It is sad but true that the VHS era is over in the same way that the vinyl LP record era is over even though there are collectors and die hards who still buy and collect both, but by and large it’s over for both. When you watch a blue ray DVD on a 50 inch plasma TV with Dolby surround stereo blasting the doors off their hinges, it’s pure cinematic bliss – not as good as sitting in a theatre but pretty good all the same. Whereas back in the day when we were rushing off to the “video store ” on a rainy Sunday afternoon to grab the latest new release or some great movie we missed back when it had a theatrical release twenty years ago, it didn’t seem to matter that the picture was cropped to 4:3 format instead of full frame 16:9 or 2.35. Our 4:3 vhs movie was panned and scanned, very badly, and the picture quality was, looking back from our blue ray era, pretty terrible. But we loved them all the same, often renting 3 or 4 at a time to make a whole day of it.
But VHS was an undisputed cultural phenomenon that lasted from September 9, 1976 when the first Victor HR-3300 VHS machine was presented to the president of JVC until the DVD was introduced to the US market in March 1997. After the DVD era started it was a slow and inevitable decline for VHS. According to the British Video Association ten million VHS Videos were sold in 2005 compared to two hundred and eleven million DVDs in the same year.
There still are filmmakers such as Harmony Korine using VHS, her film “Trash Humpers” was shot and then released on VHS in 2009 but this is the exception rather than the rule . The last film released by a studio on VHS was David Cronenberg’s ” A History Of Violence”. Since every other phase in the history of film was driven and dominated by the studios – the silent era, the sound era, the technicolor- color era, the widescreen era and now the 3D era – it’s probably safe to say that the VHS era ended with that film. Nearly 30 years, not a bad effort considering DVD is on its knees after only 15 years.
What made watching a VHS video at home so great? Probably the same reason that we loved listening to our Walkmans, the sound quality wasn’t great , but that wasn’t the point – it was a personal listening experience you could take anywhere you wanted to go. With VHS you took home the movie of your choice and watched when and how you liked it. You could stop it and have something to eat or fast forward the boring bits or replay the awesome bits even if it didn’t look like it did at the cinema. In fact looking back its hard to believe we did put up with it, but we did and we loved it!
The VHS era changed the film business in lots of ways – some good , some bad. A lot of the early VHS movies in the “per-cert” era were the so called “video nasties” which were made by film makers excluded from the studio system, who otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to make their own films. In some ways it was the lunatics running the asylum-lots of money and out of control- and a lot of really bad films got made but so did a lot of great films such as the most famous film of the era “Evil Dead”. Where would Sam Rami be now without VHS?
With the advent of VHS, films lived on beyond their theatrical window, forgotten classics and cult films could be seen by a new generation of film fans. As the business matured and turned into a river of cash the studios strangled the life out of it, making the VHS business more and more about star driven films which became known as A titles , which for the most part they could control since they were the only ones that could afford to pay the stars 20 million a film. Everything else became known as a B title ( often these were “Straight To Video” movies ) which became increasingly hard to finance without a star attached. In the end, inevitably, it was back to business as usual for the studio distribution system and all the innovation that was there at the beginning of the VHS era fell away as the movie stars got greedy and rich and the movies got ordinary.
In those heady VHS days it was very hard to make a movie- the equipment was expensive and clumsy to use, film stock was very expensive to buy and process and so on. Every film was a huge investment of time and money and it was very risky. Even more extraordinary that these films got made. Now, in the digital era you can make a film for 10,000 dollars like Oren Peli did in 2007. “Paranormal Activity” was a massive hit but the lesson is that anyone can make a film with very little risk. If you think you have a decent story to tell on film you should have a go. You never know how great it might turn out, or it could go the other way which is ok because as William Goldman’s said “Nobody knows anything”. Possibly the VHS era filmmakers spirit and film legacy will inspire the digital generation of filmmakers of today tell the stories they want to tell they way they want to tell them and make watching films exciting again like those Sunday afternoons watching our little VHS films. Let’s hope so.
More “Ghastly Fun ” VHS film reviews to come. Next up Sydney’s last video store Dr What? A store that still has over 20,000 VHS to rent.
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