This Netflix series creator wants to own every movie—on VHS

04/28/2024, 6:57 AM
fastcompany.com

Shea Serrano has a TV series currently on Netflix. He also owns 861 VHS tapes.

The cocreator of Reggaeton-flavored streaming series, Neon, and Freevee’s family sitcom, Primo, has a respectable collection of DVDs, Blu-Rays, and 4K steelbooks as well, but his heart resides inside his massive VHS stash. Those other formats are excellent at capturing, for posterity, modern movies best viewed in the highest quality possible. They’re not very fun to collect, however. Only a VHS obsession offers the thrill of an archaeological dig, the aesthetic pleasure of an art installation, and the lived-in nostalgia of a time-traveling DeLorean.

Serrano grew up loving movies but didn’t have many to watch at home. Back in the ‘80s, buying brand-new VHS tapes was mostly the province of elite cineastes with money to burn. A copy of Top Gun might set someone back a hefty 90 bucks, so most people just stuck with renting. Serrano’s family used their VCR to dub some movies as they aired on TV, but the selection was limited.

“When I was a kid, the idea of having immediate access to a movie like Mortal Kombat or whatever was just the most incredible thing,” Serrano says.

Decades later, after amassing many DVDs, those sacred artifacts from childhood rewound their way back into his life. As the prolific author was writing his first book, Basketball (and Other Things)—one of President Obama’s favorites of 2017—he started leasing an office in Houston, which was essentially just a tiny nook inside a personal injury lawyer’s much larger office. The space had one bookshelf, so Serrano went to a thrift store nearby on a mission to stuff the shelf with old books. That’s when he saw, jutting out of a big bin of VHS tapes, the twinned visages of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta on the cover of Face/Off, glaring at him imploringly. The tape sat among a treasure trove of ‘80s and ‘90s action classics—the kind of movies meant to be seen at a resolution no greater than 240 x 320—all priced at three for a dollar.

He had to have them.

“A big part of it was just the art. Like, the cover of Robocop is a cool-ass poster, and now you have it,” Serrano says. “I thought they could live like books if you turn them to the side, so I grabbed 12 for four bucks and put them on my bookshelf. That’s how it started.”

my favorite thing about collecting VHS tapes is you can get the coolest movie poster ever for like $1 https://t.co/BH18W596On— Shea Serrano (@SheaSerrano) April 14, 2024

my favorite thing about collecting VHS tapes is you can get the coolest movie poster ever for like $1 https://t.co/BH18W596On

Though these first VHS tapes were intended to be strictly decorative, Serrano eventually picked up a vintage 9-inch Zenith TV/VCR combo, so he could actually watch them. Once he popped in that first tape, a moment scored by the whirring of a drum head, he felt transported.

For anyone not old enough to have ever set foot inside a Blockbuster Video, VHS tapes do not have menus. The quickest way to get right to the feature presentation involves fast-forwarding through the FBI warning, a flurry of trailers, and other ancillary stuff. Yesterday’s nuisance, however, becomes today’s wistfulness. Watch a VHS copy of the first Michael Keaton Batman from 1989, for instance, and you’ll catch the custom Looney Tunes short Warner Bros. slapped on ahead of the movie—and remember exactly what it felt like to watch it on a couch 35 years ago. For Serrano, that feeling arrived when he put on his VHS copy of Twister, and watched the old THX tag from the ‘90s.

“I forgot about that, I did not expect it,” he says. “But it was so funny to watch and hear it on a 9-inch TV with horrible speakers that were just like crackling for their lives.”

VHS tapes, on average, reportedly degrade at least 10-20% over 10 to 25 years, which partly explains their descent into obsolescence. But the fidelity of the medium, and the certainty that these tapes will one day fall apart, has no bearing on the quality of how it feels to watch them. VHS offers a portal back to a prestreaming era of movie fandom, marked by far less immediacy. A person who owned Mortal Kombat on tape could technically watch it whenever they wanted, but it took some work. Fetching the tape, rewinding to the beginning, and then fast-forwarding past all the preamble added friction to the experience—and that friction added value, says Serrano. It emphasized the effort and intentionality of watching exactly what you want to watch, rather than scrolling through infinite options and landing on the one that’s least objectionable.

“What streaming is missing,” says Serrano, “is that feeling of being 17 years old and somebody’s older brother’s friend’s cousin has a copy of Friday and you’re like, I gotta get my hands on that tape.“

After his career as an author took off, he expanded into a more spacious office in San Antonio. The more space he had, the more tapes he could cram into it. Eventually, Serrano asked his father to build him the kind of VHS storage unit that hung on the walls at Blockbuster in the ‘90s. The resulting shelving can hold up to 440 tapes, and it’s where the TV creator keeps his favorite ones—action flicks like Bloodsport and Blood In Blood Out—sorted in alphabetical order, to further ground the display in video-store realness. (The tapes he doesn’t consider wall-worthy are at home, either adorning the Zenith TV/VCR or stacked up nearby it.)

the picture on the left is february 2017 when i grabbed a few vhs tapes from the thrift store by my house because i thought they'd look cool on a bookshelf in my office and the picture on the right is february 2024 a whole wall in my office lol real weirdo behavior pic.twitter.com/qC6JxXayRp— Shea Serrano (@SheaSerrano) February 11, 2024

While digging through crates during weekly visits to thrift shops and resellers, the author quickly got a sense of which ones are harder to find. Campy, old horror movies like Killer Klowns from Outer Space tend to be rare, copies of Jaws are practically impossible, and then there are holy grail oddities, like the small batch of Mission: Impossible 3 screeners rumored to have been created right at the moment in 2006 when VHS manufacturers ceased production. (The last VHS officially made at a mass-market level, famously, was David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence—a tape Serrano hopes to get his hands on, not for its historicity, but because the movie kicks ass.)

It would be incredibly easy for Serrano to find even the most rare VHS tapes online through the internet, though some of them go for thousands of dollars in perfect condition. He is not at all interested in going that route, though. It would take the fun out of collecting. In many cases, the thrill of finding a prized tape out in the wild can be more entertaining than the film itself. Somehow, the excitement of getting to stream The Killer on Netflix last fall—a brand-new movie by David Fincher, a director whose work Serrano loves—paled in comparison to the feeling of finding recently, at the bottom of a bin, the goofy Corey Haim vehicle, Prayer of the Rollerboys.

“It’s a terrible movie. It’s awful,” Serrano says. “But I’d been looking for it for years and when I finally found it, I was so pumped.”

Sometimes the hunt for rarities takes him to VHS swaps. Among the rows of vendors at tables, like an indoor flea market, Serrano will hobnob with fellow collectors, some of whom would find his 861 tapes considerably piddling. On a recent trip, he met a guy who dubbed onto VHS newer movies like Moneyball and Whiplash, and even made cover art for them. (Since it’s illegal to sell a pirated movie, he technically charged $25 for the sleeve art and gave customers the tape inside it for free.) This encounter brought Serrano’s VHS collection into the 2010s.

The movies he picked up that day, however, don’t count as the newest content he owns on tape. That honor belongs to a VHS that a fellow collector recently gifted Serrano: one containing a transfer of his Freevee show, Primo, with full mock-up cover art.

yoooooooooooooo so last week @Ballislife gave me this incredible gift where he designed VHS tape sleeves that looked like they were made for PRIMOi thought there were dummy tapes inside the sleeves but he actually dubbed them with the actual episodes!!!!! this is nuts 😭😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/ICE9qaQfaK— Shea Serrano (@SheaSerrano) May 14, 2024

Since no DVD set exists at this point for either Primo or Serrano’s Netflix series, Neon, this tape is the only way to watch his own creations the way he would prefer—in any physical format.

“Physical media is a different, more intimate experience,” he says. “It feels like you’re a part of it because this is your property. Like, if the world fell apart today, I could still watch Karate Kid.”