Blank Memories: The Lost Art of Taping Horror Movies Off Television

For people my age, many people older than me and a few younger, the video store was foundational. I was there almost every single weekend as a kid, and would spend way too long picking out a movie because I wanted to see everything. I needed to know about every film in the horror aisle, even the ones with covers so scary I could barely look at them. But for those times I couldn’t make it to the video store, there was one other vital way to discover movies, and that was television. I lived for discovering films on TV and there were some that became childhood favorites that I could only catch when they aired on television because the video store didn’t have them. Those were things like My Best Friend is a Vampire, My Boyfriend’s Back, and The Monster Squad. I also loved to discover horror movies on TV because while my parents were not nearly as strict about movies as some, they did have restrictions. I could rent anything rated R if it had been released prior to the 1990s, because my mom felt that “yesterday’s R is today’s PG-13.” But if a movie was edited for television? Then I could see anything.

You would think a horror film would lose its appeal at that point, given that all of the “good parts” were cut out, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to see, and especially to own, these movies so badly that however they were presented didn’t matter to me. The gore and nudity was cut out? Fair price if it meant I actually got to see it. It did, however, very much matter to my friends. Sleepovers always revolved around staying up late watching horror movies, but they not only were not impressed with the lack of gore in a taped off TV flick, but the fact that we had to constantly fast-forward through commercials. Sometimes the movie itself was incomplete, missing not only a few minutes but sometimes the entire first or third act. Air times were occasionally delayed, so taping a film off of television was never an exact science.

It’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t there, or was barely alive when these things existed, but there was a time when blank VHS tapes were as common as batteries. Every household had tons of them because they were sold absolutely everywhere and you never knew when something would come on that you simply had to record. Of course, you wanted to be economical all the same, and made sure as best you could that you got your mileage out of one tape before moving onto another. That was the truly exciting part. It wasn’t just the fuzzy image of those recorded movies, it was the combination of movies on a single tape. They could be aggravating when trying to navigate to a specific movie, but on the upside, they made for wildly eclectic marathons.

We’re over two decades removed from the DVD boom that led into Blu-ray, 4K and streaming, but I still remember those tapes. I remember the combinations of movies I had on so many various tapes without even really having to think that hard about it. Looking back at those tapes, it also reminds me that taping horror movies off of cable was also such a massive Halloween tradition for me when I was young. Any other time of year, a catching a horror flick on TV was unexpected, it was a surprise. But in October, you knew they’d be playing nonstop, and it was a chance to try and snag a few of the greats, every single year.

One of the tapes I returned to most often consisted of Child’s Play 2, Child’s Play 3, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. For a long time, I had been terrified of Chucky to the point that I could not even look at the covers of those movies in the video store. That changed when my dad bought the first film for me to help me conquer my fears, unknowingly kicking off an obsession. I taped Child’s Play 2 off of TNT in 1999, presented on Joe Bob Briggs’ MonsterVision. That was my introduction to the legendary Drive-In movie critic and horror host and was part of an all-night Halloween marathon in which he parodied the popularity of The Blair Witch Project with an investigation of the “Nair Witch” while hosting Carrie, Child’s Play 2, Phantasm and Phantasm II. I also caught a few minutes of both Carrie and Phantasm in that recording, my first exposure to either film, but both were random scenes from the middle of the movie, so I still don’t know how that happened.

Child’s Play 3 has an even longer story behind it. I taped it that same October off of the USA Network, and had attempted to tape it before, but it simply hadn’t recorded. This time it managed to record, but I was missing the first twenty minutes. My recording of Child’s Play 3 started as soon as the scene when teenage Andy Barclay is first introduced to his love interest De Silva and his non-Chucky nemesis Shelton. This time, my mom felt so bad that I had twice tried and semi-failed to record this movie that she offered to take me to Walmart to buy it. I was on cloud nine. But as soon as I was there, looking at the tapes, I saw what was at the time the brand-new Bride of Chucky and hatched a scheme. I decided to myself that I could live without the first twenty minutes of Child’s Play 3 if it meant getting away with this. I told her they didn’t have 3 and asked if I could get Bride of Chucky instead, insisting one Chucky was as good as another. She agreed. That Halloween season was the year that, in my eyes, I wound up owning every Chucky film that existed at the time. Even though two of them were cable broadcasts and one was missing nearly the entire first act.

I was usually lucky enough with horror franchises to start with the first one and rent my way through the series. I’m not like most horror fans I talk to, who were first exposed to every series with a random sequel — except for Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I didn’t start with the original in that franchise. My first exposure to it, other than knowing about it through my friends who had seen so many horror films and to whom I always felt like I was trying to catch up, was taping Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation off of HBO. We rarely got the premium channels outside of a short-lived subscription here and there every few years, or the beloved free preview weekends. Amazingly, my mother’s insistence that a film was fine to watch if it was on TV extended to the premium channels, which I didn’t understand even as a kid, but never questioned once.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was another movie I only semi-successfully taped. This time, instead of missing the beginning, I was missing the film’s climax. My recording cut off just after the freeway scene. It was a bummer not to get to see that wild final showdown in Freddy’s World, at the nexus of all world mythologies, but at least I got Sky Freddy, which is one of my favorite moments of the series. I was just thrilled, again, to “own” a Freddy movie, even if all of the gore was cut out and it was not even a complete broadcast.

The flip side of that situation was when we recorded Bram Stoker’s Dracula when I was very, very young. I was born in 1989, so given that I’m pretty sure this was a Pay-Per-View recording, I had to be really little. I still knew my monsters and had come to love Dracula, so when I was about five or six, I started watching it with my dad and that was one time when my mom was officially Not Having It. I think I got through the scene where Jonathan is confronted by Dracula’s Brides, and my mom turned it off. After that, to the horror of both myself and my father, we discovered she had taped over it. This had all been largely forgotten by third grade, when my dad rented the movie for my one day when I was sick, truly kicking off my obsession with that film in earnest. It was an obsession that ran so deep, I put in that old recorded tape to see what, if anything, was left. It turned out that the last ten minutes were still intact. As I started reading Dracula and feeding that obsession, I watched those last ten minutes more than I want to admit.

Those viewing numbers paled in comparison to when I taped The Faculty off of the Sci-Fi Channel in 2001, though. I obsessed over a lot of movies as a kid, usually franchises, because I could really dig in deep and keep that cycle of love going. But The Faculty was the only film I’ve ever been obsessed with in my life where there was a period of time in which I watched that movie every single day. And even in seventh grade, I could admit this was not the way to see it. My first exposure had been renting it when it came out. Taping it off of Sci-Fi had been a rediscovery in a sense. Dramatic moments were undercut by Jon Stewart yelling “Fooey!” But I didn’t care because I just loved that movie so much.

Still, my number one childhood obsession was the Puppet Master franchise. It was a love fueled by inaccessibility. I could only ever watch those movies by renting them at the video store or very rarely catching them on TV. Even if I wanted to buy them, as my mom would have let me once my love for that series reached its boiling point, the movies were out of print when I discovered them in the late ’90s. Luckily, I managed to tape a double feature of Puppet Master III and Puppet Master 5 off of the Sci-Fi Channel in 5th grade. I nearly wore that tape out. My fondest memory with that double feature was watching it for my birthday that year, showing those films to friends who had never seen them before. As I had kind of expected, Puppet Master III’s World War II setting was not every kid’s speed, but I will never forget watching them hoot and holler throughout Puppet Master 5 as the Puppets waged a low-budget war against the demon Sutekh and his evil Totem. At some point, I added Gremlins to that tape as well, taped from Comedy Central, perhaps perfecting it.

Blade and An American Werewolf in Paris were both taped off of Starz free preview weekends, as was Robocop 2. I cherished that recording of American Werewolf in Paris simply because I didn’t own any other werewolf movies and I had rented it when it came out. This was years before I eventually saw American Werewolf in London.

As someone obsessed with the Friday the 13th movies, but had never owned a single one of them, I’ll never forget taping an entire Friday the 13th marathon (save the original, because I didn’t like it at the time) on TNN in 2002. That felt like a game-changer to me, even though I was getting to the point where I was right on the cusp of being old enough to be allowed to buy those movies own my own. It didn’t matter. It thrilled me to have so many Jason flicks at my disposal (edited though they were) and I adored the “This Halloween, take it from Jason…” promos that played constantly throughout that marathon.

Maybe the biggest tape I need to talk about, though, is a 1998 USA Network broadcast of Halloween II. I owned the original Halloween by this point. In fact, I’m almost positive I bought it that very same Halloween season, and I had rented it before that. It blew my mind to discover that the sequel picked up immediately after the original and just carried on through the rest of that same night. I had never seen a horror movie do that before. That was another tape in constant rotation, and my friends didn’t even mind having to fast-forward through the commercials because it was simply so cool to throw this movie on right after the first one for a double feature. Last year, a friend of mine sent me a message that they had found a recorded tape labeled Halloween II in their dad’s basement and I immediately recognized the crooked label and my 4th grade handwriting. This was my tape. I must have brought it over at some point where it sat to fester for the next twenty years. This is the one childhood recorded tape that I have been reunited with. It is once again in my possession and will absolutely be a part of this year’s Halloween rotation.

The primary function of those tapes, however — aside from football games and NASCAR races — was recording episodes of one’s favorite TV shows. Those were the reasons blank tapes existed in the first place. My mom had several tapes simply labeled “Soaps.” I fondly remember taping episodes of The Flash and Robocop: The Series as they briefly re-ran on Sci-Fi. I was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but only got the WB sometimes, which made watching the show fairly difficult. I only managed to become as obsessive a viewer as I had always wanted to be when the series moved to UPN in its sixth season. I remember recording the two-hour premiere and watching it over and over, as well as recording several more episodes that season. The main event, though, was “Once More, With Feeling,” the musical episode, though once again, that recording was cut short because that original broadcast ran long.

There’s something more than simple nostalgia when it comes to these television broadcasts. There’s an archival nature to it. These films were presented on television in a way that they have never been shown since. Now, you simply get the movie with a few short, cosmetic editing touches to cut out the worst stuff, but the film itself remains more or less intact. TV broadcasts of horror films used to be fascinating because they butchered the movie, replaced well-laid curses with the worst lines you’ve ever heard, cut the gore to oblivion, yes, all of that’s true — but they also included scenes that were either originally cut from the film or were filmed specifically for television so that the presentation could meet an allotted runtime.

Child’s Play 2 had an ending that teased Chucky’s return. Child’s Play 3 features several scenes in its original TV version that were not included in theaters or on home video, particularly a great classroom lecture about never underestimating the enemy. It’s like a whole new version of the film. Halloween famously had several scenes shot for its television version by director John Carpenter when it premiered on NBC in 1981, to help better tie it to the then-upcoming Halloween II. Even though I owned the movie on VHS, I would watch Halloween any time I caught it on TV as a kid because I loved those additional early scenes between Loomis and Michael. It blew my mind that there were scenes that could only be seen if watched on cable.

I think the last movie I ever recorded was Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys, which was a no-brainer. I had been waiting years for that movie, obviously I wanted to own some version of it, and with it being a Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie I did not want to be at the mercy of waiting for it to air again. The classic double of Halloween 4 and Halloween 5 taped off AMC Fear Fest were also among my last earlier that October, but I was in high school at that point and could simply buy those movies if I wanted, so even when I was recording them it seemed kind of pointless.

There were so many more memories. Too many to count. My household had no shortage of recorded tapes with peeling stickers, crossed out titles barely making room for whatever was scribbled over it. This was such a pivotal part of engaging with media when I was young. If nothing else, I’m grateful for this walk down memory lane. I’m happy to tell a new generation all about a time when watching a movie occasionally meant fast-forwarding through haunting Duracell ads and local auto park commercials, and to stir those memories in those my age and older.

These were the perfect distillation of a time when movies were not instantly available, when catching the one you wanted felt like lightning in a bottle. I’m not saying it was ideal, not saying it was better, but it is at the very least a time worth remembering.