A long-time collector screens obscure finds at the inaugural Forgotten Film Fest

COMING ATTRACTIONS: (L-R) Harry Guerro, Jesse Nelson and Dan Fraga review some of the rare movies that will be shown at Sunday’s Forgotten Film Fest in Guerro’s private screening room.
Maria Pouchnikova

The fact that Harry Guerro is a collector is clear as soon as you enter his house in Mount Ephraim, N.J. The walls of his living room are lined with bookshelves crammed with horror and sci-fi paperbacks, pulp crime novels and hardbound comic book compendiums. Across the room, three pinball machines are lined up side by side, spillover from a larger collection that takes up a side chamber in his converted garage and has even invaded his wife’s home office.

But none of that is part of what Guerro and his partners in Exhumed Films casually refer to as the collection. To see it, you need to descend the stairs into Guerro’s basement and weave through a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling boxes. Examine the small, neat handwriting on each to get a clue of what’s inside: “HALLOWEEN,” reads one; “ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL,” another; stacked next to “THREE STOOGES SHORTS.” Aside from the washer and dryer across from the staircase, the basement is packed with 35 mm and 16 mm film prints collected by Guerro over the last 17 years, beginning shortly after Exhumed started screening horror-film double features at South Jersey’s Harwan Theater in 1997.

The latest addition to this treasure trove arrived late last year, when Guerro lucked into nearly 200 prints being unloaded in California. Some of the fruits of that haul will be screened this weekend at Exhumed’s first Forgotten Film Fest, featuring five films, none of which have seen official release on any format in the States. The eclectic lineup includes Patrick Swayze’s debut in the roller disco drama Skatetown U.S.A.; Hammer director Freddie Francis’ Son of Dracula, starring Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr; the U.S. release version of Blood by no-budget auteur Andy Milligan; Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things director Alan Ormsby’s first feature, the cruise-ship slasher Murder on the Emerald Seas; and the heretofore lost 1968 film The Satanist, unseen by audiences for nearly 50 years.

“Anytime you can find something like that is what’s exciting to a film collector,” Guerro says, referring to The Satanist. “It’s one thing to find your favorite film when it’s Casablanca, something everyone has seen, but it’s something else entirely to find something that no one knows. This may be the only print that was ever made, and somehow it ended up in this hellhole on the edge of the Mojave Desert.”

Every Tuesday, Guerro projects a pair of films from the collection for a small group of friends in the eight-seat screening room that takes up most of his detached garage. When I dropped by last week, he was showing Paul Morrissey’s Trash and Blood for Dracula, both released under Andy Warhol’s imprimatur. It’s a practice Guerro started when he worked weekends at the Harwan and would stay after hours, swapping out a second-run print of Runaway Bride for his latest gory find.

According to Exhumed’s Dan Fraga, Guerro’s film collection is only the latest iteration of a lifelong mania. “Before Harry’s house looked like this, his room looked like this,” Fraga says. “You’d walk into Harry’s room when we were teenagers and there’d just be a bed, and you couldn’t see the walls because of the videotapes and laser discs.”

Guerro grew up in Audubon, Pa., watching horror films with his parents, so the genre has been a major part of his life since childhood. Collecting, he says, is simply a way to delve deeper into the experience. “You start out collecting by dubbing your favorite movies off TV onto video, then start buying pre-records, then you start collecting your favorites on laser disc because they’re in wide screen or have commentaries or trailers that get you one step closer to that movie, then DVD, then the next step is prints to get that pure movie experience. It’s a way of getting closer and closer to that movie that you like.”

When Guerro joined with Fraga, Jesse Nelson and Joseph Gervasi to begin hosting screenings as Exhumed Films, they found that many of the more obscure horror films they loved weren’t available, so Guerro began searching for prints on his own. At the time, the main source was a magazine called Big Reel, which he describes as “a bunch of old guys getting together and writing about film, and then they would post want lists or sale lists for what few 16 mm films they had in their closets or under their porches or in their crawl spaces that they’ve accumulated over the years and were selling off.”

The market has since shifted to eBay and a handful of collector websites, but the community remains small and insular. “There aren’t a whole lot of film collectors out there, but they’re all looking in the same places,” Guerro says. “Steven Spielberg has people eyeing up the same places that you’re looking for titles, so you have to hope that you’re in the right place at the right time.”

One of the buyers with whom Guerro has regularly competed is Quentin Tarantino. Last year’s Exhumed screening of the director’s complete Kill Bill edit was the result of a trade that Guerro made of a rare film by director Sergio Corbucci, whose 1966 Western, Django, inspired Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Guerro’s prints have been used for DVD and Blu-ray releases, and been loaned to many of the country’s leading repertory cinemas.

With most of his wish list checked off, Guerro — like Exhumed Films itself — has moved on to more unknown fare. “I see Exhumed Films as a shark,” he says. “It’s got to keep moving and doing new stuff or it dies. I do these shows primarily for me, so I’m a little more keen on showing movies I don’t know. I’ll take the blame for it if people hate the movie.”

Forgotten Film Fest, Sun., July 20, noon, $20, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, exhumedfilms.com.