A few years ago, Elijah LaFollette and Bryce Shoemaker realized they were sitting on VHS gold. It was time to share it with the world. The 27-year-old LaFollette, who was born in Long Beach but raised in St. Joseph, Missouri, came of age during the DVD boom. But he remembers fairly well the tail end of VHS’ reign over video culture, and he never sold or trashed his early videotapes. When he moved to Kansas City for college, he ended up living across the street from a Goodwill. His roommate was into thrifting, so he occasionally joined in. One day, LaFollette came across a screener copy of Stuart Gordon’s 1995 horror flick Castle Freak. A rare find. Something clicked: He liked the feeling of discovering weird, old, forgotten films—the kind that live on in obscurity inside dusty secondhand store bins.
“As collectors, everyone has their own little niche,” LaFollette explains, rattling off the names of people he knows who are into laser discs and compact discs. “Betamax, VHS, cassettes, Video 8—anything based on magnetic tape, that’s what I’m going for.”
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, video stores were booming, and production companies were pumping out movies, racing to keep up with demand. Plenty of these movies were direct-to-video (meaning they were never released in theaters) and many were only ever released as VHS tapes. While reissue companies such as Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome, and Severin have brought some of these heretofore lost films back to the masses, the sheer amount of material put out during the VHS boom years means there’s an almost endless supply of films that are mostly lost to the ages. Some unknown but hilarious horror classic might be mouldering on the shelves at a yard sale in the middle of nowhere at this very minute. For people like LaFollette, hunting down that film offers a tantalizing challenge.
Source: Magnetic Magic is building a community for all the VHS weirdos out there