface called Terror Vision. He knows he’s entering a crowded niche market, but he’s confident he can stand out. “I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to go ahead and pull the trigger on doing this stuff anyway.’”
Barkan studied music production and engineering in college, so he may have an even keener appreciation for a good score than the average horror fan. “I’ve always thought that the soundtrack to a movie was an unseen additional character,” he says. “Imagine a hallway in a rustic country house. There’s doors on the left, there’s doors on the right. At the far end there’s a window, and golden light is coming through—you’ve got the sunray—and there’s little particles floating in the air. If you have a very nice, pleasant tone, at any moment you’re gonna expect some children to burst out of a room laughing and playing with toys, and you’re just gonna have a happy feeling about it. If you take that exact same shot and you put one single violin with an unrosined bow kind of screeching and squealing across a single note, you’re gonna feel like at any moment something’s gonna come out and kill you. And nothing changed except for the music.”
I recently spent nearly $100 on three LPs and a cassette at Reckless and more than $100 for four LPs and a cassette at Bric-a-Brac. I was drawn in by the gory cover art for the Death Waltz release of the score to 1981’s Absurd—a maniacally smiling man spells out the movie’s name with handfuls of his own pulled-out guts, which are embossed on the sleeve. And Mondo’s release of the score to 1990’s Maniac Cop 2 includes a track called “Maniac Cop Rap,” which I like to think would pique anyone’s interest. But both records left me with buyer’s remorse. Bric-a-Brac co-owner Nick Mayor understands the feeling. “I love ’em, I keep ordering ’em,” he says. “I feel like people have stopped buying them as much, though.”
The newest Terror Vision release, WNUF TV28 Presents Frank Stewart Investigates: Halloween, owes its existence to Graveface’s affection for the VHS format and to the thriving subculture surrounding weird, cheap horror films. The new LP works almost like a radio play—it’s an audio prequel to WNUF Halloween Special, a 2013 found-footage flick from Baltimore director Chris LaMartina. Graveface surprised himself with the intensity of his reaction to the movie. “It tapped into a nostalgic part of me that I didn’t even know I possessed—it just meant a lot to me,” he says. “I grew up in Ohio, and it just reminded me of television in Ohio so perfectly. They were so spot-on with my youth that it was just fucking wonderful. It just made me feel something that I definitely have not felt from watching a movie that was a contemporary film.” He reached out to LaMartina about releasing a WNUF record, but because the movie has no score or soundtrack, they had to get creative. “We basically came up with an idea of doing a sequel-slash-prequel to the WNUF Halloween Special as an audio-only story extension,” LaMartina says.
The record’s A side features Stewart’s spooky exposés of alleged monsters and hauntings, and on the B side the movie’s other two main characters, paranormal experts Louis and Claire Berger, conduct similar investigations and provide step-by-step instructions for a seance. The film is sometimes funny, but on the LP, LaMartina and cowriter Jimmy George crank up the humor—in the tale of the “River Hill Sheepsquatch,” for instance, Stewart peppers his monologues with corny puns (“No, I’m not pulling the wool over your eyes”). “It was a true delight to revisit characters I thought I would never be able to use again,” LaMartina says.
Fri 10/23, 7 PM The Niche Lab 3328 W. North All-ages Free
