(Original text from Absolute Underground Issue #69 - originally published April, 2016)
It
was the summer of 1994 that I walked into the little corner store –
an independent retailer – at Richards & Pender Street in
Vancouver. It was primarily music, a used and collectible record
store; the proprietor also had a lot of CDs – but in the far back
corner of the store, as far away from the summer sun streaming in
through the large glass windows as physically possible, was a small
wooden thrift-store bookshelf that held, in no discernible order
whatsoever, used VHS tapes of all genres. Interestingly, there were
no mainstream Hollywood movies there on that shelf. There were a
couple of 80s horror films that starred a very young Bill Paxton, and
a weird-looking horror-thriller that starred Sting and was directed
by celebrated filmmaker Robert Altman with I title I have never again
come across since that day (and can no longer remember what it was).
Attempts to find this film on the internet have been fruitless, as
well, and possibly the VHS cover was using an alternate title; this
happened quite a bit in those days. I still remember Uumberto Lenzi's
Nightmare City and its
Canadian-release VHS cover from the early 80s – a naked woman
hanging upside-down with her nipple torn off, and the alternative
title “City of the
Walking Dead” partially
obscuring said ripped-off nipple. Also
long forgotten was the name of this little corner used-record shop,
the shop itself has been gone for decades now, replacing by an
ever-increasingly dilapidated convenience store that is somehow,
inexplicably, still in operation to this day. I do remember, however,
having a lively conversation with the proprietor when I brought the
used VHS tape of Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator up
to his counter to purchase. He was a tall, young-ish man with a
sore-looking condition of skin psoriasis all over his otherwise pale
face. I was about to pay $9.95 plus tax for this used Re-Animator
tape that had be re-packed in a
black Amaray clamshell by some unknown video store long before it
ever wound up at this guy's
shop, and he proceeded to explain to me why the VHS videotape in my
hands would never become valuable to any collector.
“Look
at this,” he said, removing the videotape from inside the clamshell
case and pressing the tiny black release button that allowed the back
of the tape to swing up, exposing the magnetic tape and all of the
thin silver and white reels the tape had to wind around in order to
get from the right side to the left while playing through a VCR. “All
these moving parts. Records don't have moving parts, and that's why
they can become collectible. Something like this, all these parts and
components – it will never become collectible. These tapes won't
ever be worth anything to any collector”. I paid for my Re-Animator
tape and left.
I still have that tape to this day, almost 22 years later.
Funnily,
I was not the only one to hold onto a couple of my old VHS horror
tapes. In fact, I literally only
held onto a couple of them when the DVD revolution hit. Now, though,
it's astoundingly clear that VHS tapes have indeed become highly
coveted collectors items, some going for hundreds of dollars on eBay
and Amazon, in a time where we've gone even further beyond the
original DVD revolution of the new millennium into HD and 4K Blu-ray
disc media, creating something of a treasure trove for collectors of
all types of media from magnetic standard definition to digital
hi-def picture quality; and often, fans of niche and genre film fare
are the ones benefiting; many genre (horror) titles have survived the
advances in film media technology, and it's not unusual to see titles
that have made it across all the home video formats: Betamax, VHS,
Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray (and I'll include digital streaming in
this sentiment, as well). Of course the biggest impacts were made by
the VHS, DVD and Blu-ray formats specifically, clearly defining the
technological generations in home video history. And with these
defined generations, we see that there are also titles that had
skipped a generation, and it's amusing to me when I happen to come
across a horror or cult film title that had run out its print in the
VHS days only to make a surprise comeback on a hi-def 1080p Blu-ray
disc, while missing out on the entire DVD generation altogether.
Most
recently, Slasher//Video (through an output/imprint deal with the
Blu-ray distribution company Olive Films) has begun to release niche
and sought-after horror and slasher videos on Blu-ray while
incorporating the nostalgic aspects of the VHS days. These
Slasher//Video releases were not entirely imagined by design –
often, Slasher//Video (Olive Films) could only track down a Betacam
SP tape master to provide us with the digital transfer to their
Blu-ray discs – Betacam SP is a large videotape master, in standard
definition (or Standard Play, SP), that was the standard delivery
master to broadcast television and often to direct-to-video
distribution in the eighties and nineties. In the case of the
direct-to-video films, while they were nearly all originally shot on
film, they were cut together and mastered only onto standard
definition Betacam SP tapes in that bygone era of film and video
production. The very name of these tapes – Standard Play
– signified the maximum video quality that the technology had
produced at that time. So now, mixing these distant generations of
video technology, Slasher//Video has given us niche horror and genre
fans a bit of an unusual and offbeat treat – we can see these
wonderfully strange, gory, exciting, and low-budget originally
direct-to-home-video horror movies in their original video/VHS
anesthetic, but on a Blu-ray disc that will never wear down, no
matter how many times the film is played at home. In the VHS days,
god forbid you would fast-forward to your favourite part of the tape
(an explosion of blood, a couple of boobs, a kickass werewolf
transformation and subsequent gory slaughter) more than a couple of
times; the tape would soon develop tracking issues and interruptive
glitches, constantly changing the way you could see your favourite
scenes. Admittedly, this is one of the charming aspects about VHS to
some collectors. But for those who are keen on reliving the nostalgia
of the VHS aesthetics with their 1980s horror obscurities,
Slasher//Video and Olive Films have fallen on something very unique
for horror fans, by delivering that VHS aesthetic on their Blu-ray
and DVD releases. I'm curious to see how Slasher//Video's new
mixed-technology retro-releases will be received by fans down the
road. For me, it gives me the chance to see some of these films that
I missed before the VHS tape went extinct, and I'm personally loving
it.
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