Video Barn has its world premiere at SXSW on 8 Mar 2025
Video Barn opens to the sound of a chainsaw and female screams. As steadicam movement takes us into and through the throwback movie rental store of the title, past tattered horror posters, gum ball machines, a notice for a missing girl and a hand-written sign that reads “freaks welcome”, we are entering a twilight zone of nostalgia, obsolescence and loss, not unlike the retro-reflexive rental emporia of Jackson Stewart’s Beyond The Gates (2016) or Cody Kennedy & Tim Rutherford’s The Last Video Store (2023).
The sounds we can hear are from the climactic sequence of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), as traumatised final girl Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) at last narrowly escapes the clutches of her deranged, chainsaw-wielding assailant (Gunnar Hansen) – but heard now, those sounds also, in a self-conscious flourish, evoke the title of Carol J. Clover’s subsequent seminal slasher study Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), suggesting that we are in the self-conscious realm of metacriticism – even as a display table in the store prominently advertises titles for the ‘female gaze’.
“Oh my god, that was fucked up,” says high-school student Hannah (Reina Hardesty), watching from behind the store’s counter. “That was sick,” responds her best friend and co-worker Jules (Grace Van Dien), adding, “ I loved it” and offering her take on the film as a pro-vegan allegory. As these two high school students while away the late hours working in an otherwise empty store, they are seeing the horror of the past with fresh, female eyes. Yet they are closer than they realise to this 50-year-old film. For just as the family of slaughtermen from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been laid off and left behind by a butchering industry itself butchered by more modern modes of automation, Hannah and Jules are working for an outmoded video store whose only customers are “forty-year-old creep[s] renting porn”, and which Hannah believes is inevitably soon to close down for good. Meanwhile, on a different level, the actress playing Hannah shares her surname, Hardesty, with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s final girl. Despite the distance of time, there is a place in these old VHSes for young post-millennial women like these to find themselves.
Working alone in the store, Jules will accidentally find that place, drawn, Videodrome-style, inside an old cassette labelled ‘Lucida’. As Hannah searches for her missing friend, she too will become mediated and absorbed into a world of Eighties artifice and bad tracking, even as Video Barn’s sole customer Rick (Andrew Bering), who really is a middle-aged male looking for old-school porn, is set to take home these two young women, or at least a video version of them, to be objects for his own appetitive, decidedly male gaze.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre famously begins with self-authenticating text and narration which claim veridicality for a story that is in fact almost entirely fiction (apart from having, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the very vaguest of links to the true crimes of Ed Gein). Directed by Bianca Poletti from a screenplay by Allison Goldfarb, Video Barn plays a similar game. For it is a polished, sophisticated look beneath the staticky surface of old-school, VHS-era home entertainment, where women are equally empowered and exploited by the images that contain them, and where unpleasant realities occasionally peak through the glossily stylised presentation. “The tape’s so good it will have you wondering: is it live or is it Lucida?”, say the familiar-looking women in the ads for Lucida VHS tapes, “I bet you can’t even tell the difference.” In this short’s different layers of fictionality and film history, the past still has a surreal hold on the present – and these two small-town Gen Z girls, who look back as much as forward, may find themselves, unlike Sally Hardesty, unable to escape the hell of specularity and superficies in which they have become trapped.
strap: Bianca Poletti’s short has two Gen X rental store attendants losing themselves in an objectifying hell of image and exploitation
© Anton Bitel
