Back in December of 2008 (almost 17 god-damned years ago!) I wrote a post on this blog, “A Very Bava Xmas”, about the 1984 holiday exploitation film Silent Night, Deadly Night. In particular, I focused on the early scene where Grandpa warns little Billy about the dangers of Santa Claus. The original YouTube video I embedded is long gone, but luckily ScreamFactoryTV has a high-quality version up for anyone interested in the real lowdown on the fat man in red.
The key to that post is a comment by Tom Woodward, who noted how visually arresting the VHS cover was back in the day:
I remember the cover of that video so clearly. Santa’s arm with the axe visible as he goes down the chimney. Strangely, my parents would never let me rent it . . .
That was 100% my experience too. The only difference is my parents were MIA most of the time, and with little oversight the Groom kids rented what we wanted — and rarely returned anything on time 🙂
Silent Night, Deadly Night movie poster.
Tom linked to the poster that features the awesome tagline: “You made it through Halloween, now try and survive Christmas.” I love that so much, and going back to that old post helped me cement the vision for this year’s Christmas diorama: a gigantic VHS tape modeled on the one below.
Silent Night, Deadly Night VHS tape
But instead of all the text calling out A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13th, I’m just going to include the “You made it through Halloween…” tagline. It’s more succinct for the Italian population here, and it playfully alludes to the horror of the season far better.
So, the plan is to make a roughly 4′ by 2.5′ tape (or whatever the scaled-up dimensions of a VHS work out to) sitting in several inches of fake snow. The walls and ceiling of the diorama will depict a snowy night scene. The tape will stand upright like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the middle section — with the roof, chimney, and Santa’s arm holding the two-headed axe — will be built out in three dimensions. Essentially, a VHS tape with some real holiday depth.
To the point of my last post, I decided on a more straightforward diorama this time around because I’ll quickly run out of time, and this should be a reasonably easy project (famous last words?). I’m giving myself until December 15th… ready, set, Ho-Ho-Go!
That’s pretty awesome. It’d make for an awesome little clay manger-like scene as well. Matthew is doing ceramics this year so maybe that’s why clay is on my mind. I keep sending him videos like this.
Crazy what people can do and wild how seeing it changes how you think about doing things. That is why I still love the internet and even instagram.
Now do we need a cottage industry of people recreating key VHS covers as clay dioramas? I think so.
CHUD has got to be on the list. That’s another one that I memorized and never rented.
That vivisection of the frog is insane. Yeah, the internet is a wealth of riches, and perhaps my waxing about art for art’s sake elsewhere misses the forest for the trees, but a cottage industry of clay vhs tapes is exactly what the doctor ordered. the only difficult piece is those people have talent, I’m bricolage over here pretending to just do the basics.
Also, you are putting a lot of pressure on Matthew with that Instagram account 🙂