Be kind and rewind: Inside the growing cult of VHS survivalists

There was no hierarchy in the video rental shop. Hulk Hogan’s Christmas baby-sitting comedy Santa with Muscles (1996) could sit alongside the original, terrifying Ring (1998); Michael Mann’s obscure horror The Keep (1983) might share shelf space with Ken Loach’s Kes (1969). Video shops bred a canon-less cinephilia for those of us who frequented them, and a rabid sense of community that no algorithm could ever replicate. Despite the VHS being obsolete since 2006 – when David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence became the final movie to be released in such a format – nostalgia, collector’s fetishism and video shop mythologising have combined to create a cultural reappraisal of what they once offered us.

In what was perhaps the worst business decision of the last 20 years, the defunct rental shop juggernaut Blockbuster turned down an offer to buy a little company called Netflix – then a mail-order DVD service that would post the films to its customers – in 2000, turning its noses up at a $20m sale offer. Fast forward two decades and it is Netflix itself that so often triggers nostalgia for VHS. To promote its 2021 teen slasher trilogy Fear Street, the company launched video shop pop-ups in London, Brighton and Newcastle. The most recent season of Stranger Things featured characters working at a shop called Family Video, and this week it’s launched Blockbuster, a fairly inert workplace comedy about the last remaining Blockbuster shop in existence. It’s all a bit ironic, given that the streaming behemoth shifted the culture of movie-watching from rental to streaming, helping push rental shops out of business entirely. Well, almost.

Today, many still remain dedicated to the VHS format and preserving the sense of wonder that video shops embodied. Andy Johnson is the owner of VideOdyssey, billed as the UK’s only video rental shop. He started off working in a video shop himself, and kept a hold of ex-rental tapes and original wall displays once the industry began to fold. VideOdyssey was set up in 2018 just outside of Toxteth, Liverpool, in a corner of a media studio, and has now grown into something of a cultural mecca for fans of the format. “I didn’t think it would become its own standalone thing,” Johnson tells me. “It’s actually more successful than the studio now. We get visitors from all over the world and 200-300 tapes donated a week. I’m enraptured because I’m always finding films that I’ve never heard of.” Johnson is genuinely passionate about the format, seeing VHS as akin to a first edition of a film. “If you look after the tape, it’s the most robust format. You can drop a VHS down a flight of stairs and it’ll still play.”

Every time a scene in a popular show or movie takes place in a video shop, VideOdyssey gets an influx of customers and emails, even if it’s just from people expressing admiration for their mission. “Stranger Things definitely had an impact on visitors of a certain age,” he explains. “Before that, it was mostly a lot of middle-aged men talking to me about tape mould. It puts the video culture back in people’s minds and that’s had a massive impact on us.”

Perhaps the most famed former video shop employee is Quentin Tarantino, writer, director, author and newfound podcaster. His podcast Video Archives is named after the Manhattan Beach, California, video store where he used to work as an aspiring filmmaker – with fellow future filmmaker Roger Avary – and aims to recreate the atmosphere of the defunct shop. When Video Archives went out of business in 1995 – a year after he struck big with Pulp Fiction – Tarantino bought the store’s entire tape collection, with Avary buying the laserdiscs. These all now live in a room that “looks like an obsessive shrine to Video Archives”, he explains in the show. In each episode of the podcast, Tarantino and Avary pick three movies from the (literal) shelves of the Video Archives and discuss. The first two films usually work as a double bill, with the third being an obscurity – the kind of movie that “when you found it at the video store you had no f***ing idea what it is”.

Knowing that Tarantino and Avary are revisiting these films from actual ex-rental tapes is part of its appeal, or the “fetishism of tactile objects”, as Avary calls it. Jed Shepherd, the screenwriter behind Host and Dashcam and the co-founder of the London Video Club, agrees. The Video Club started over a drink between friends – Shepherd, Host and Dashcam director Rob Savage and film curator Elaine Wong – about two weeks before the pandemic kicked off. “Most people under the age of 25 had never experienced a VCR, so we thought we’d bring it to them,” Shepherd says. At their screenings, a VCR is set up in front of the screen, purposefully visible, and someone from the audience – usually on the younger side, who might have never actually interacted with this tech before – is asked to do the honours and put in the VHS tape. The group try to always screen from ex-rental copies that have trailers playing before the film. Just for that extra-nostalgic experience.

Another plus to VHS is the near-forgotten legacy of films that have never been transferred to DVD or Blu-ray. “They’re almost like hidden media or lost media,” says Shepherd, who also looks at these VHS-only films as a source of inspiration. “A lot of them have incredibly good ideas, but maybe not the budget to execute them in the best way. Being a horror filmmaker, I’m looking for things to inspire me. I don’t want my wealth of ideas to be the same as everyone else’s. I don’t want to just be inspired by The Exorcist or The Shining.” As with any medium, scarcity breeds value, and on the VHS collector’s scene some of the lesser-known titles can rake in money. “I’ve got Attack of the Killer Refrigerator (1990), which is worth about £400”, boasts Shepherd, while Johnson has some really rare horror tapes, like I Drink Your Blood (1971), which is “certainly worth over £1000”, perhaps more.

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Johnson made the news last summer when he received a donation of 20,000 tapes from a collector in Dundee. Out of that lot, around 5,000 “deserved to be saved”, he says. Johnson’s mission is to save films from oblivion, “because not all VHS tapes were created equal – I’ve got 30 copies of The Full Monty. Who really wants 50 copies of Bridget Jones’ Diary? Sourcing the tapes is not the problem. The problem is staying on top of the donations.”

There is a romantic allure to VHS culture: “Watching something on VHS is so different from, say, an IMAX screen or a regular 35mm screening,” says Shepherd, “because it comes with the history of who had that tape before. The tape degrades, especially around the good bits.” When they screened The Blair Witch Project, for instance, they noticed that its unsettling final shots – that confused viewers about whether what they were watching was real or fiction – was “really scratchy”. “People kept rewinding it to see if they could see anything,” laughs Shepherd. “So you get the history of the viewing of the film within the film. It’s something magical, I feel.”

That same notion comes up with Johnson, too. “You open it up and you can see that little black spool … You take it out of the box, put it into this other little box, clunking down the top loader. [You] press play and then the story appears. And if you love the story, then you can rewind it and watch it again. That’s just magic.”