The VHS Cover That Haunted Me: Sorcerer
There are countless horror covers I could name. VHS shelves were full of faces, monsters, knives, and impossibly muscled men holding even more impossible weaponry. Promises the movie would never deliver. But the cover I distinctly remember being haunted by was William Friedkin'sSorcerer.
I did not know what the movie was actually about. I only knew that truck. It looked gnarly, wet, and alive, like it had dragged itself out of someplace where machines were not supposed to survive. Even the title made the whole thing harder to understand. What did a truck like that have to do with a sorcerer?
The answer was nothing I would have guessed from the shelf. The film follows four desperate men transporting dangerously unstable nitroglycerin through the jungle. The truck is not a supernatural monster, but Friedkin makes the journey feel hostile enough that it might as well be alive.
I carried that cover around in my head before I understood the story inside it. When I finally found out what Sorcerer was, it was not the movie I had imagined. It was stranger, more human, and more tense than the title or artwork could explain.
That is what a great VHS cover can do. It does not have to summarize the movie. Sometimes it only has to plant an image in your mind and wait there until you are ready to discover what it means.