TERROR IN THE AISLES

Director Andrew J. Kuehn excerpted brief segments of terror and suspense in a wide variety of horror films and strung them together with added commentary, as well as some enacted narrative, to create a compilation of fright-inducing effects. Halloween actor Donald Pleasence and Dressed to Kill star Nancy Allen provide the commentary on topics such as "sex and terror" (Dressed to Kill, Klute, Ms .45, The Seduction, When a Stranger Calls), loathsome villains (Dracula, Frankenstein, Friday the 13th Part 2, Halloween I & II, Marathon Man, Nighthawks, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Vice Squad, Wait Until Dark, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), "natural terror" (Alligator, The Birds, The Fly, The Food of the Gods, Frogs, Jaws 1 & 2, Konga, Nightwing), the occult (An American Werewolf in London, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, Carrie, The Fog, The Fury, The Howling, Poltergeist, The Shining), cosmic terror (Alien, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and spoofs (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Hold That Ghost, The Ghost Breakers, Scared Stiff, Phantom of the Paradise, Saturday the 14th). In one segment of the anthology, legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock presents his concepts of how to create suspense in a clip from Alfred Hitchcock: Men Who Made The Movies. The advertising specifically refers to the movies that the clips are taken from as "terror films" instead of "horror films", and some of the movies used here, such as Marathon Man and Nighthawks, are not considered horror films but were included because their respective villains, Nazi war criminal Dr. Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) and global terrorist Wulfgar Reinhardt (Rutger Hauer) were considered horrifying. The most recent movie used for the 1984 release was Videodrome, which David Cronenberg brought to theatres in February 1983; the efforts of getting rights to and assembling clips was so extensive that no movies released after that were considered for usage by the documentarians.