TEEN’S LITTLE SHOP OF VIDEO HORRORS

A 19-year-old entrepreneur with a penchant for the hair-raising says he hopes to get in on the home entertainment boom by rention monster and horror films rarely available elsewhere to video enthusiasts.

Clifford Henderson offers full-length flicks featuring blood, gore and chills aplenty at his Video Monster shop, opened two weeks ago in this southern New Jersey town.

“The trend is toward high-tech special effects,” Henderson said. “That’s bringing back the classic horror movie with films like ‘An American Werewolf in London’ and ‘The Howling.’ They’re taking old themes and making films that are now 1--% more entertaining,” he said.

But there are few outlets for the video versions of the horror pictures, he said.

“At a supermarket, how many titles can they have?” said Henderson, who reads magazines with titles like Fangoria and Cinafantastique and can reel off the names, producers and directors of the most obscure chillers.

Henderson’s shop, which opened Dec. 17, also carries popular movies and features on cassette. And he said he hopes to build his business as the video market expands.

“Video stores are going to be like delicatessens,” Henderson said, “Every neighborhood is going to have one.”

After attending collage for a year, Henderson worked briefly in the real estate business before launching Video Monster.

Lining the store’s shelves is such drive-in fare as “Halloween,” “Friday the 13th,” “Night of the Living Dead” and “Humanoids From the Deep.”

Other titles are less familiar but classics still, according to Henderson. Included are “2,000 Maniacs” and “Color Me Blood Red,” two gory low-budget movies made in the 1960s by Herschell Gordon Lewis.

“In the 1930s and part of the ‘40s there were the werewolf and vampire classics, but they became burned out after the same ideas were used over and over, as in ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ and ‘Son of Dracula,’ ” Henderson said.

Horror movies focused on “radiation” during the 1950s, he said while the ‘60s and ‘70s served up only a few horror films, mainly with supernatural themes.

In 1977, when “Friday the 13th” was released, and in 1978, when “Halloween” hit theaters, Hollywood began putting out a wave of “slasher” films, Henderson said.