VHS horror fans got their gore on at the Sherman Theater on Saturday.
Anyone who still owns a video cassette player could have had a thrill looking through some of the dusty copies of mainstream movies, but most of the people there — close to 100 throughout the day — came for one thing: schlock.
“A lot of people are excited about how many people are here with tapes, and how many different distributor companies are here with limited edition releases,” said Earl Kessler, the curator behind the Sherman’s long-running Severed Sinema film series.
The off-shoot of that event is the Short Film Night, which is held ever April for the past five years. For the last two years, he’s dedicated a portion of the day to VHS collectors.
Some people came from as far away as North Carolina and Michigan for the visual splatterfest. They were all collectors of dark and gory materials related to movies from a bygone era, where quality mattered less than blood. Rows and rows of video cassette tapes lined the floor and about 10 tables were set up with vendors from far and wide coming to get in on the action.
Scott Appleby, the North Carolina fan, drove nearly 10 hours, “to buy all the limited tapes that I’m only going to be able to get here,” he said.
He had grabbed a vinyl record (which he also collects) with the score to the 1987 German horror movie, “Nekromantik”.
Paige Kay Davis, who works at the New Jersey-based production company called Pop Cinema said they just started to re-release some of it’s schlock horror catalog.
“Through our conversations with colleagues, we became aware that there was this really niche and passionate VHS, analog movement,” Davis said.
