Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026)

[Matt]

But this is a pretty funny gag in an era when everything's a "must-see" in IMAX, 70mm, or VistaVision or has a separately released black-and-white version. And it's very true to Schoenbrun's aesthetic. I assume anyone going to these screenings would be a superfan. I'd feel bad for a person for whom this would be a first viewing.

I think I can understand a VHS revival much more than the vinyl revival. Vinyl has always had people (questionably? speciously?) claiming it sounds better than digital audio. Whereas everyone knows VHS looks like shit, but it's a rejection of today's omnipresent pristine 4K video aesthetic (whether it's filming something with your phone or watching something on a streaming service). There is probably a good dose of millennial nostalgia involved here as well. Both are made pretty explicit in I Saw the TV Glow where the show-within-the-film is enrapturing on off-air VHS recordings but is a massive letdown when watched years later on a streaming service.

[Never Cursed]

I will never, for the life of me, understand the current VHS fetishization trend. Unquestionably a worse way to watch a film than almost any other option available. (And I say that as someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on specialized upscaling equipment for analog video game consoles.)

I think it's one of many manifestations of nostalgia for '80s and '90s (and probably now Y2K) pop culture that, because it can be effectively monetized at pretty low cost to the producer, has been slipped back into the minds of people of a certain age in spite of or even perhaps because of how crappy the format is. The ne plus ultra of this kind of thing is Terror Vision, the worst boutique label currently operational, which flogs a bunch of (not-deliberately-futzed-with) VHSs to sweaty collectors and stores with an eye for resale. By that standard, buying specialized equipment so that Super Smash Bros: Melee or whatever runs normally on modern TVs is outright ascetic.

While I wouldn't like it being done to any film, it is certainly a Choice to do this with a movie that so heavily fetishizes ("masturbatory" is an applicable descriptor in multiple ways) the mechanical signifiers of both '80s pop culture and home video film. If this is a gag, it's one that stops being funny fast when one realizes they'll be selling copies of these things.

[The Narrator Returns]

I assume anyone going to these screenings would be a superfan. I'd feel bad for a person for whom this would be a first viewing.

The place it’s playing in Chicago is a literal coffee shop, they either don’t expect or don’t want more than a very select audience showing up. It’s not really my thing but appropriate for something that starts so deep in VHS-horror-era ephemera. It could well have a moment of thematic kick like when I saw it on a print and couldn’t tell when the real and fake cigarette burns were in the middle.

[Monterey Jack]

I will never, for the life of me, understand the current VHS fetishization trend. Unquestionably a worse way to watch a film than almost any other option available. (And I say that as someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on specialized upscaling equipment for analog video game consoles.)

Ever since I bought a laserdisc player thirty years ago (I was late to the game on that), I've jumped on every new home media format, as each one starting with DVD has been a substantial upgrade from VHS. Those who fetishize watching movies on VHS in the 2020s baffle me. I even did a Tweet recently calling out the timeline absurdity of Hannah Einbinder's character discovering the tituar movie as a kid, considering she gives her age as thirty, and who the hell was watching horror movies on videotape as late as 2006? Yet I got shouted down by an angry mob, some of which claimed they were still watching VHS up until the mid-2010s(!), and all I could think was, how poorly off could anyone be to not be able to afford a DVD player by 2015 or so? Hell, you could find discarded DVD players at the side of the road!

On his podcast, Quentin Tarantino also goes on about how the movies he selects for discussion he watches on his own private VHS collection, and how in God's name could anyone intentionally watch a brutally pan & scanned version of something like Dressed To Kill? As soon as I discovered the benefits of letterboxing in the mid-90s (it was a widescreen VHS copy of Jaws that made me see the light), any time I was forced to watch a movie in the pan & scan format from that point on made me wince. It's like the hipster "vinyl" movement, when listening to music on CD has always been a vastly superior experience (better sound, able to skip to any track instantaneously, more durable and long-lasting). Why would anyone want to watch a movie or listen to music on a inferior dead technology?