In late 2014, when Ryan Graveface launched Terror Vision, an imprint of his Graveface label specializing in horror-movie music, he’d already secured the rights to its new release: the score for a 1988 obscurity called 555. It’s the only movie from director Wally Koz, who used Ukrainian Village as the backdrop to his no-budget slasher. (Graveface now lives in Savannah, Georgia, but he spent years in Chicago.) Koz shot the movie on video, a popular choice for aspiring horror filmmakers after the rise of camcorder technology in the 1980s. Shoestring productions like his, released directly to VHS, filled out the horror sections of the country’s rental shops.
Even this modest fuss has Rodriguez bemused. “I’m flattered that somebody would even ask me about this garbage,” he says.
- The trailer (such as it is) for 555
It certainly made an impression on Graveface, a longtime fan of shot-on-video horror movies. “Growing up, when I was starting to obsess over Video Violence and 555, I would be amazed that I could just make these—and so I did,” he says. “I made a bunch of short films at like 12, 13, 14. None of them are any good.” Graveface says he’ll never show those old movies, but the DIY directors of the films he loved—”really highly motivated weirdos that had oftentimes stupid concepts”—lit a fuse in him the way 1980s punk did in many of his peers.
“It was just as good as the soundtrack,” he says. “It was horrible!” v
