Rewind This!
Directed by Josh Johnson
Starring Frank Henenlotter, Drew McWeeny, and Charles Band
FilmBuff
Release Date: August 27, 2013
Available on iTunes
Official Site

Videotapes once played a huge role in my life. I grew up in a family that never had much money to splurge on weekend excursions to the local cinema, except on rare occasions. Therefore, we were reliant on home video to keep us up to date on the most popular movie releases of the day. In the beginning we had to not only rent the videos, but also the VCR to play them, and a neighborhood store called Video Circus carried the early model “top loaders” that were big enough to build the pyramids of Egypt with. For years my younger siblings and I were fixated on certain movies and every time my mother offered to rent us a movie for the weekend, we were always crowing for Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol or The Princess Bride. As I got older, I started to build my own collection of films on tape; my library officially kicked off on Christmas Day 1993 when my late grandmother Betty gifted me Batman Returns, Beetlejuice, and The Rocketeer.

Once I got my first job and suddenly felt the rush of having real money in my pocket for once, I purchased more tapes and even my first VCR, which I picked up dirt cheap at a thrift store. When I was 20, I started working for a Tower Records and Video in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia and took great advantage of an amazing employee discount to build my movie collection into a literal library of cinema. Having a VCR and access to digital cable movie channels precipitated the purchase of blank video tapes that could three to four movies depending on their length and how much storage space was on each tape. Within a few years, I had more movies than I had time to watch them.

At WonderCon 2013 in Anaheim, CA, the panel for The Conjuring kicked off with a clip featuring Lili Taylor as a mom playing blindfolded hide and seek with her daughter, trying to find her just by listening to her claps, when she hears claps coming from something in the wardrobe that only the audience realizes isn’t her daughter. Later that evening, she hears the phantom claps again and she goes to investigate. The claps lead her down to her cellar. As she’s walking downstairs, the cellar door slams behind her and the lightbulb breaks, leaving her in darkness. As she turns on her flashlight, we see hands behind her in the darkness, issuing an ominous CLAP CLAP!

Director James Wan explained that the film is based on the true story of the haunting of the Perron sisters as documented by Lorraine Warren, a real-life paranormal investigator. Both Ms. Warren and sisters Cindy and Andrea Perron were on the panel.