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Shot-on-video (SOV) movies didn't get much attention from most movie outlets back in 2000, so I wanted to cover them alongside big Hollywood movies and arthouse fare, giving them the respect and exposure that they rarely received outside of a few ultra-niche sites, zines, and Yahoo! Groups (remember those?). Flash forward 13 or 20 years and SOV cinema is being paid homage to in well-received movies like Chris LaMartina's WNUF Halloween Special and covered in books like Analog Nightmares, Bleeding Skull!, Aesthetic Deviations, and Hand-Held Hell. Select '80s and '90s SOV titles are even being reissued on Blu-ray courtesy of Makeflix, SRS, Terror Vision, and Vinegar Syndrome partner labels like Saturn's Core and AGFA, delighting old fans and gaining new ones.
Flipside got in at the tail end of the SOV era, as standard-definition digital video had all but replaced analog formats for micro-budget indie filmmakers and high-definition video was just around the corner. But we still reviewed many '90s analog horror favorites like Tim Ritter's Creep, J.R. Bookwalter's Ozone, Eric Stanze's Savage Harvest, Ron Bonk's The Vicious Sweet, and Todd Sheets' Zombie Bloodbath trilogy. On the digital-video side, we covered Matthew Jason Walsh's brilliant black comedy Bloodletting, Brad Osborne's excellent neo-noir Hall of Mirrors, Sal Ciavarello's super-scary chiller Hardcore Poisoned Eyes, and a few erotic spoofs from Seduction Cinema (The Erotic Witch Project). Horror dominated the SOV market, but it wasn't the only genre going.
This list highlights micro-budget indies made outside the Hollywood system, usually intended for the direct-to-video market. That means you won't find any multi-million-dollar early/mid-2000s experiments with SD digital video like Spike Lee's Bamboozled, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, or David Lynch's Inland Empire. You won't even find low-budget shot-on-DV pseudo-indies like Open Water. These are SOV movies from the fringes.
--Michael Scrutchin (editor), 04.08.2022
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