Rewinding history

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This article was published 21/02/2015 (4190 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Is VHS the new vinyl?

That was the question posed in a recent magazine article that examined how VHS movies are mounting an improbable comeback, nine years after A History of Violence, directed by Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, became the last videocassette released by a major motion picture studio.

Just like music-hounds who sing the praises of every snap, crackle and pop emitted by their vinyl LPs, VHS — short for Video Home System — aficionados swear by the grainy look of 30-year-old videocassettes, especially when it comes to cheesy, low-budget horror flicks from the 1970s and ’80s — films that were shot on video in the first place.

“Not everything looks or sounds better with a technological upgrade,” said Ken McIntyre, writer for Film Magazine. “Try listening to Foghat on an eight-track player sometime. It’s… awesome. Same thing with a beat-up VHS of Satan’s Sadists.”

The piece also talked about how the resurgence is being fuelled by a good, old-fashioned thrill of the hunt. Because there are tens of thousands of VHS movies that are not — and probably never will be — available on DVD or Blu-Ray, collectors haunt second-hand stores, pawn shops and flea markets in a race against time — essentially, to get ’em before they’re gone.

 

Andrew Sigfusson is the founder of Cult Winnipeg VHS, a Facebook group whose 70-plus members know what it means to “be kind, rewind.”

Growing up, Sigfusson, 27, and his father had a weekend ritual: Every Sunday, they would head to a neighbourhood video store to pick out a VHS movie for their family to watch after dinner. Sigfusson can’t recall the name of the place they went to most often but he distinctly remembers it had a porn section — only because his dad would always tell him to “stay the hell away” from that end of the shop.

“Nowadays with things like video-on-demand and Netflix, everything is click and view,” says Sigfusson, a full-time cook who once wrote a screenplay about punk rockers breaking into a high school that may or not have been haunted. “But back then it was an event to watch a movie at home; you had to get in the car, even if it was 40-below outside, and hope by the time you got to the store, they still had a copy of whatever movie it was you wanted to rent.”

Six years ago, Sigfusson was shopping at Value Village when a shelving unit teeming with VHS movies caught his eye. The price was right — everything, including Star Wars and Scarface box sets, was going for less than a buck — so he began tossing tape after tape into his basket.

“I felt like I was a kid again, back at the video store trying to decide what to rent. And that’s probably the main reason I started collecting in the first place — because it took me back to a time when I used to come home from the video store and crawl into my Jurassic Park sleeping bag in the family room, while my mom was in the kitchen, making popcorn on the stove-top, for me and my sister.”

For months, Sigfusson, a horror movie fanatic who cites The Shining as his favourite movie of all time, felt like he was the only person interested in VHS copies of “classics” such as Evil in the Swamp or Blade of the Ripper.

Then one day, while he was combing through tapes at a video store that was selling off its old stock, he noticed a fellow next to him with a scribbler filled with page after page of hand-written titles — movies the fellow already owned.

“That’s when I kind of realized I wasn’t the only VHS hoarder in town,” Sigfusson says with a laugh.

Last year, a Gallup poll revealed almost 60 per cent of North American households still owned a VCR, and that at least that many still had boxes of VHS cassettes gathering dust. But if you’re thinking your fuzzed-out copy of Ishtar or The Adventures of Pluto Nash is going to make you rich one day, sorry, but that’s probably not the case. On the other hand, if your taste ran more towards the obscure, you could be sitting on a gold mine — that is, a gold mine fashioned out of 12.7 millimetre-wide, magnetic tape.

Not that long ago, a used copy of Tales from the Quadead Zone fetched over $800 when it was auctioned off online. It is believed less than 100 copies of the 65-minute-long, cult classic exist and movie buffs anticipate if another copy ever comes up for bid, it will command in the neighbourhood of $2,000. (Hey, what’s not to like? In a 2012 documentary about VHS collectors called Adjust Your Tracking, a person interviewed spoke rapturously about Tales from the Quadead Zone’s “terrible special effects and senseless plot.”)

“I own a couple (of movies) that have gone for about $100 on eBay,” says Sigfusson, reaching for his copy of Highway to Hell (tagline: “Where the toll is your soul”), a 1992 release about a man who must head to Hades to rescue his girlfriend who was taken there by a “zombie hellcop” while the two were driving to Las Vegas. “It’s a pretty s — movie, but it’s valuable because it has a split-second cameo of Ben Stiller frying steaks on a sidewalk in Hell.”

When Sigfusson goes shopping nowadays, he keeps his eyes open for a flick from yester-year — a film he refers to as his Holy Grail.

“When I was five, we were in my cousin’s parents’ room while a Christmas party for the adults was going on, downstairs. We were watching something we probably shouldn’t have been, and all I know is it had vampires, a hospital and a swing-set,” he says, noting he’ll often buy tapes based on the cover art alone. “To this day, I can’t figure out what that movie was but I know it scared the hell out of me and I have to find it, even though it’s probably crap.”

Sigfusson’s Facebook group serves primarily as a forum for members to compare notes about what they’ve picked up lately and where they lucked into this or that. But Sigfusson plans to add a new wrinkle soon, he says.

“There has been talk of hosting VHS screening nights. We’ll probably pick out the worst movies we can find and not even list the title — just post a general description of the plot, online, and let people decide if they want to come over and watch.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca