Collecting horror and exploitation films on the VHS format has become a huge deal in the past five years with several Facebook collector groups popping up, newsworthy lists of tapes that fetch hundreds of dollars on the open-market, and the excellent documentary film Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story Of The VHS Collector covering the obsession.

Graphic artist and collector Bobais B Borris has been making waves in the VHS collector community recently with his fan-art mash-ups of classic classic VHS box art and reimaginings of modern film art, had they been released in the VHS era.
 

 
Borris has created a series of, in his words, “silly mockups” of the most notorious films in the world—had they been released in the VHS era by Disney. There’s just something hilariously unsettling about seeing the Disney logo above Cannibal Holocaust or Pink Flamingos.

Borris runs Afraid of the Basement, which is a fanzine, website, and video label. The fanzine covers “dark and freak culture,” highlighting subjects like goth and deathrock music, occultism, history, extreme film, and esoteric art.

Borris started AOTB Video about two years ago, beginning with making custom VHS covers for modern horror films like The Babadook, The Conjuring, Curse of Chucky, Noroi: The Curse, and other films that he wanted for his own VHS collection. He found a market in that and it began to take off. Borris started licensing actual films about a year ago, mostly concentrating on obscure live music and documentaries. As of this article he’s licensed about seventeen official releases, as well as over 100 custom fan art mock-ups including Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Deadpool among various others. His most popular fan art releases, however, have been the series of faux Disney films that have found their way all across the Internet.

Borris’ art is available on his Instagram page, @afraidofthebasement, while his official licensed releases are available for purchase along with his custom poster designs on the website www.afraidofthebasement.com.
 

 

 
Plenty more after the jump…

 
Despite its Jason Pierce score and Werner Herzog subplot, Mister Lonely, Harmony Korine‘s feature film from ‘07 left me bored and disappointed.  Its opening moments had a sense of poetry and provocation (see here), but all that was quickly squandered as Korine, striving to broaden his film’s appeal I’m guessing, attempted the distinctly non-Gummo feat of “establishing his characters.”

Korine’s new film, Trash Humpers, premiered this week in Toronto and, fortunately, it looks like he’s left very far behind him the burdens of character development.  The trailer follows below, but I’m finding even more intriguing this Variety review which opens thusly:

Pity the festival-going fool who stumbles unawares into Harmony Korine’s patently abrasive, deliberately cruddy-looking mock-documentary “Trash Humpers.”  All others—that is, those familiar with Korine’s anti-bourgeois oeuvre and know what they’re in for—will have a glorious time.

Named for a band of cretinous vandals in old-folks masks who favor gyrating against garbage cans (and worse), “Trash Humpers” is a pre-fab underground manifesto to rank beside John Waters’ legendarily crass “Pink Flamingos.”  Theatrical distribution is virtually inconceivable—though, in part for this reason, any fest devoted to maintaining its rep among cult-film completists will simply beg for it.

 
In Daily Variety: Trash Humpers

Trash Humpers @ The Toronto Film Festival