Stephen King is the in thing right now, with It smashing up the September box office, but if you're craving a really good King-related scare, you need not go all the way to your local multiplex and endure a bunch of kids rustling popcorn boxes in your ear. Instead, pick up a copy of the 1983 VHS release of Cujo by UK-based distributors Guild Home Video and immerse yourself in hands down the scariest viewing experience you're ever going to get out of a King flick - not because of the content of the film itself, of course, but because of what'll pop up on your screen right before it. Never mind a rabid St. Bernard or a shape-shifting clown demon, the Guild Home Video logo is all of your worst nightmares encapsulated in one fiendish burst of cold blue terror.
The graphics themselves are fairly tame, so the obvious nightmare factor here lies in that cheap, repetitive synth music, which sounds unpleasantly reminiscent of the kind of sonic experience you'd get when you were playing Bullfrog Productions' Theme Park and the game would crash during the ride simulations (an occurrence so freaky that it might be worth covering here in its own entry some time). The Guild Home Video copyright notice/logo has that same distinctively jammed, broken quality that makes it seem as if there is something very wrong with your VHS machine and which really underscores the threatening nature of the copyright text. And then the cruelest twist of all...just when you think the damned thing's over you have to endure an all more tortuously chaotic-sounding version which plays over the company logo. The logo itself isn't the most memorable-looking in the world, but at least the blue and pink stripes give it a relatively snazzy, colourful vibe.
Founded in 1979, Guild Home Video enjoyed a pretty healthy lifespan and were still distributing titles into the late 1990s, when a merger with Pathe finally brought an end to the brand. By then they'd adopted a much softer, gentler logo involving a director's chair, but anyone familiar with their earlier releases would never forget just what monstrosities they were capable of (and it didn't start with this one. I don't currently own any of their pre-1983 releases but it seems that the logo they used there was intent on evoking your very freakiest memories of The Exorcist).
Oh, but it's not all terror. The Guild Home Video release of Cujo does also have this at the start. Just in case you needed one last puff of happiness and rainbows before the stuff with the rabies gets underway.
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