I must have read tens of thousands of back covers for video tapes at rental places during the age of the video store. I used to spend hours browsing for the right movies, and would frequently judge them by their covers, because that was the filmmakers' one big chance to get your average punter to fork out the money for an overnight hire.
And I can't remember the vast, vast majority of them, because they got deleted from the short term memory as soon as I put the tape back on the shelf, but some stuck in the mind, especially when they made you feel like a goddamn murderer.
That's what the back cover of The Killing of America did to me. The 80s documentary was in a long line of mondo films featuring raw footage of death and carnage, and for all my love of horror film gore, I didn't really want to sit and watch the real thing for entertainment purposes. I never bothered with any of the Faces of Death, and the only thing I really saw was something called Inhumanities, one that my mates insisted we get out one Friday night, and was just full of grim war footage and gross animal mutilation. (A shock cut of some penis mutilation was the big hit from that.)
So I didn't want to watch these things, but I still read the back covers of everything, and while I haven't seen a copy of The Killing of America on the shelves in decades now, I still remember it's stark notice that in the time it took me to read the blurb on the back, another American had been killed.
I was only 11 or so when I saw that and could not get my head around it, that an entire life could be snuffed out in the brief moment I was reading that back cover. I have no idea if the claim was even true, but it was enough nightmare fuel for years.
And while I know this is nothing I can't find on the internet with two minutes of searching, but that creeping horror of all those deaths, and I felt it just by looking at the back of video tape.
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