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The Fly-Thing Double Creature Feature

From $34.46
The Fly-Thing Double Creature Feature poster art

Two for the price of one, and the second one starts whether you're ready or not.

This is how it was done. You rented the first. You rented the second because the sticker said both back by Tuesday. And you sat through four hours in the blue light of a set that was too small, on the floor, with a bowl of something, and school in the morning.

The creature does not improve between tapes. It gets bigger, the print gets worse, and somewhere in the second feature the tracking goes and the colour turns pink and you can hear the tape itself beginning to give up.

You watched anyway. Of course you watched anyway. You'd already paid for Tuesday.

The Fly-Thing Double Creature Feature t-shirt
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SKU 31449816

From The Morgue

The double bill was a Depression measure. With attendance collapsing after 1929, exhibitors began offering two features for a single admission, and by the middle of the 1930s roughly half of American theatres were running them. The second picture had to cost less than it brought in, which created a whole class of production — cheaper, shorter, built to fill a slot rather than headline one. Horror and science fiction lived in that slot for decades. The format did not merely show those films; it is the reason a great many of them were made at all.

The arrangement outlived the theatres and moved onto a shelf.

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