Before I was neck deep in action cinema, I was a horror fan. It was the first real genre my mum introduced me too when I was young – via A Nightmare on Elm Street, no less.
I found the slasher sub-genre to be particularly appealing. Probably because of its simplicity. Cheese, boobs and gore apparently go a long way with me. I’ve gotten through many slashers over the years – from classics like Halloween to lesser-known Japanese films like Evil Dead Trap. So my eyes lit up when I was sent a screener for Terror Vision’s upcoming 4K remaster of the little-known horror gem, Hide and Go Shriek.
Hide and Go Shriek is as formulaic as they come, really. Eight teenagers spend the night in a furniture store with the aim of getting drunk and canoodling with the opposite sex. But someone else is in the furniture store, and he’s stalking and murdering the teens one by one. If you told me it sounds like Scott Spiegel’s superb Intruder, only with a furniture store instead of a supermarket, you’d be absolutely right. Hide and Go Shriek isn’t exactly uncharted territory.
So it’s generic cheese? Well, yes and no. It’s a veritable avalanche of cheese featuring humdinger lines like “jerk head” and “slime bag.” It’s silly as heck, but also a ton of fun. The characters are essentially wafer-thin cannon fodder. Just the way it shout be. What makes Hide and Go Shriek stand out is that it takes its time. It’s both a daft slasher and a slow-build American Giallo film (yes, I know that’s an oxymoron. Giallo films can’t be Giallo if they’re not Italian).
Director, Skip Schoolnik (really, bro?), chooses to pace the film very deliberately. We spend time with the characters and while the time we spend doesn’t add much substance to the plot, it’s not wasted time. The teens are goofy. They drink beer and awkwardly fondle each other. There’s something very endearing about it all. I found myself both laughing at the cheesiness of it all and laughing with the characters. When watching Hide and Go Shriek, I was very happy to be there. I was immersed. I mean, as much as one can be immersed in a 1988 slasher.
When the kill scenes rolled around, I was expecting lashings of the red stuff but, once again, Hide and Go Shriek surprised me. Schoolnik believes in a light touch when it comes to the gore. There is blood. Quite a bit of it. But don’t go expecting the shocking brutality of a High Tension or even the exaggerated camp of a Friday the 13th. The violence is downplayed, often masked in darkness or shot so the nastier stuff is off screen. It’s subtle, which I didn’t expect. The Terror Vision release is the uncut version (which hasn’t seen a release since the VHS and Laserdisc era) so there are a few grisly moments (a late elevator-based decapitation is a fun addition). But if you’re looking for a gore-fest, this isn’t the film for you. This is far from mature film making, but the film does have nuance.
Like many slasher and Giallo films, Hide and Go Shriek is also a “whodunnit?” The killer isn’t unveiled until the final act of the film and, also like many slasher and Giallo films, the reveal is positively psychopathic. In a delightfully eighties way, of course.
I feel like many slashers of that era swung for the fences. They wanted to give audiences something they hadn’t seen before. While Hide and Go Shriek doesn’t quite accomplish “freshness” with its killer, it’s so zany that you can’t help but sit back and enjoy the ride. By the final scene I was tittering to myself in bewildered glee.
And that’s the film’s special sauce. It genuinely feels as though Schoolnik wanted his audience to have fun. It’s unabashedly free-spirited – for example, the archetypical “virgin” character goes from awkward wallflower to silk-tongued Casanova in mere minutes. The cliches are all here, too. The gratuitous nudity, the red herrings, the weirdo outcast no one trusts, the 80’s fashion, etc. The best way I can describe it, is by saying Hide and Go Shriek feels like a very “complete” film. It achieves everything it sets out to do and one of those achievements is to simply entertain.
Did I mention one of the leads is Sean Kanan aka Mike Barnes from The Karate Kid III and Cobra Kai? Hide and go Shriek was his first film.
As genre fans, we often dig until we can dig no more. We uncover all the obscure gems and exhaust our resources. That’s why it’s good to know that companies like Terror Vision are still finding, remastering, and releasing long forgotten about films like this. Just when we think we have no more land left to conquer, they come along and release what should be a well-established cult classic.
I, for one, hope Hide and Go Shriek finds its audience on Blu-ray. It truly deserves to be seen and cherished. It’s one of the more unique 80’s slashers I’ve seen and one I’ll definitely be picking up, myself.
Hide and Go Shriek will be available on Blu-ray and 4K UHD in October from Terror Vision and recently screened at the twentieth edition of Fantastic Fest.
