You might have to dig a little at an Austin VHS Swap meet-up, but that’s a reasonable cost for time travel.
Tape vendors display their inventory in towers, rows and, yes, box-bound piles. Shoppers pick up old favorites, maybe a hit like Speed or an indie like My Own Private Idaho, and examine their cardboard sleeves like long-forgotten family heirlooms. Serious collectors, perhaps on the hunt for movies not starring Keanu Reeves, scope rare bootlegs and slices of horror schlock. Is it even legal to watch The Howling without a little snow on your TV screen?
In a streaming age that has largely rejected physical media, Austin VHS Swap is like the opposite of a doomsday cult. Every stack of tapes seems to say: Be the Blockbuster you wish to see in the world.
“It’s a bunch of people who are super obsessed with movies and different genres, just talking about film and sharing weird things with each other that maybe they wouldn’t have known about,” Sarah Froelich, one of the organizers, said.
“It’s a bunch of people who are super obsessed with movies and different genres, just talking about film and sharing weird things with each other that maybe they wouldn’t have known about.”
Sarah Froelich, Austin VHS Swap organizer
Here, no cut is too deep, no digital purgatory too powerful. On a folding table at the summer market in June, there sat Alpha’s Magical Christmas, the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” holiday special from 1994, safely preserved on two spools of magnetic tape inside a plastic shell.
Mitch Rafter founded Austin VHS Swap in 2019 as a small monthly meetup at Kick Butt Coffee. Rafter soon left it in the hands of Rob Jimison, who also runs the Righteous Retro vintage market series. Today, he steers the ship with Froelich and Scott Shay, who are colleagues at North Loop’s We Luv Video.
Fast forward just a few years, and the swap has bloomed. In addition to quarterly markets at venues like Barrett’s Too and The Highball, they sometimes pop up at We Luv Video to “celebrate the ethereal splendor of magnetic tape,” as an October event description put it.
“It’s like a great block party feel sometimes, even at the smaller ones,” Jimison said.
The next VHS marathon and swap is set for 6 to 11 p.m. on Dec. 19 at We Luv Video.
Both Jimison and Froelich consider VHS their native form of physical media. Corpus Christi native Jimison haunted the video shelves at Les Feldser’s in the ’90s. He swapped bootlegs and rarities with other enthusiasts in the tape-trader network.
Froelich grew up renting from Atlantic Video in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. When the store had a going-out-of-business sale during school hours, she sent her mom to snatch up copies of movies like Carnal Knowledge and Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
“I started going to tape events because I was like, these people get it,” Froelich said. “That’s how I met most of my friends in Austin.”
But just a few years ago, the future of local VHS culture looked bleak. Beloved indie rental shops Vulcan Video and I Luv Video closed in 2020. Blockbuster, the corporate Goliath to their Davids, shuttered its last local outlets in 2014.
Then, a rewind renaissance. The nonprofit We Luv Video opened in 2023, reborn from the ashes of I Luv Video. Alamo Drafthouse resurrected Vulcan Video’s DVD and Blu-ray library in 2024 through a rental operation in the lobby of the Village theater. This summer, Austin Video Store opened in the Montopolis neighborhood.
A community of physical media heads is still kickin’ it Blockbuster style at Austin VHS Swap, which touts itself as the place “where vendors, traders and collectors unite.”
An outsider to this analog subculture might underestimate the draw. Sure, there’s the nostalgia factor. Jimison points to big studios’ nasty habit of disappearing beloved content from their platforms and trying to squeeze ever-more money out of audiences. Froelich also appreciates the sensory appeal of VHS. “The tape hits your brain in a totally different way,” she said.
At swap events, new friends compare photos of their tape walls at home. When the weather’s cooler, Jimison has seen folks show up wearing hoodies designed to look like their favorite brands of blank tape covers.
“It’s a desire for the real,” Froelich said.
“There’s a need for counterculture communities,” Jimison added.
We Luv Video sells and rents VCRs, if you need one. Thrift stores are a good place to look, too. (Just make sure to test it out before buying, Froelich warns.) If you’ve got an old machine that needs a little love, Texas Archive of the Moving Image teaches repair classes.
All of this passion burns on a finite resource, and that’s part of the fun. Jimison prizes his copy of The Return of Living Dead. The crown jewel of Froelich’s collection is Scary Movie — not the Wayans brothers spoof, but director Daniel Erickson’s 1991 horror flick filmed in Austin. Only 100 tapes were produced; Froelich plucked one from an estate sale.
The organizers say DVDs are increasingly in demand on the nostalgia market. Even if discs eclipse tapes — again — Austin VHS Swap plans to keep connecting people through movies.
And if your rewind finger isn’t itchy after all these years, that’s fine, too.
“We just want to talk about movies with you,” Froelich said. “I hear so many people come up and say, I haven’t had a VCR in a really long time. I say, OK, well, I’ve got books and I’ve got DVDs — and I’ve got some Betamax, too, if anyone’s interested.”