VHS crackles back to life in Sacramento as new video store presses play

The Abridged Version:

• A new video store is opening Monday in Midtown Sacramento, coming as the old-school format welcomes a wave of new enthusiasm from collectors and movie lovers.
• Alongside My Cat’s VHS, there are other hopeful video store owners in the city looking to bring tapes, DVDs and other physical media back into the mainstream.
• Those stores may spring to life in the coming year, and Dreamland Cinema has found success with its VHS screenings.

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Did you think VHS was dead? Think again. Like a slasher in an ’80s horror flick, you can’t kill it. The format has somehow survived and returned for a sequel, and now it’s coming for Sacramento.

The city will see at least one — possibly three — video stores open this year.

It’s been eight years since Awesome Video, the last-standing video store in Sacramento, closed and almost 20 years since the final mainstream VHS distributor rolled its last load out of Los Angeles, according to The Los Angeles Times. Movie enthusiasts have seen the waves of media change in DVDs, Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD and everything in between. But as streaming services became the dominant form of home media consumption, the general landscape of physical media started to quickly shrink. The once ubiquitous video store became antiquated — but strangely, like the VHS tape itself, not necessarily obsolete. Local vintage stores are seeing demand increase and theaters like The Dreamland Cinema are selling out VHS screening nights.

“There’s like a warmth to it. The analog kind of crackly, ugly fuzzy quality. It’s just irreplaceable,” said Tish Sparks, a co-owner of Dreamland, an indie film house in Midtown. “Sometimes things just look better that way.”

A new video store for Sacramento

Sacramento will welcome its first video store in almost a decade on Monday, when My Cat’s VHS opens on P and 20th streets in Midtown.

Tony Swan has been selling tapes for almost 10 years, but this physical location will be his first. The name is an ode to his cat. The new space will allow him to host his streams on Whatnot, an auction site where retro media is popular, and sell a mix of physical media and memorabilia.

Walking into Swan’s new space, you’ll find wrestling a key theme.

“It’s just this kind of passion that I had for old movies and mostly wrestling that just kind of grew into this space we’re in now,” Swan said while wearing his New Day wrestling trio T-shirt.

He only collects wrestling tapes and memorabilia for his personal collection, but he loves the hunt for tapes in general.

“I love to find and sell tapes and I love to show people a tape they haven’t seen in years and then give them a good deal on it,” he said.

The store won’t be limited to just tapes — there will be DVDs, Blu-Rays, 4Ks, CDs, cassettes and other retro goods. It’s a small space inside of a large American Foursquare style home in Midtown Sacramento, converted into multiple offices. The studio is already filled to the brim with physical media. As Swan organized the store, he looked for a place to hang his “Video Store“ arrow sign in front of the building. Just like the video store of yesteryear, rentals will still be at the forefront.

“Anything in the store will be rentable … but if you see something, like in this case, you can ask to rent it,” Swan said while pointing to the glass case in front of him holding all his rarer, higher priced tapes.

He pulled out a copy of “Christmas with the Kranks,” a 2004 Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis Christmas comedy.

“This is a very late release,” he said. “This is like a $40 tape online.”

Being in the game since 2017, he’s seen changes in interest.

“The boom of tapes — when you have a collection then all of a sudden you see the value of some of these tapes — you are beyond weirded out,” he said.

His decision to open a physical space was encouraged by the community of supporters that have formed around My Cat’s VHS. Swan said he wouldn’t have the confidence to do it if people weren’t telling him he should.

My Cat’s VHS is at 2011 P St., Suite 10. The store will be open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Saturday, with availability at night through appointment only.

Evidence of a resurgence

The affirmation from Swan’s supporters is backed with evidence from other businesses in town. Guy Rogers, owner of Sparky’s Retro Resale, which sells vintage items in South Land Park, said his VHS sales tell that story.

“So far this year, I’ve sold as many tapes as I did for the entire year last year,” Rogers said.

You can find a mix of retro goods and physical media like music, movies, comics, T-shirts and toys.

“Things that evoke memories,” Rogers said. “Things people can relate to … nine times out of 10 someone walks in here will say, ‘I used to have that!’ Or, ‘I remember these,’ or, ‘I always wanted one of these.’”

One of the most noticeable sections in the sea of nostalgia is the towers and shelves of video tapes in the back of the store. Rogers said they just purchased a load of 1,100 VHS tapes the other week, and “that’s on top of the already thousands we already had.”

He’s seen that same tape boom as Swan.

“February last year we were starting to sell about 100 tapes a month,” Rogers said. “And then as the year went on, we were starting to sell about 200 tapes a month. And now kind of on the regular, it’s 300-plus.”

Sparky’s Retro Resale is at 1184 35th Ave. The store is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. You can follow them on Instagram here.

VHS in for vinyl future?

So, is VHS going the way of vinyl with a retro resurgence? Swan says not necessarily.

“There is still an overwhelming feeling of obsoleteness for VHS,” he said. “Vinyl, you can turn up loud and you can get a good quality sound from it. Sometimes VHS on the biggest TV isn’t going to look good, you know?”

Then why do collectors enjoy tapes at all? Of course, some extremely rare videos may not be available anywhere else, but wouldn’t you want to watch a movie on a higher resolution format? Besides the ability to collect, these enthusiasts say watching a movie on VHS is a completely different experience.

Artist and collector Meg Chiladas from El Dorado Hills said her renewed love of tapes started when she wanted to watch the original Star Wars trilogy. Specifically, she wanted to watch the unaltered originals that didn’t feature any of the edits or added CGI that all new releases of the films have.

“I was like, ‘I need to watch them on the tape,’” Chiladas said. This led to her purchasing the original trilogy on tape and a VCR CRT (cathode ray tube) — the big box TVs. That was just the beginning of her love of tape collecting.

“I never looked back,” she said.

Video store hopefuls

Nostalgia informs much of the newfound enthusiasm for the format. It’s what video store owner hopefuls Chris Emery and Jefferson Miller see as their guiding light. They are in the process of building a collection and looking for a space, hoping to open a location in the fall.

“Very Good Video Store is our passion project of bringing back the throwback video rental store to Sacramento,” Emery said. “We’re very excited to give communities and families that opportunity that we had growing up of walking the aisles, picking out a movie with your family or friends.”

The team has a variety of ideas like events (including exercise VHS meet-ups) and slumber party rental packs that come with tapes, a VCR and snacks. They said they have been mentored by Matt Renoir of Be Kind Video in Burbank (mentioned in this Los Angeles Times piece on the VHS resurgence). The Very Good team sees nostalgia as a guiding light but also wants to offer an antidote to streaming services.

“We want families to trade five screens for one,” Emery said.

They intend to have a different focus than what is driving a lot of tape sales in other stores.

“One of our stances is a lot of the rental stores that are popping up around the country tend to lean towards ’80s horror,” Emery said. “I feel like ‘tapeheads’ and collectors, that’s a big thing for them. We’re pretty adamant about we’re more about ‘The Goonies,’ the ‘Harry and the Hendersons,’ the ‘Home Alone'(s) — like the family-oriented movies. Not that we don’t have a special place for the ’80s horror.”

You can find updates on Very Good Video Store on their Instagram.

Sold out screenings and a future video store

The Dreamland Cinema in Midtown has had VHS as a part of its programming since shortly after it opened in 2022. Co-owners Sparks and Lauren Hess have collected their own tapes for years. In 2023, they were approached by filmmaker and educator Rob Livings about bringing a series called Trash Tapes to the theater. Sparks and Livings collaborate on the tape selections.

“We always kind of seek out straight to video or, like, just the worst kind of B movie you can find, and people have a good time with it. It’s one of our most popular events,” Hess said.

They have sold out every screening except for one — the 2003 film “Quigley.”

“I guess people draw the line at Gary Busey turning into a dog,” Livings said.

For Sparks and Hess, VHS tapes aren’t just about memory.

“I think some things just play better on VHS,” Hess said. “Like, especially the stuff we do for Trash Tapes. It’s like these movies were made for VHS.”

Many of the films featured in Trash Tapes are cheaply shot on video tape with the video store market in mind. If you want fidelity to a filmmaker’s original creation, a VHS tape is as close as you can get.

They hope to add a video store section to their business “whenever we get our bigger space, but TBD on that,” Sparks said. Hess noted the potential video store would also include new DVDs, Blu-Rays and 4K UHDs from boutique distributors.

Dreamland Cinema is at 1901 P St. Showings can be found online.

A filmmaker and serious collector

Livings of Trash Tapes is also a collector with over 1,000 tapes stored in his office at Futures Explored, a film school for adults with disabilities, where he works.

“I had about two-and-a-half-thousand in Australia before I moved here, and that was 2017, and I just gave them away,” he said. “They weren’t worth anything (at the time). I think back to the Fright Night coffin box that’s worth five-or-six-hundred bucks now.”

He stopped collecting for a while until a friend gave him a bag of tapes to go through. He looked through them for nostalgia.

“And then I was like, I’ll just keep a couple and a couple became a couple hundred,” he said.

Livings’ love of VHS extends past just collecting and screening nights. He has released two of his films on the format.

His first release came from Retro Release, a manufacturer of new tapes for both contemporary films and rereleases. He also found that someone online was making bootleg VHS copies of his films “Christmas Tapes” and “Infrared.”

“I reached out to him and I was like, I’m not mad. I want you to send me copies of this,” Livings said. “And then I was like, can we just make this official? Now we’ve got a deal with him.”

Livings is organizing a VHS swap at Futures Explored in August, but details haven’t been ironed out yet.

VHS is for kids these days, too

There is a definite devotion and excitement to the format burgeoning in the region. Of course, low fidelity memory unites all these collectors — but it’s not just Generation X, Millennials and older Gen Z people who are looking for tapes.

“I have met young people, very youthful people, that they feel like their generation like missed out, like they were kind of robbed of the physical media,” Chiladas said.

Rogers, of Sparky’s Retro Resale, mentioned many of his customers bring in their children to enjoy tapes with them. It simplifies media and allows them to not get trapped in the endless streaming service options.

Chiladas mentioned that her 3-year-old enjoys watching tapes with her and her husband. She gives her son the autonomy to explore the collection, look at the covers and see what he likes, “which is completely different from TV shows streaming online.”

For future generations it may not be a completely foreign concept if these new video stores find success. Before My Cat’s VHS opened, there was only one video store in the entire Sacramento region — a DVD rental spot in Davis. If everything goes right for all parties involved, there may be four by the end of 2026.

Chiladas said her son’s relationship to tapes has extended past just watching. He wanted to play a game with their VHS collection.

“So, I said, ‘we can pretend we’re at Blockbuster,’ and he wanted to know what that was,” Chiladas recalled. “So, we had a whole setup. He was the worker at Blockbuster, and I was renting videos and bringing them back and then he was putting them back on the shelf.”

Blockbuster may be long gone but there could be an opportunity for Chiladas’ son to enjoy the warmth of a video store still. For now, he gets to enjoy tapes at home with his collector family.

Chiladas said his favorite VHS is an As Seen on TV video – “Big Equipment: Farm Machinery.”

 Jordan Mata is a digital audience producer for Abridged.