Something We Used to Watch in the Dark

There was a video rental store in my hometown. When I was small, my mother would take me inside, and I wasn’t allowed past the Disney section—the whole place was technically adults-only. I was there every other day regardless. Each visit I’d drift a few cassettes further along the shelves. Past the kung-fu action films. Past the erotic thrillers. Until one day I found myself standing, entirely by accident, in the porn section. That changed something in me, somewhere deep. It’s probably why I run this journal today.

VHS was my life for a stretch of years I remember with disproportionate warmth. Watching Friday the 13th with friends at someone’s parents’ house. The Lion King on permanent rotation for months, the tape developing that slightly washed-out look from too many plays. Recording everything off television onto blank cassettes, building an archive with my own labeling system, not really understanding what I was constructing until it was already a habit. Then DVDs arrived and the tapes just quietly disappeared. I didn’t notice the transition while it was happening.

VideoHunterS is a short documentary series that ran on Arte, in which director Daniel Hyan and his friend Bart travel across Germany meeting people for whom VHS never stopped being the thing. Collectors, true believers, people who kept the equipment running long after the culture moved on. Watching it made me want to find a VCR immediately and start over from scratch—which is probably the most you can ask from a documentary: that it makes you want to become a slightly different version of yourself, one who made different choices somewhere back in the early 2000s.