Silent Night Deadly Night Diorama Progress

I spent pretty much all day at bava.studio putting together the Christmas-themed diorama featuring a 4′ high and 2.5′ foot wide wooden Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) VHS tape. I almost knocked out the whole diorama in a day. In fact, if we weren’t scheduled to decorate the tree tonight I may have completed it. That’s a testament to being a bit more practical about this diorama. I scrapped the idea of building out the actual chimney and roof and having an actual arm with an ax coming out, and I just built a big VHS tape and printed to scale. It looks pretty good, and I love the way the scan picks up all this old tape’s imperfections.

Anyway, today consisted of a run to the horrible home improvement box store Obi to get the wood, screws, and some other odds and ends. The good news is I found pre-cut pieces that match my measurements almost exactly (124 cm high by 64 cm wide) so I just grabbed them, and I had to make like three or four cuts tofay with a hand saw, so the building could not have been easier.

I attached the print-outs with thumbtacks to make sure everything works, and it is perfect.

With the VHS tape sorted, I had to figure out how to cover the background walls as simply as possible. Rommaso was like paint them, but I was like absolutely not. I am not laboring like that again. So I got some black plastic reflective material and wrapped that around the three walls and the ceiling. It took a few hours, but i did it right and it was easier than painting,

So the background was done and I also needed a little snow effect for the ground, but the options at Obi were terrible. i got some fake sheeted snow for now, and it is clean enough.

I also got some clusters of snow-like material that makes it look better, but they only had one bag left, so I might go back for another.

At this point the last thing left is to glue the print-outs onto the scaled-up wooden VHS tape. I’ll do that in the morning.

I was only going to do three sides of the tape given no one can see the back, but when it came together so perfectly this morning I said the hell with it and also screwed on a back. Tis meant I needed to get the scan I took of the back of the tape printed so it can be glued on tomorrow. No half-assing this diorama.

Oh yeah, I also picked up some red lights I am going to decorate the tape with to use the reflective nature of the plastic background and walls to get a red glowing light, but we’ll see how that works out—they may not be strong enough.

I am hoping this diorama proves to be a case of less is more because I can’t spend too much more time on it. My family is coming into town next week and I still have Christmas stuff to do. That said this diorama really felt bavatuesdays-ish. It was dirt cheap (I spent less than $100), it took no time to “publish,” and it’s a bit of a poke at the Christmas celebration with a little 80s b-movie madness. What could be more bava? —especially when this is post number 3,999. Yeah!