In a digital world, VHS tapes are cool again. Meet the crazy faithful, including my roommate

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Scroll through the deceivingly “endless” options on streaming sites — all of them at the touch of a button — and you may find it difficult to imagine that there are cinephiles out there who prefer to have it differently.They’d rather watch a low-resolution, outdated physical format.

They’d rather stand up and insert a tape into a deck.Exchange the soulless interface of a digital app for the mechanical whirs, “tracking” wheels and overall inferior image quality of seeing a movie on VHS and you enter the world of so-called tapeheads: thousands of people who religiously collect and watch movies via a precarious and mostly discontinued device from a bygone era.“With old formats, there’s something of a haunting in them,” says Jane Schoenbrun, director of 2024’s “I Saw the TV Glow,” in which two teens at Void High School (VHS) obsess over a fantasy show that one of them records on tape for the other to watch.“We’re haunted by the memory of the low fidelity, the green of VHS and being stoned at 3 a.m.

on your friend’s couch falling asleep to ‘The Mask’ in bad quality on a VHS.That’s its own particular kind of experience.” Movies Loaded with teenage confusion and intense fandom, ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ speaks to its audience in an intimate way.

Its trans director made the film as a lifeline.A little over 20 years ago, on March 14, 2006, the last mass-produced VHS tape hit video stores: David Cronenberg’s crime thriller “A History of Violence.” Fittingly it came from the director of 1983’s “Videodrome,” a movie whose protagonist gets a tape inserted into his abdomen.At the moment of its commercial death, VHS was giving way to the advent of a “new flesh” for home viewing: DVD.“It’s a minor achievement,” Cronenberg tells me on the phone from Toronto about “A History of Violence” being the last of the major VHS releases.

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