Tag Archives: mom and pop video shop

VIDEO STORE DUST MEMORIES

This piece originally appeared in No Friends Magazine. Parts have been edited for clarity.

VIDEO STORE DUST MEMORIES aka A WALK DOWN THE AISLES aka TERROR IN THE AISLES aka A WALK TO DISMEMBER aka EVERYBODY KILLED THE VIDEO STORE aka POSTCARDS FROM THE VIDEO STORE’S EDGE.

I wish I had a time machine to go back and see what the first video I rented was. I wouldn’t stop any fascist rulers, I wouldn’t make any bets on the World Series. I just wanna see what that first tape was. Continue reading VIDEO STORE DUST MEMORIES

Horror VHS Promo Videos!

If, like most Americans in the mid to late-’80s, you quit your law firm in the city to move to the boonies and open a video store amid the Great VHS Boom, you were probably fairly clueless on the subject and immediately found yourself struck with the most imperative decision of your new business venture: what do you stock your shop with?

You turn to your family for answers: your boy says “Freddy”, whoever that is; your daughter suggests anything with Johnny Depp; your wife offers something classic. All fine suggestions, but what do the people want? At a retail price of $99.95 a piece, video cassettes at the time were too pricey to simply buy blindly. That’s where promotional videos come in. In a pre-Google world, movie distribution companies — wanting to secure some video store shelf space — would send these promotional tapes directly to video store proprietors. Continue reading Horror VHS Promo Videos!

Horror Video Ads from the ’80s!

Long before the Internet — before Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, and whatever else people use to search and share information nowadays — details on the latest movies releases (especially the more obscure titles, especially horror titles) were a lot harder to come by. A lot harder. There were newspapers and word of mouth, of course. But if you were a gorehound or looking for info on more underground stuff, having a subscription to a magazine like Fangoria or Starlog was a necessity — especially if you wanted to buy these movies. (There were other movie-centric publications, like Movieline which was actually pretty decent, but the best genre-specific info required genre-specific magazines.) Continue reading Horror Video Ads from the ’80s!