VHS Visions: Hide And Go Shriek

By Brad Henderson

There is a feeling of satisfaction that many have received when dabbling in horror and falling in love with it. Hide and Go Shriek has a plot that will always give me goosebumps. As soon as you tell me there is a horror film with a group of high school or college students that goes camping, hitchhiking, to a summer camp, a sleepover, the mall, or in this case, a furniture store, I’m completely down. I honestly don’t need to know more than that and I couldn’t care less what the plot is about. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to impress us and we love these types of films.

Hide and Go Shriek is a very underseen slasher that takes place in a furniture store after it’s closed for the night. Our group of mindless teenagers decides to go into that furniture store, stay there after it is closed, and have themselves a party. . . and sex. Yeah, you might think of Chopping Mall with a plot like that and I’m sure that film was inspiration for this one, but the films are different.

I think the traditional slasher film is one of the most definitive of all different types of horror. I also think it’s nutty that some of them haven’t seen the surface since their initial release. Yes, some of them are lost because of the rights but it is still odd that they are not as popular as they should be. The list of films of this caliber could go on and on and I hope that one day someone will have the sense to release them again.

Hide and Go Shriek is one of the better unknown slashers out there. It does a variety of very cool things that I haven’t seen replicated in the countless horror films I’ve seen. It has some pretty good gore and a badass kill involving an elevator that will make you stand up and clap. The killer is also pretty creepy, wearing the clothes of the victims in order to trick the other friends. I always thought that was pretty freaking cool and original.

Hide and Go Shriek needs to be seen by every horror fan there is. It deserves a decent DVD or Blu-Ray release. There was a Dutch DVD released at some point but it’s not easy to find now and I heard the transfer wasn’t that great anyway. This is one slasher I have loved for a very long time and I always recommend it, hoping many others will get as much joy out of it as I have through the years.

Disclaimer: During these VHS Visions segments I have seen (rude) comments stating that some of these films have made it onto DVD. Well, I’m not looking into every single country to see if the films made it onto another format besides VHS. And DVRs don’t count. The majority of people who read this are not going to spend $50 on a shitty DVD from Indonesia of a cheesy horror film that they haven’t seen and that may have a crappy transfer. Trust me, I know that some of these films have been released in other countries and I will start stating that to calm these horror elitists down. Just because a film has been released in another country in a limited edition of 500 doesn’t mean that film is readily available to the people I’m trying to reach out to. If you want to state that a film has been released on DVD from another country, just put it in the comment section and let me know. You don’t have to be rude about it or act like I don’t know what I’m talking about. Be nice and hug someone.