I didn’t come to love movies in the theater. After the first memorable experience I had in
the theater (seeing “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”), I was hooked and couldn’t
wait to go back. But, it was at home, like so many kids who grew up in the ‘80s
and ‘90s, where the love story between film and me began.
Sometimes I describe my dad as an early adopter, but in
retrospect I think he was a bit of a collector/hoarder of new technology. When
most people were waiting for VHS (or Betamax) to drop to a somewhat affordable
price, my dad brought home the RCA Video Disc Player. Here is a fun commercial
for the device:
Now that isn’t a Laser Disc player. That’s an actual analog
home video player, not all that different than vinyl records. The discs could
only hold an hour’s worth of a movie on each side, so either the discs had to
be edited or they had to be put on multiple discs. I still remember walking
around my house with the double disc set of “The Ten Commandments,” holding
them like the title tablets. Sometimes there was a title card to flip the disc
at the halfway point of movie, sometimes the film just stopped mid-scene.
The video discs weren’t available at many stores, so often I
had to hunt for them with my dad, who would take me in the backroom
of electronic stores (this was before Best Buy or even when other department
stores started carrying tech products), where either a haphazard display space
was made, or there would be a sort of swap meet with other cinephiles, trading
and selling their favorite movies on the off chance you happened to have a copy
of the second disc of “The Godfather.”
My mind goes straight back to those places if I
get a whiff of ozone bouncing off of a concrete floor. Or if I come across a
really interesting DVD stand at a flea market.
Eventually, the home video wars were won, for a time, with
VHS beating both the limited Video Disc and the superior Betamax. The
portability and affordability of VHS created a whole new industry, home video,
and soon every film release was sold in stores months after it left the
theater, creating a whole secondary market for film exhibition.
It didn’t take long for trips to the video rental store
(another new phenomenon made possible because of VHS), to become a favorite
activity of mine. When my dad and I went to electronic stores to scavenge, buy or
barter Video Discs, it was sometimes a bit of a dark and dingy experience, but
our video rental store, Video Stop on Hobson Road off of East State, was bright
and filled with covers on the video tape boxes jammed with images and colors.
And there were the cardboard displays. They were so cool. So
many kids I grew up with did not become acquainted with Freddy Krueger from the
“Nightmare on Elm Street” films, our parents would never allow us to watch them,
but we learned about him from the larger than life displays in the horror
section of the rental store. I’m pretty sure the stories we made up in our
heads were far scarier than the movies turned out to be.
Recently on the public radio magazine show “Here & Now,”
a film historian was describing a program at the Yale University library where
a massive archival project is underway of VHS tapes. Are they archiving
forgotten silent films or something from the French New Wave only available in
VHS? Heck, no. They are preserving grindhouse horror and exploitation films
with titles like “Cellar Dweller” and “Shock ‘Em Dead.” You can hear the story and learn about the
project here:
Horror films typified the VHS format, and also gave rise to
the new distribution system – straight to video. Grabbing attention with
scandalous cover that had off kilter fonts and bold colors, the video rental
store was the last stop for many of these straight to video films. These were
movies that many artists had poured their soul and creativity into, spending
countless hours in production, and were not given a chance in theaters because
of marketability concerns or budget restraints.
But they found new life in the video rental stores. I
remember being at Delmar Video, which is still in operation in Fort Wayne, and stopping
cold in my pre-kindergarten tracks at a huge display that mimicked the cover of
the horror film “Ghoulies,” complete with an enormous toilet and the ghoulie
sticking its head out. It was both shocking and funny, and I am sure that one
image has embedded itself into my psyche and planted the seed that would
eventually turn into my sense of humor.
Even though the home video market as a whole is waning, and
the video rental store is all but extinct, it always makes me smile when I see
how all the ways it stills has an impact on other film lovers.
Just look at the poster for the critically lauded horror
film “It Follows,” which Cinema Center is opening at 11:59pm tonight.
It's perfect. This is just the kind of poster that would be up at
the register at Video Stop, or there would be a mini postcard size version
given to customers with their receipt. Sure the film itself was influenced by
great horror films from the ‘70s and ‘80s, but it also evokes that feeling of
joyous discovery, looking at something that you might not understand and are
probably too young to see, and to want to take it home even more because of
that. VHS gave me that feeling, and I am forever trying to recapture it. At
least I can look at this poster and delight in the fact that it appears David
Robert Mitchell, the director of “It Follows,” is doing the same thing.
Jonah Crismore is Cinema Center’s executive director and
battles an addiction to physical media.
