San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Collectors rewind to the days of VHS
Looking at Jason Dyer’s VHS collection is like rewinding to the days of Blockbuster Video and a blinking “12:00” on the VCR.
More than 3,000 tapes line the walls of the Gen-Xer’s converted garage on San Antonio’s Northeast Side. A standee of Leatherface from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2” guards a corner of the room, which houses mostly horror films, from classics such as “Halloween” and “The Evil Dead” to curiosities like “The Capture of Bigfoot” and “Barn of the Naked Dead.”
Dyer’s passion goes well beyond his tapehead time capsule. The 44-year-old drilling engineer co-founded Planet VHS Horror! With more than 16,000 members, it’s one of the largest VHS groups on Facebook. He even cleans and repairs VCRs and VHS tapes.
Many of the movies he owns are readily available on highdefinition streaming services.
But he says there’s something about literally getting his hands on that bygone grainy-picture media, especially when it’s one of those schlocky horror flicks he used to stumble upon as a kid at the video store.
“It always leads back to nostalgia,” Dyer said. “To be holding it in your hand, being able to look at the front and the back and the cool covers. The time and the effort put into them. They even have a certain smell sometimes.”
Welcome to the world of VHS collecting, a subculture of enthusiasts and everyday people who dig up those boxy plastic relics for a little old-school fun — and in some cases a lot of cash.
Like the resurgence in vinyl, VHS is getting some serious replay. VHS conventions and swap meets continue the tale of the tape with longtime collectors as well as newbies. Meanwhile, a niche group of collectors with deep pockets are buying and selling graded and sealed VHS tapes like they’re vintage baseball cards, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
A recent report likens the
sealed-tape trade to other alternative assets such as NFTs, those one-of-a-kind digital works of art. But one VHS expert said there’s a much bigger picture to VHS collecting, namely that it’s first and foremost about finding tapes for fun, not flipping them for profit.
“We live in a very digital world now. So if people are able to handle a video cassette, a physical, tangible item … I think there’s something special that happens there,” said Paul Zamarelli, a VHS collector for nearly 20 years and founder of the Pennsylvania-based website VHSCollector.com.
Zamarelli said most VHS collectors are purists like himself who latch onto tapes for the memories they bring and the legacies they leave behind.
“I can imagine all the people who put this in their homes and their VCRs,” Zamarelli said. “I always wonder how many homes and how many sleepovers and how many first dates these movies have had. I love that intrinsic value.”
Ty Menchaca can relate. The co-owner of GG’s Emporium, a nostalgia novelty shop in San Antonio, once drove to New Mexico to fill his truck bed with more 5,000 tapes for less than $500. Menchaca also organizes VHS swap meets. And like Dyer, he has a special place in his
heart, as well as his store, for late-’70s and early-’80s slashers and screamfests.
“Most of the collectors tend to be horror-related,” Menchaca said, “due to the fact that there were a lot of (those) movies that were never put on digital.”
Obscure horror tends to be the genre of choice with VHS collectors. Part of it is the thrill of the hunt. Many horror films on VHS never made it to DVD or Blu-ray and likely never will because the original negatives and rights to those films are long gone, Dyer said.
Then there’s all that grindhouse gore, both on film and on the box art, that first shocked and awed collectors back when they were kids. Dyer’s all-time favorites include 1980’s “Zombie Holocaust,” also known as “Doctor Butcher M.D.,” and 1982’s “Boardinghouse,” which also was
released as “Housegeist.”
But the real scary thing about collecting VHS is running out of time and tapes to enjoy.
The last major movie release on VHS was “A History of Violence” in 2006, while the last mass-produced VCR rolled off the assembly line in 2016. Even under the best conditions, with no mold or humidity, a VHS tape has a shelf life of maybe 40 years, which makes it harder to find older tapes that can be played.
“You’re talking about a format that’s not going to be around forever, no matter how you store it,” Dyer said.
And then there’s the arrival of a new breed of collectors taking part in the boutique flipping frenzy. Tape graders such as Investment Grading Services and VHSDNA typically score a sealed VHS release on a scale of 1 to 10 based on its condition, then pack it in a clear casing for display. The higher the grade, the more money the tape can fetch on the secondary market.
For example, a sealed 1987 copy of “Top Gun” with an IGS score of 8.5-9.0 sold for more than $4,000 on eBay, while a sealed 1986 copy of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” on eBay with an IGS score of 8.0-7.0 whipped up nearly $3,500.
Zamarelli noted that tape grading has only been around about two years and that the quality of a tape, sealed or otherwise, cannot be guaranteed. He said the boom in the high-dollar sale of graded tapes — much like the previous enthusiasm for graded and sealed video games and comic books — basically was spurred by the arrival of the grading companies themselves.
“In my experience in the collecting community, there’s never been a huge demand for sealed tapes,” Zamarelli said.
Which is why Dyer said most VHS diehards such as himself and Menchaca want to see those grainy videos pop back to life on their TV screens, or just pop off the shelf with their gonzo cover art.
“We’re the same as with comics and toys,” Menchaca said. “Comics are meant to be read. Toys are meant to be played with. And movies are meant to be watched.”
So how do you enjoy such analog entertainment in the digital era? Menchaca recommends shopping for VHS tapes and VCRs at estate sales and garage sales, as well as flea markets and small thrift shops. If you’re blowing the dust off your old VCR, you may need a $10 to $20 adapter to connect it to your high-def TV. And, yes, some TV repair shops still fix VCRs, though depending on the cost it may be cheaper to buy a replacement.
“In that case, you have to rely on the knowledge of the VCR groups and making contacts,” Dyer said.
Just remember that the VHS experience is not about picture quality.
“There’s people out there that love 4K Ultra HD and want to see every pore on someone’s face,” Dyer said. “But for VHS it’s like, OK, cool, pop in the tape and you’ve got this grainy stuff that pops on the film like those grindhouse movies.
“And you may lose the picture at one time, you have to adjust the tracking at one time. But everyone should have that hassle of going to their player. And hitting rewind.”