Last night I watched Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge for the first time in many years. But I didn’t watch a good copy of it. Instead I torrented a dirty VHS rip. And this clearly wasn’t just a transfer from the commercial home video release, but rather a rip from a second or third generation VHS copy. Like a copy made from a tape where someone decades ago recorded the movie, maybe even from TV, at SLP onto a tape that probably had two other movies on it, and then maybe someone else copied that tape. It looked like complete shit and, my friends, I couldn’t have been happier. The fuzziness of the image, the tracking lines, the weird visual noise, the washed out colors and indecipherable special effects sent me deep into a warm nostalgia about what it was like to watch tapes when I was a kid. I sat there thinking, “Actually this is how we were intended to see dirty slasher flicks all along.”

And it kept me just a bit tantalized by what I couldn’t see quite well enough. Like the supreme hotness of Mark Patton as Jessie that I had to enhance in my imagination because he was just a bit too blurry in this version. Or the effect where Freddy exposes his brain right after he sexily menaces sweaty Jessie with his blade hand and says “You have the body and I have the brains!” He peels some skin away from his head, but you really can’t even fucking see it in this transfer that I watched. But I didn’t mind. I just felt cozy. Here’s some pics that I took with my phone while the movie played.