Shudder's Castle Freak Remake Coming to VHS

Witter Entertainment will release a super-limited print run of Castle Freak on VHS. Based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Outsider," Castle Freak is a reimagining of the 1995 Full Moon Entertainment cult classic from Reanimator director Stuart Gordon. The remake, which debuted exclusively on Shudder in 2020, from director Tate Steinsiek, best known as a special effects artist on Law & Order and The Amazing Spider-Man. While the movie, which was originally released through Shudder as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic cutting short a planned film festival run, has found a physical release on DVD and Blu-ray since, a VHS release -- even one as limited as the 100 copies that Witter Entertainment's Broke Horror Fan label will be releasing -- is especially sweet for Castle Freak since, like virtually every Full Moon movie ever made, it debuted on home video...and in 1995, that meant VHS.

Broke Horror Fan is releasing 100 copies of Castle Freak on limited edition, fully functional VHS tapes. The cassette will come packaged with a letter and introduction by Steinsiek (a callback to something the Full Moon did on many of its tapes in the '80s), and there will be two different versions.

The standard edition of the VHS tape (limited to 75 copies) will feature all-new artwork by director Tate Steinsiek, and a variant edition (limited to 25 copies) will feature artwork from Stockholm Designs. While it is not uncommon for superfans to create functional VHS tapes as a passion project and sell what is technically a bootleg of the movie, but presented as a transformative work because of the VHS trappings they add, Castle Freak is officially licensed from RLJE Films.

You can try and snag one of the VHS tapes when they go on sale tomorrow, May 14, at this link. You can check out the official synopsis for the Castle Freak reimagining below, and check the movie out on AMC or Shudder -- or rent it on virtually any streaming video on demand platform -- if you're curious to see how it came out.

After she's permanently blinded in a tragic car accident, Rebecca's receives some bizarre news: her long-lost-mother has recently passed away, leaving her their family's ancestral castle. Traveling to the estate with a group of friends, Rebecca hopes it will be an opportunity for her to reconnect with a past she never knew—and a mother who seemingly left her behind. When strange and unexplained things start happening and her friends begin to die, Rebecca must unravel her family's mysterious history before she too falls prey to the Castle Freak.