Why I Still Buy VHS in the Age of Streaming
I have always been a tactile person. I like being able to pick something up, turn it over, and know that it is mine. A movie on a screen can take me somewhere, but a tape gives that movie a physical place in my life.
I also like to actually own the media I buy. Streaming gives us access, but access is not ownership. A movie can move to another service, disappear completely, or become something I have to pay for all over again. The tape on my shelf does not renegotiate the arrangement.
Movies are the greatest storytelling format to me, and VHS has a viable place in the history of which stories were told and how people found them. The format is not separate from that history. It carried movies into homes, video stores, sleepovers, sick days, and ordinary nights when somebody needed to be somewhere else for a while.
That last part is personal. Movies were my escape from an illness I could barely handle. When I felt trapped inside a body that hurt, a movie could take my mind somewhere the pain was not. Sometimes that meant going to the video store after a difficult medical test and choosing what world I wanted to disappear into next.
I do not want to make collecting sound relentlessly serious, because it is also fun, weird, and occasionally ridiculous. But underneath the hunt and the cover art is something real: movies have carried me through a lot. VHS lets me hold onto them, and lets me own a small piece of the history that made that escape possible.