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| The last 2 VHS tapes I own |
NOSTALGIA- a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.
Horror and genre fandom has had a huge boom in VHS nostalgia over the past few years. I can understand collecting VHS boxes for some of the fantastic artwork or having some childhood favorites on VHS adorning your video shelf. But recently I've heard the opinion that VHS actually contains some type of analog magic that digital formats like dvd and blu-ray can't replicate. I've actually heard some stunning ignorance in regard to VHS and high definition and how people think movies should be viewed.
What bothers me about VHS nostalgia is that it's ignoring historical context in order to champion VHS hipness.
First off, I loved VHS. I Bought, collected and traded movies on VHS. I had rental memberships all over the state I lived in. I would rent from Chinese groceries to get Hong Kong films. I worked in VHS rental stores and a laserdisc store by the mid 90s.
I'm here to tell you it's never been a better time to be a genre film fan than now.
Lovers of VHS will tell you how many titles are on VHS that have never been released on other formats. This is true, but with a little work you can find nearly any title you want online. Movies have been transferred from VHS to digital in order to share them with the world. Unless you are a film fan that is on the university level of film studies nearly everything you want is "out there". *wink*wink*
I've also heard how important it is to preserve VHS because it could be the last format a movie is available on. If you really want to save and preserve a film you should look for a film print or negative. If a VHS is the sole remaining copy of a film, it should be handed over to archivists and not be in someone's home video collection.
Next up, the quality of VHS was TERRIBLE. It sucked. And nothing was widescreen! That should be a dealbreaker right there for any reasonable film fan, When working at the laserdisc store at the advent of DVD, the negative reaction and anger towards DVD was unbelievable. Some people get very emotionally invested in these formats and simply won't listen to reason. Or you get the old "Looks good enough to me" reasoning, You would hear the same thing about blu-ray/HD and still do!
So lets compare the days to VHS to the present shall we?
-Realistically your local video store would only stock a fraction of what was available on VHS., If you have Netflix Instant and Hulu Plus your choice of films is far beyond what you would find in your average rental store. The Criterion section on Hulu Plus would put most any foreign section of a video store in the late 1980s to shame.
-Anyone remember when new movies on VHS would cost about $80-90? Or what about spending $100-125 for a single movie on a Criterion laserdisc? This was before Amazon, so you can forget about heavy discounts. People complaining about $40 Criterion blu-rays are pretty amusing if you remember Criterion laserdiscs.
-Remember all those cut and retitled movies on VHS? When it came to horror and b movie titles you could never be sure what version you were getting. You had to read magazines like Video Watchdog to figure out what releases were worth buying.
-It sure is nice to have all the new releases on rental streaming services without having to call the video store and reserving a tape. Nothing is ever rented out. It's fantastic!
-You can find nearly ANY film you want online with some determination.
-Blockbuster Video! Remember these puritanical assholes? They refused to carry The Last Temptation of Christ. They refused to carry "unrated" or NC-17 versions of films like The Cook, The Thief, his Wife and Her Love, The Toxic Avenger, True Romance, Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer, Frankenhooker, Suspiria,and the list goes on and on.
-It has never been a better time to be a genre movie fan. The wealth of titles available is mindblowing. The quality of a lot of HD/blu-ray titles are second only to watching them in a theater on 35mm, where movies were intended to be seen. Blu-Ray and HD give new life to vintage genre films from Shaw Brothers martial arts, Japanese monster movies and Italian genre films. Watching any Mario Bava film on VHS instead of HD would be doing yourself a serious disservice.
However if you are going to start espousing how VHS is a superior format and you'd rather watch the butchered version of The Beyond on Thillervideo's 7 Doors of Death VHS instead of Grindhouse Releasing's new The Beyond blu-ray, I'd say you are out of your damn mind.
Yes, an unprecedented amount of films were dumped onto VHS in the 1980s. It was the wild, wild west. Title changes, cuts, dubs(no dual audio tracks) and nearly EVERYTHING was pan and scanned at best or brutally cropped with the picture locked dead center.
One HUGE thing the VHS Nostalgia folks are forgetting, a lot of top shelf Euro horror and cult titles were only available in butchered versions on VHS, if at all. It took Suspiria over a decade to get a US VHS release. EVERY SINGLE CLASSIC DARIO ARGENTO FILM WAS CENSORED ON AMERICAN VHS. Deep Red. Phenomena, Bird Withe the Crystal Plummage. Tenebrae. All those Euro Horror titles Anchor Bay released in the late '90s and early 2000s on DVD was the first time these titles had proper releases.
Take a look at old Fangoria magazines from the '80s and marvel at the VHS prices. Most of them between $40-80. And it was a labyrinth of retitlings and cut films. Pick up a vintage copy of Video Watchdog. Editor and genre film journalist Tim Lucas made a career out of cataloging cuts and retitlings on tapes and discs the world over. During the VHS Boom, companies would dump all kinds of crap into video stores. They were just out to make a buck and didn't give a damn about the consumers or quality control. We now have companies who actually care and are curating fantastic films.
There has never been a better time to be a genre film fan or just a film fan in general. Between DVD, blu-ray, streaming services and the magic of the "internet", you can find nearly any movie you want.
For genre film fans, just off the top of my head, entire subgenres are able to be rediscovered or re-evaluated on DVD and blu, some for the first time with English subtitles. Paul Naschy. Jess Franco. EuroCrime. Shaw Brothers films. Japanese monster movies and Japanese films in general, from Kinji Fukasaku crime epics to the ero-guro sleaze of Teruo Ishii. All the fantastic work that companies like Synapse, Blue Underground, Mondo Macabro, Grindhouse, Raro, Arrow, Shout Factory, and others shout be applauded.
Enjoy your nostalgia folks, a lot of this hobby is all about nostalgia. I think it's great if you have a shelf full of original Wizard Video big boxes. But don't get caught up in VHS just for the sake of the old memories. Take advantage of the wealth of cinema that's out there! There's an an INSANE amount of amazing films to dig into and discover.
Now get off of my lawn and go watch some movies
Forgot to mention something. If you are transferring hard to find VHS movies to digital and sharing them, I salute you. If you track down widescreen Japanese tapes of Bruno Mattei movies and upload them for all to see, you are doing the Lord's work. Whoever uploaded the Japanese widescreen version of the Hong Kong film "Mirage" would get a Nobel prize if it was up to me.
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