\u201cIt threatens to reshape the foundations of education, entertainment, and all communications.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the early 80s, there were dozens of different VCR machines available, ranging from $1300 to $3000. \u201cNow available: VHS The World\u2019s No 1 Home Recording System!\u201d hollered a print ad for Ashby Berghs in Christchurch<\/a>, which featured a television set plugged into a VCR that inexplicably appeared to be \u2018playing\u2019 the Mona Lisa. Renaissance appreciation aside, the ad boasted life-changing benefits: you don\u2019t need to stay up anymore to watch the big international sports games, or miss out on the Saturday night feature if you\u2019ve got plans.<\/p>\n Aside from taping things off the television, the VCR was also touted as an opportunity to curate your own custom viewing experience by purchasing or renting your favourite movies on VHS. Another bold prediction from The Press in 1971: \u201cA library of tapes to supply all of Christchurch with each week\u2019s episodes of Coronation Street would be a formidable proposition,\u201d the report reads<\/a>. \u201cTelevision libraries of the future are more likely to be concerned with serials and will, perhaps, concentrate on accumulating stocks of classics or other popular programmes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n We never did get our dedicated Coro Street video library, but we did get United Video, the first video store chain to open here in 1984, closely followed by Video Ezy in 1988 and later Civic Video. With 100s of video shop franchises across the country and countless more independent stores, these places were a brightly-coloured haven for running your fingers along the spines of film history and widening your eyes at the mysterious fleshy land beyond the beaded curtain. I once saw a man emerge with a big stack of \u201cFresh Meat\u201d pornos, most likely five for $10.\u00a0<\/p>\n Growing up in Featherston in the South Wairarapa, the nearest cinema was three towns over and about 40 minutes away. We didn\u2019t have Sky, or even sexy new channels like TV4 or Prime in the late 90s. That meant that Star Video, a dark treasure trove nestled on State Highway 2, was my portal straight to Tinseltown. I can still see the precariously perched TV by the counter playing trailers, casting an alien glow on the already fluorescent yellow bags of popcorn. There were Tangy Fruits, there were tubes of old movie posters, there were endless possibilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n When I wasn\u2019t taking clutches of videotapes home myself, I was watching them with my friends. The terrifying 1991 VHS board game Nightmare saw a rapidly decaying Scottish gatekeeper bellow at you from the screen while you frantically rolled the dice and squealed with glee, trying to beat him before your time ran out. My childhood best friend wasn\u2019t allowed to watch television but she could select from her parents\u2019 small VHS collection, which meant we spent most of 1999 watching Silence of the Lambs, every single weekend, with the door and curtains closed.<\/p>\n Fast forward a few years later to the early 2000s, and things were changing fast with the introduction of the DVD, a smaller, sleeker and higher quality way of watching movies. Star Video downsized from its premium shop front to a smaller and creakier shack next to the Mobil. They began to sell off their VHS tapes en masse for $1 each, and I nabbed the murderer\u2019s row of Bring It On, Miss Congeniality, Dumb and Dumber and Best in Show. I was 12 years old and watched them every night in my room, diligently rewinding each time for my future self.\u00a0<\/p>\n When I moved up to Auckland in 2005, the video (now DVD) stores were even more impressive. The Civic Video in West Lynn shops, now a luxury indoor golf club, had enormous high ceilings like a cathedral, and a fairytale fibreglass tree in the centre of it that housed kid-friendly movies (it also had a dodgy beaded curtain nook too, but suitably far away). The nearby Video Ezy on Ponsonby Road was famously open for 24 hours, making it the perfect place for nerdy movie obsessed teens and\/or shady characters who had been kicked out of nearby bars.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to imagine what teenage me, or indeed that poor Press reporter who quaked at the prospect of VHS in 1971, would make of the catastrophic way we watch movies now. A weekend movie marathon no longer begins with an energizing trip to the video shop, but a paralysing dead-eyed scroll through thousands of titles, before making a half-hearted choice that you turn off after five minutes, just to repeat the process until you realise you actually just want to watch Bring It On, which is suddenly the only movie you can\u2019t stream anywhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perhaps it\u2019s this cesspit of streaming platforms, where something as tremendous as a movie is shrunk down to a thumbnail often featuring whichever actress has the biggest boobs, that is making people return to physical media. When I first held The Castle on VHS, I felt the kind of spiritual zap that people buy big chunks of amethyst for. There\u2019s nothing like being able to hold onto a real life representation of the pop culture that made you, even if that coveted piece happens to be a big box red clamshell edition of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.<\/p>\n At least I\u2019m not alone in my obsession with VHS that has lead me to own over 100 VHS tapes and two VCRS (one for playing, one for cleaning). There are at least 2,000 of us misty-eyed maniacs in a local Facebook group searching for their holy grail tapes, shuddering to think how many of our favourite movies have been thrown in the bin, or left in damp garages to grow mould. Many are after obscure horrors and big box 80s action movies, but you\u2019ll find the occasional outlier with a bloodlust for old TV3 Suzy Cato tapes, or a hankering exclusively reserved for Bruce Lee.\u00a0<\/p>\n My dredging of Marketplace and Trade Me has taken me inside some suburban scenes that wouldn\u2019t look out of place in the exact kind of obscure horror film that would fetch upwards of $50 to the right buyer. I\u2019ve found myself in a piss-reeking bedroom in Blenheim picking up Evil Dead videos from a woman who seemed to be \u2013 and I say this with love and adoration \u2013 an actual witch. I\u2019ve weaved through rusted cars on a front lawn to pick up The Parent Trap off a sunlounger, and braved a scary dog to get my paws on a copy of Final Destination 2.\u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve often wondered if I will be brutally murdered while picking up a VHS from a stranger on the internet. Once, while scooping up a copy of Halloween H20 in Woolston, I noticed the seller lock his front door behind me after I entered. \u201cSorry, bad habit,\u201d he chuckled. In Auckland for a work trip last year, I dragged my then-editor Madeleine Chapman with me to pick up some foreign-language Disney tapes (another inexplicable kryptonite) from Morningside, and felt much better for it when the seller told us that the tapes were \u201cdown in the basement\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other times, I have roped in family and friends to enable my addiction. My mum picked up a Spongebob Squarepants VHS on my behalf in Whang\u0101rei, expertly packaged inside an empty Doritos bag and left behind a bike wheel. My 75-year-old father lugged home six banana boxes of free VHS for me from the Kapiti Coast, and I spent a weekend visit sorting through the mouldy tapes until I got a chest infection. One friend picked up The Polar Express (don\u2019t @ me, it\u2019s rare) from New Lynn, dodging what they described as \u201ca giant poo\u201d on the deck outside.\u00a0<\/p>\n These examples may seem extreme, but they pale next to the dedication of some other titans in the VHS collecting community. When my dad sent through photos of the many, many videos he picked up from Kapiti, I instantly zoomed in on a Thomas the Tank Engine title \u2013 I knew there was a Thomas fiend in the Facebook group. I DM\u2019d him the screenshot and he was immediately keen to nab it, sending me the address of his sourcing guy in Feilding, who was soon going to be shipping a crate of Thomas VHS back to his home\u2026 in New York City.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even if there are flickers here and there of a VHS renaissance \u2013 Dead Video in Lyttelton<\/a> is an ever-growing haven for collectors, Taylor Swift brought a VHS to the Toy Story 5 premiere<\/a> last week and the first straight-to-VHS film in 20 years was released in April<\/a> \u2013 there\u2019s no denying that it remains a cumbersome and fallible medium<\/a> to pursue in 2026. So why are so many of us still chasing the VHS thrill? I asked my fellow die-hards in the New Zealand VHS collectors group, and was inundated with dozens of surprisingly moving responses.\u00a0<\/p>\n As you might expect, nostalgia was a huge factor. \u201cBack in the day, anyone who had a large VHS collection at home was immensely wealthy,\u201d wrote one commenter. \u201cSo my collection makes me feel old timey rich, especially considering my childhood VHS collection was some blank tapes with Ninja Turtles and the Masters of the Universe movie taped off TV.\u201d Others connect VHS with certain chapters in their lives \u2013 inheriting the damaged built-in VHS TV after the Christchurch quakes, or escaping the \u201cchaos of my household\u201d through Pokemon tapes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe feeling of being transported into a romanticised retro past that \u2013 while fictional \u2013 is rejuvenating for the soul,\u201d wrote another VHS fan. \u201cMuch like how I imagine the poets of the Romantic era would\u2019ve felt about Arthurian legend.\u201d<\/p>\n But several collectors are not even thinking about the past at all, but the future. \u201cI collect for my future kids to watch the low-stimulating animated movies that I grew up on, instead of the addictive overstimulating ones that they produce now.\u201d Parents in the group shared that VHS tapes can\u2019t be scratched like DVDs, and builds patience in a world encouraging kids to swipe YouTube shorts every few seconds. \u201cThe endless options on YouTube and smart TV apps are so bad for kids,\u201d wrote one. \u201cThis way we can be selective of what we want them to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n And while the low quality may be off-putting to many accustomed to the high definition of 4K, VHS collectors live for the fuzziness, poetically described by one as \u201cadding a dreamy feel, like a rainy day\u201d. Several mentioned that older movies were made for VHS, and that \u201cthe blurry, low definition hides a lot of sins that HD brings right to the forefront.\u201d The mechanical qualities of VHS were also of huge appeal: \u201cthe whirring and humming; the tactile interface \u2013 it all just scratches a part of my brain that I just don\u2019t get with touchscreens and mouse clicks.\u201d<\/p>\n You\u2019ll notice nobody mentioned money \u2013 most VHS sell for less than a coffee. A mint copy of Star Wars might fetch $60,000 in the States, but you\u2019d be hard pushed to find anything like that in this corner of the world, especially nearly 50 years later. With that said, our down-country ways do have their advantages \u2013 New Zealand held onto VHS technology longer than most, and as a result we were one of the only territories to distribute Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on VHS in 2005 (if you\u2019ve got a copy, hold onto it like the almighty golden snitch).\u00a0<\/p>\n As much as I try to convince myself my sealed copy of The Castle will be our ticket to a better life one day (tell her she\u2019s dreaming!), my motivation for hoarding physical media is primarily existential. Like everyone, I spend most of my time on the internet. Apart from the one time I ghost-wrote a YouTuber\u2019s book (find it in an op shop near you), the entire last 12 years of my professional life only exists online, which you can\u2019t hold in your hands and you certainly can\u2019t guarantee won\u2019t get warped with upside down images and weird code as the years wear on.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the distinct suspicion that social media and streaming is rapidly fizzing holes into my brain like a Berocca and that the algorithm is shaping me into the worst, laziest version of myself. Do I actually even like true crime? Or is it just that The Dead Lady Living Next Door is number one on Netflix, and dissecting the death of yet another woman seems easier than thinking? I\u2019m sick of not trusting my own entertainment instincts, waiting for Spotify Wrapped to tell me what music I like, and Letterboxd to remind me what my favourite movies are.\u00a0<\/p>\nImage: The Press, 18 December 1980, Page 4.<\/p>\n
Natasha Loh at Video Ezy Grey Lynn in 2017. Photo: Aaron Yap.<\/p>\n
Video Ezy Ponsonby Road in 1996. Image: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 802-02-13<\/p>\n
The author herself in VHS hog heaven\/hell, about to get a chest infection.<\/p>\n
A pretty normal Marketplace exchange<\/p>\n
Alice Cinemas in Christchurch: a portal to the past. Image: Alex Casey<\/p>\n
The kind of thing my friends leave in letterbox these days. Image: Alex Casey<\/p>\n