The Power Of VHS | SCANLINE

There's a quote by Brian Eno that is relevant to this subject: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

Yes, the low quality of VHS porn certainly enhanced the horror of the whole experience.

you: heres the same clip in bruray me, watching in 144p, out of fast data on my phone: ah i see

I literally spat my drink out when the bit about the cult came up with the song "S.O.S". I was in that cult as a kid and had completely forgotten about that song until just now. We had so many good propaganda songs, from "Cathy Don't go to the Supermarket" (spoilers: the Anti-christ was at said supermarket), to "White Sugar Will Rot Your Teeth", to my personal favorite: "Psychic Waste", a song by Jeremy Spencer (a former guitarist for Fleetwood Mac who we were told was the greatest guitarist who ever lived cause he joined the cult) about how T.V. Is bad and will pollute your mind. That cult was weird as hell looking back now, but as a kid it all seemed so normal. I was 100% certain the world would end and Jesus would return before I turned 18; and then I turned 18, and realized I had no formal education, no social skills or even social experience, and no general skills aside from reciting a few bible verses. We are all--the kids who were born into the cult and left later--set up to fail. It's amazing any of us managed to become semi-stable adults. ... Good times...

A childhood accident left me with visual snow, so dark rooms actually look like black VHS noise to me. It's a scary thing, I gotta say.

I had a broken copy of harry potter: the chamber of secrets that made the basilisk look like it was missing half its face and I still haven't out grown the nightmares.

As I'm sure others have pointed out by now, this video perfectly predicted the "analogue horror" trend of the last few years. Things really are more frightening when you can't quite make out what you're looking at, especially if it's poor CGI done personally by an indie filmmaker

Here from the second scanline videos. Want to convey my appreciation for Shannon Strucci. I honestly didn't notice that this wasn't a single person production and felt like coming back to admit it. Thanks for the sharp and concise writing Strucci.

Thanks to 80s movies, I've always had this impression in my brain that the 70s and 80s were a brownish-yellow hue.

I can't describe the pain I felt the day when I came home to see that my Dad had given away our COMBINATION VHS and DVD Player

How did I live through the indroduction and demise of VHS without ever wondering what VHS stood for? Well now I know, thanks hbomberguy

We watched SO MUCH poorly taped, subtitle-free anime in the mid 90s I've a friend who was actually motivated to become genuinely fluent in Japanese.

HOT DAMN THAT'S MY MATE'S IMDB REVIEW OF MALLRATS! "Brad from Auckland New Zealand!" He's gonna love this video

Still not sure whether Hbomb is expanding or contracting his audience with every new series

"The real challenge is making something people would fall in love with even if they were watching it on a crappy old tape in the 90's" Take heart, Harry. I fell in love with your stuff on a crappy old phone watching in 240p to save mobile data.

5 years late to bring it up but I'm surprised that the concept of being at home, where one could be alone watching horror, is a much more frightening setting to experience it in than a large theatre with a small crowd. There's a sense of safety being around other people, and I feel like some of the kick behind vhs horror sales was from a more intense experience.

"You'd be amazed what hoops people would jump through to see a show they liked." My parents legit had my uncle recording soap operas, cartoons, sitcoms, etc while they were stationed in Kenya in the late 80's/early 90's. My uncle would then mail these tapes to Kenya so my parents could keep up with shows and my sister and I had American cartoons/films to watch. I try not to get too attached to physical objects, but I am p bummed that my family has since lost most of those tapes. My older sister estimates that over the course of two years, my uncle sent several hundred VHS tapes to Africa for us. I think my stepmom still has my dad's Betamax collection, though.

About your point with VHS making things scarier, I have a similar philosophy with older horror games. I find Silent Hill on the PS1 to be so dang terrifying, much more terrifying than anything I'd ever play today with photorealistic visuals. I find that the low frame rate and resolution really help with that for similar reasons!

"This film has been modified from it's original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen." That screen always excited me when I was a kid. Like I was looking into the past through a window.

TIL people used to go out and watch porn in public at the theatre.