[FrightFest] Review: Cult of VHS
Cult of VHS is a documentary helmed by independent filmmaker Rob Preciado. After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2020, the project finally debuted at Frightfest a little over two years later. It’s a beautiful, nostalgic labour of love and an overall great watch!
It features interviews with a variety of filmmakers and VHS collectors, including Josh Stifter (The Good Exorcist), Kristian A. Söderström (Videoman), Severin Films co-founder David Gregory, illustrator Graham Humphreys, and many more. Each one goes through their memories of watching VHS tapes and the impact they had on them.
I grew up in the 90s, probably as the last generation of VHS kids. I remember the switch to DVDs quite well—The Phantom Menace was the first film we owned on both VHS and DVD. I owned a tiny TV with a built-in VCR that I found in a dumpster, covered in stickers. I absolutely loved it and would spend countless hours watching videos I rented from the local Mom and Pop video store, Mort’s. Like many of the people interviewed, this is where my love of horror was born. So obviously, I was going to enjoy Cult of VHS! I was smiling from the moment the credits rolled. The John Carpenter font, a parody of The Thing's title crawl, and the enthusiasm for video cassettes and films mentioned are heartwarming. I couldn’t help but nod as they recount memories of browsing the seemingly endless shelves of Blockbusters, striking up friendships with the rental clerks, and racing home with a huge stack of tapes to watch. I had all of these experiences, as I’m sure a lot of you did too.
One of the advantages of collecting VHS tapes over other hobbies is the price tag, sometimes pocket change is enough to grab something wonderful and nasty. Second-hand shops usually have a video section and combing the piles of old Rom-Coms and exercise tapes is like digging for buried treasure. The first time I watched The Blair Witch Project was after my friends and I found it in a Value Village bargain bin. So starting a collection is very affordable in most cases! It’s also a very tactile and satisfying thing, to hold a tape, vs how we stream most films today.
VHS is also well known for the artwork featured on the cover. You have to grab the customer’s attention in a store, right? So some would feature lenticular images, embossed art, or intense slogans (“UNCLE SAM wants you…DEAD!”) to entice people into renting them. Oftentimes the artwork was better than the movie itself! Not a lot of these were retained when the films were re-released on DVD, instead showcasing photos of the main actors and actresses. It just doesn’t feel the same! Even the stickers used to show the genre, the green “horror” sticker, have become iconic, being made into pins, shirts and tattoos. They’d also be available in either cardboard sleeves or chunky clamshell cases, and each collector has their preference. With limited-edition sleeves and steelbooks, this trend has kind of come back in the Blu-Ray age.
The golden age of video was also the first-time regular Joes could film a movie and have it distributed. You no longer had to be backed by studio execs or have tons of cash to get a film made. Feeders was Shot-on-VHS and reportedly cost 500 dollars to create and went on to become a cult classic of bad movies. Not just horror of course—tons of exercise tapes, instructional videos and home movies were created around this time. The Youtube channel Redlettermedia is famous for watching particularly bad VHS tapes, like Riding Mower Safety and The Octopuff in Kumquat (an anti-smoking PSA for kids). VHS collectors have no delusions about how bad some of these films can be. It adds to the charm and makes us love them even more!
Of course, it’s impossible to talk about the home video market without discussing the Video Nasties cases in the UK. For a brief overview: politicians and concerned parents banded together to completely ban over 100 films from viewing, due to their violent content. This only made them more popular, with stores selling them under the table and kids copying tapes to distribute to others. The 2021 film Censor is directly about this (and is quite good too). Film classification has been a hot topic since the dawn of cinema and it’s interesting to look back on it and how the political climate at the time affected it. From the 1930s to 1960s in America, the Hays Code similarly determined what was and wasn’t allowed on film. The modern equivalent of this is probably the ratings of video games, with some purporting that playing violent games makes you a violent person—making every horror fan in the world roll their eyes.
The VHS aesthetic has returned in several ways; Retro-inspired films and video games use clunky effects and filters to give off the same visual style as their inspirations, and many popular YouTube series use the style to scare just as well as The Evil Dead would have to kids growing up in the 80s. Analog Horror has solidified itself as a major subgenre and is here to stay. As Jacob Trussell explains, “no matter how far away from the format we get, it doesn’t discount the fact that VHS is how we fell in love with movies.”
Kevin Martin, the owner of The Lobby video store in Edmonton featured in the documentary, is only a few hours away from me. A pilgrimage might be in order…
Cult of VHS premiered at FrightFest on August 28th.
