The Streaming Era and the Death of the Video Shop

Blockbuster had somewhere around nine thousand stores at its peak in the middle of the 2000s. It filed for Chapter 11 in September 2010. The British arm went into administration in 2013 and took the high-street rental habit with it. One franchise shop survives, in Bend, Oregon, and it is now a tourist attraction, which is a sentence that would have been incomprehensible to anyone standing in a queue on a Friday night in 1997 holding a cassette with a sticker on it warning about the rewind charge.

The convenience argument was won years ago and it was won fairly. Streaming is better than rental in every respect that can be measured: no journey, no queue, no late fee, no empty case behind a display box, no discovering at eight o’clock that both copies are out. The genre’s grievance is about something else entirely, and it took most of a decade to work out what. The video shop was doing a job that nobody has rebuilt, and the job was the shelf.

What the shelf actually did

A video shop was a physical argument about what films are. The horror aisle put a Bergman-adjacent Swedish ghost film, a Hammer gothic, a Fulci gut-muncher and a shot-on-video regional slasher on the same run of shelving at the same weekly price, sorted by nothing except genre and the alphabet. There was no hierarchy. A fourteen-year-old could pick up Zombie Flesh Eaters and Don’t Look Now in the same handful, and nothing in the room would tell him one of them was culture and the other was rubbish. That flatness is precisely how a generation of genre-literate directors got made. Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary were clerks at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach; the aesthetic that came out of that shop is a direct product of a room where Rio Bravo and a Shaw Brothers film had adjacent spines.

The second thing the shelf did was force browsing. You went in for one film and came out with three, two of which you had never heard of, because a box had a severed hand on it. The whole video shop aesthetic — the airbrushed skull, the tagline in dripping type, the promise the film could not keep — was a solved problem in cold-open marketing, refined over fifteen years by distributors who knew they had four seconds and a piece of cardboard. That artwork is now a design revival because it was the last time anyone had to sell a film to a person who was physically holding it.

The third thing, and the one people miss most, is the clerk. A recommendation from a human being who has watched the thing and can see what you are already holding is a piece of technology that no recommendation engine has matched, because the clerk is doing something the algorithm structurally cannot: recommending a film you will not like this year but will need in five.

The catalogue was wider then, which is the scandal

Here is the fact that still catches people out. The rental era gave a British viewer access to more horror than a streaming subscription does now, and it is not close. A well-stocked independent in 1994 carried thousands of titles. It carried them because the economics of rental made obscurity viable: a shop bought a cassette once and rented it fifty times over five years, so a film with two hundred fans in the catchment area still earned its shelf space.

Streaming has the opposite economics. Every title on a service costs a licence, renegotiated on a cycle, and a title nobody clicks on costs money to keep. So the catalogue churns. Films appear for eighteen months and vanish. The long tail — which is exactly where the genre lives, because the genre is a long tail — has no home, and the services that carry the biggest libraries carry them for a fortnight at a time. The situation got genuinely grotesque in 2022 when Warner Bros. Discovery began removing completed films and series from its own service as a tax measure, including a finished feature that was simply shelved rather than released. A film can now be un-made after it exists. No video shop ever achieved that.

The disappearance falls hardest on exactly the material this desk cares about. The Eurohorror catalogue, the giallo run, the Ozploitation boom — this is not material any general service will license, because the numbers do not work at any price. What was a shelf is now a rights problem.

What the shop’s disappearance did to the canon

The video shop also created canons by accident, and the British case is the famous one. When the Director of Public Prosecutions assembled a list of titles for seizure in the early 1980s, the effect of prohibition was to promote a random assortment of Italian and American cheapies into a permanent, memorised roll of forbidden objects — a mechanism this desk has picked apart in the video nasties panic and the censor’s scissors. That canon exists because of physical objects moving through physical shops, and it could not be produced today. There is nothing to seize. Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor (2021) is a film about precisely this — about the era when a cassette was contraband and an examiner’s scissors could change what a nation had seen.

Something similar had happened a generation earlier, when the drive-in gave American teenagers a whole genre by putting two films on one ticket in a car park, a bargain described in the drive-in and the teenage audience that built a genre, and again with the midnight movie circuit. Each of those was a distribution accident that produced a body of knowledge. Every generation of horror fandom has been shaped by whatever the delivery mechanism happened to be, and the delivery mechanism has now stopped producing accidents, because it is optimised.

The tape shaped the films

There is a craft argument buried in all of this that gets skipped, and it matters because it changed what directors shot.

A film destined for the rental shelf in 1985 knew it would be watched on a fourteen-inch set, panned-and-scanned to a squarish frame, on a tape at least one generation down from the master, in a room with the lights on. Directors adjusted. Faces got bigger. Compositions moved to the centre of the frame because the edges were going to be cropped off by a telecine operator with a joystick. Blood got brighter, because subtlety of shade survives nothing on a domestic tape. The entire look people now nostalgically call the video-era aesthetic is a set of engineering compromises made for a bad delivery format, and then loved anyway once the format died.

Sound went the same way. VHS audio was a narrow, hissy linear track until hi-fi stereo arrived, and even then most viewers were listening through a single mono speaker in the front of a television. So the mixes went loud and blunt: sharp stings, a music cue that tells you exactly what to feel, dialogue pushed forward. A film like The Fog, built around a low, ambient, encroaching sound design, loses a genuine layer of its architecture on a tape, which is why a whole generation underrated it and the restorations have been quietly rehabilitating it ever since.

The shop’s other formal legacy is the cover. Distributors commissioned artwork that promised a film the budget could never deliver, which built an entire viewing culture based on disappointment and a strange kind of loyalty. You rented the box. Sometimes you got the film. The gap between the two is the reason the era produced such fierce, argumentative fans: everyone had been lied to by a piece of cardboard, and everyone had a story about it.

The honest case for the new arrangement

The nostalgia needs interrogating, because a good deal of it is nonsense.

Call the shelf a curated library and you are misremembering it. It was whatever the regional distributor had dumped on the owner, and it was full of holes. Try finding a subtitled film in a suburban rental shop in 1996. Try finding anything from before 1970. Try finding the uncut version of anything at all in Britain, where the scissors had been through most of it. The romance of browsing conveniently forgets that the browsing was constrained to a few hundred titles chosen by a man who mostly cared about Die Hard.

The picture was appalling. VHS was a soft, smeared, chroma-bleeding format, cropped to a television shape, with the dark scenes rendered as grey mud — and horror is a genre made largely of dark scenes. Anyone who saw Suspiria on a rented tape and then saw a proper restoration knows the tape was showing them a different, worse film.

And the access gap was brutal. If you lived somewhere with no shop, you had nothing. The genre’s global conversation, in which a viewer in a small town can watch The Medium the week it lands, is entirely a streaming achievement, and it has done more for the anglophone blind spot than thirty years of rental ever did.

What is rebuilding the shelf

The interesting development is that the shop is being reconstructed in pieces by people who noticed what was missing.

Shudder, launched in 2015, is the closest thing to a functioning horror aisle the internet has produced, and the reason is that it is programmed rather than served. Somebody chooses. Somebody writes the collections. And in 2018 it put Joe Bob Briggs back on television with The Last Drive-In, which is a man sitting in a chair between two films telling you what to notice — the clerk, restored, with a microphone. That is the single most on-the-nose piece of evidence in this whole argument.

The nonprofits are doing the archival half. Scarecrow Video in Seattle converted to nonprofit status and holds a collection in the region of 140,000 titles, most of which exist nowhere else in any legal form. Kim’s Video in New York shipped its collection to a town in Sicily, a story so strange it became a documentary in its own right. These are libraries now, which is what the shops always were and never got paid to be.

And then there is the disc, which turns out to be the only version of ownership on offer — the subject the desk takes up in the 4K boutique label and the cult of physical media.

The verdict

The video shop was a bad library with a great idea in it. The idea was that films of every rank should sit at the same height, at the same price, in a room where a bored teenager could pick up the wrong one, and the loss of that idea is measurable in how the genre’s audience now finds things: by being told, by an engine, based on what it already liked. Netflix ended its DVD-by-post service in September 2023, which was the last commercial link to the era, and hardly anybody noticed.

What is worth carrying forward is the flatness. Any service, label or programmer that puts a Fulci and a Dreyer on the same shelf without apologising for either is doing the job, and the ones that do it — Shudder in one direction, the boutique labels in the other — are the closest thing this generation has to a Friday-night walk down the horror aisle with two quid and no plan.