Scroll through the deceivingly “endless” options on streaming sites — all of them at the touch of a button — and you may find it difficult to imagine that there are cinephiles out there who prefer to have it differently. They’d rather watch a low-resolution, outdated physical format. They’d rather stand up and insert a tape into a deck.
Exchange the soulless interface of a digital app for the mechanical whirs, “tracking” wheels and overall inferior image quality of seeing a movie on VHS and you enter the world of so-called tapeheads: thousands of people who religiously collect and watch movies via a precarious and mostly discontinued device from a bygone era.
“With old formats, there’s something of a haunting in them,” says Jane Schoenbrun, director of 2024’s “I Saw the TV Glow,” in which two teens at Void High School (VHS) obsess over a fantasy show that one of them records on tape for the other to watch. “We’re haunted by the memory of the low fidelity, the green of VHS and being stoned at 3 a.m. on your friend’s couch falling asleep to ‘The Mask’ in bad quality on a VHS. That’s its own particular kind of experience.”
A little over 20 years ago, on March 14, 2006, the last mass-produced VHS tape hit video stores: David Cronenberg’s crime thriller “A History of Violence.” Fittingly it came from the director of 1983’s “Videodrome,” a movie whose protagonist gets a tape inserted into his abdomen. At the moment of its commercial death, VHS was giving way to the advent of a “new flesh” for home viewing: DVD.
“It’s a minor achievement,” Cronenberg tells me on the phone from Toronto about “A History of Violence” being the last of the major VHS releases. “This might be slightly ironic but I was always a Betamax fan and I was hoping that Sony Beta would win the tape war. It was a better format.”
This year also marks 50 years since the invention and release of VHS in 1976. It’s a momentous time.
Like a zombie clawing its stiff, cold hand through the dirt of its grave, VHS refuses to die. Tapes are back in fashion for a growing number of millennials and zoomers, especially in Los Angeles, who are hitting rewind on the format’s presumed extinction.
Among these die-hard purveyors of VHS is my friend and roommate Conor Holt, 35. Originally from Roseville, Minn., he’s been collecting tapes since around 2017. His large VHS collection occupies substantial real estate in our one-bedroom East Hollywood apartment. (I turned the living room into my room.)
Currently close to 1,100 titles, Conor’s vast library of tapes stretches across half a dozen large shelves and numerous boxes around his room and elsewhere. Though chaotic, the collection is organized by Conor’s interests, with anime, Irish cinema and horror some of its most densely populated sections. It’s like a mini video store specifically curated to his taste.
When I ask Conor about the appeal of VHS to him, his answer is complex. There’s a component of preservation (some movies only exist on VHS), plenty of nostalgia (we both grew up watching Disney films on VHS), but mainly there’s a yearning for historical connection and authenticity.
“If a film came out originally on VHS in the ’80s or ’90s, it feels right to watch it on VHS because this is how someone in 1989 would’ve watched this movie,” Conor explains in our living room. “I like watching on VHS so I can feel like a time traveler.”
Through my friendship with Conor, I’ve immersed myself in the ever-growing VHS community of Los Angeles and beyond. Almost every week there are VHS swaps across the city, where collectors and vendors, who connect on social media apps like Instagram, come together to offer tapes to both seasoned and curious onlookers.
And that’s on top of several brick-and-mortal establishments in the city dedicated exclusively — or almost exclusively — to selling VHS tapes. (Yes, these places exist.) There’s Whammy! Analog Media in Echo Park, Be Kind Video in Burbank, Video Hero VHS in Chatsworth and Retro UFO in San Pedro.
If you want to see VHS projected on the big screen, programmer and horror tape vendor Matt Landsman curates screenings at Video Archives Cinema Club, a microcinema inside the Vista Theatre in Los Feliz. (Whammy! and Be Kind Video also host screenings a few times a month.)
Born out of his long-held desire to own a video store, Matthew Renoir, 41, opened Be Kind Video in late 2022. And while he also rents out DVDs and Blu-rays, what keeps his niche business profitable, he says, is VHS.
“It is just so funny to me that something so seemingly extinct or outdated could become an incredible opportunity now,” he says. “Selling tapes made it viable. The tapes were a pulse.”
Around the same time, some tapes made headlines for their value, encouraging Renoir to go full throttle.
“I read an article about Tom Wilson selling his ‘Back to the Future’ first-release sealed copy for $75,000,” Renoir recalls. “And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy.’”
Partners Rhyan Schwartz and Haleigh Le Moine’s venture in Chatsworth, Video Hero VHS, evolved from Schwartz’s obsession with collecting tapes during the pandemic. Once he’d amassed a large number of them, he decided to start selling them, first at conventions, then beginning in 2023 at a physical location.
Their space is a room inside the We Can Be Heroes Comics store. What they might lack in square footage, they make up for in how packed the shelves are with tapes. A large part of their income, however, still comes from attending events like L.A. Comic Con or Horrorcon.
“The fact that we can just go to a general fan convention for horror, anime or comics proves that VHS collecting is alive and well,” says Le Moine, who runs day-to-day operations. “Our events are wildly successful. We’re selling tons and tons of tapes.”
But why are people buying them?
“It’s the markers of age that make something very organic, analog, real and personal,” Schwartz explains about his adoration for VHS. “We’re mortal beings and to have physical media that has a mortality, that wrinkles as it ages — there’s just something very special in that. It’s almost like the difference between a perfect LED light and a campfire.”
While L.A. has become the epicenter of VHS collecting in the country, the most notable gathering for enthusiasts, VHS Fest, takes place every summer at the Mahoning Drive-in Theater in Lehighton, Pa.
Last year for its ninth edition, Conor and I took a road trip to attend the three-day event, along with my curious brother. Surrounded by open fields in a small town, VHS vendors gather in the sunlight to offer their tapes, sourced from thrift stores, estate sales or people getting rid of their collections. At night, the drive-in’s screen lights up with schlocky horror movies — all of them on projected VHS — and special guests. Most attendees camp on site for the weekend.
Now even I have some tapes of my own (the rarest one I own is probably the 1985 Cuban animated film “Vampires in Havana”). When you are a film critic who already hoards DVDs, getting infected with the VHS bug doesn’t take much of a leap. Though as filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, a major VHS collector and advocate, points out, there are plenty of physical media enthusiasts for whom the older format is a bridge too far.
While recording a video for Letterboxd showcasing the tapes from New York’s iconic Kim’s Video (where he used to work as a clerk), Perry stated a preference for watching “Scanners” on VHS over Blu-ray. The comments were vicious. “People were like, ‘No one who loves movies would say that. That’s an insane opinion to have,’” he remembers reading.
Cronenberg, who directed “Scanners,” sides with Perry’s detractors. “When it comes to VHS, I can certainly say that it has to be nostalgia,” he says, diplomatically. “It’s not what you shot as a filmmaker on the set — it’s much less quality. And therefore, people who watch your movie on VHS are not really seeing your movie.”
Perry, who we ran into at VHS Fest last year (he’s attended for several years), never forsook the format in exchange for discs. He stuck with it through the lean years. Most collectors now, including Conor, left behind VHS when DVD arrived and later came back to tapes.
During our video chat, Perry shows me part of his extensive collection. His tapes are stored by genre in dedicated cupboards with closing doors. His love of the tape experience stems from a vibe that’s a little hard to pin down.
“VHS is obviously superior if you’re looking at it in terms of your experience of the feeling that watching something evokes in you, in the relationship between yourself and the moving images,” he says. “But seeing an old beat-up 35-millimeter print is not superior to seeing a 4K either. And you don’t have to explain to somebody why the print holds great appeal for people who will sell out screenings anywhere.”
Certain movies are “VHS movies” to Perry. “Sliver,” “Indecent Proposal” and other ’90s erotic thrillers fit the bill. “Anything can be a VHS movie, so long as you can picture it in the most well-stocked store you’ve ever been in your life in 1998, before DVDs had a section,” he says.
Perry’s most recent feature, a documentary called “Videoheaven,” is a delightfully obsessive film essay about the role that video stores once played in our collective consciousness. Currently streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of its “VHS Forever” program, “Videoheaven” will also get a small-run VHS release in time for next summer’s 10th VHS Fest.
Schoenbrun’s first two features, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”and “I Saw the TV Glow,” were also released on VHS as collector’s items. These days, some distributors will put their titles out on tape if their aesthetic or the time period they evoke feels appropriate for VHS.
“I’d be more likely to want to watch one of my movies on VHS than on full-quality Blu-ray,” Schoenbrun says. “There’s something specific about the dreamlike experience of VHS, and it’s a cool way to engage with the movie.”
Horror, everyone agrees, is a fundamental part of the VHS community. Not only are horror-tape collectors some of the most zealous, but those are often the rarest and most valuable. Many were self-distributed and only made for the home video market.
Most of these rare VHS titles tend to be schlocky, low-budget efforts, the kind of movies that are so bad they become entertaining in their absurdity. There’s “Black Devil Doll from Hell” (1984) and “Tales from the QuadeaD Zone” (1987), to name a couple. “These are films that were made by amateur filmmakers with amateur crews,” Conor says, “and they only put out a few hundred copies.”
To that, Cronenberg says, “My father was a stamp collector so I certainly understand the idea of collecting a rare object. Humans are strange. What can I say?”
Even more sought after than the tapes themselves is the hardware to play them. At Burbank’s Be Kind Video, Renoir rents out VCRs for people who don’t own one and want to play a tape. Those who wish to purchase one, however, have to get in line.
“I even have a wait list for people who want a player,” Renoir says. Only a few years ago, he says, one could walk into a Goodwill and find a VCR for $10 or so. Now those machines have become scarce. “I almost never find them in any thrift stores. I wait for people to basically sell me VCRs.”
Meanwhile, the team at Video Hero has a staff member who taught himself how to repair VCRs, and now they offer that service to their customers.
“Our community could really be a lot bigger,” Perry says. “The minute you can get a $99 VCR at Urban Outfitters, as you can with a record player, then the sky’s the limit.”
For the last few years, Perry has collaborated with Canadian engineers to design a new, more compact VCR and a financial plan to make it a reality. “We could make some decks and put them in the hands of young film lovers,” he says. “They don’t want to turn their backs on 4K or streaming. They just want another option.”
These days most major music acts release their albums on cassette tapes as an ancillary if small source of revenue (including the likes of Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish). Perry believes the same could happen with VHS. Distributors like Oscilloscope Laboratories already release limited runs of some of their films on VHS.
“Collecting is fun,” he says. “Nostalgia is fun. Watching horror movies on VHS is the ultimate. But in order to figure out the next decade of the VHS revival, someone has to get in touch with me and I can tell the investor the dollar amount we need to do the first round of manufacturing.”
When I suggest he’d become the VHS messiah if he succeeds at resurrecting VCRs, Perry doesn’t miss a beat: “Nothing would please me more.”
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