Blast to the Past: A Virtual Tour of Childhood Video Stores

Video stores were essential to my childhood. They were an integral part of my growing up. They were not only obviously instrumental in establishing my love of film, of the horror genre and so many movies and franchises I am passionate about to this day, they were simply my favorite place to be. Now that I’m over thirty, video stores have been gone (for the most part) for quite some time. It’s been over a decade since I last stepped foot in one. The last one I ever visited even semi-regularly was the Movie Gallery in Farmington, Maine, where I went to college. When they went out of business, I bought Pumpkinhead 4 and Tourist Trap and they gave me Creepshow III for free because they realized as they were ringing it up that they had never rented it even once. I only went into that place a small handful of times, but I still remember that. That’s the thing. I remember every video store dating back to early childhood, especially the ones I visited regularly. Those are the ones I want to talk about, because those are the places I truly called home.

They were what marked the weekend for me. Depending on where I was or who I was with, I would walk down to whichever spot was closest with cash in hand and I would spend forever just browsing the aisles, usually never stepping foot outside the horror aisle, except on certain occasions. When I found a movie I loved, it was hard to let it go. More often than not, as excited I was at the prospect of every title I saw, I would leave with a movie I had already seen a dozen times.

Everyone has those formative film experiences, whether they’re video stores or memories of movie theater outings, certain films they saw or just being surrounded by so many shelves of so many titles and so very many possibilities. It’s hard to narrow them down. But, like everyone, I had my own particular haunts, places that will always be what immediately come to mind whenever I hear video stores being discussed. So, with that in mind, let me guide you on a little walk down memory lane. But make sure to adjust your tracking, because we’re rewinding this one back pretty far.

Tom Cat (Southwest Harbor, Maine)

Tom Cat was not so much a video store as it was a convenience store that also happened to rent videos. It was where the local teens came to get liquored up, and kind of had an “anything goes” kind of environment that probably scared some people off, but for most people in town, it was exactly the right kind of atmosphere. As a kid, it was one of my favorite places to be. In the summer, I’d walk down there with friends and get loaded up on penny candy and Sour Punch Straws. More than anything, though, I loved it for its video selection, which contained titles you just didn’t see at the other, bigger video stores in town. Tom Cat was where I first remember seeing the box art for movies like The Deadly Spawn, Return of the Living Dead 3 and Vampire Journals. All of which I wouldn’t see until much later, but the box art stuck out to me all the same.

I did happen to rent some of those offbeat selections, though. Tom Cat was where I first saw movies like Leprechaun, Jack-O and Puppet Master 5, all of which I loved regardless of quality — particularly in Jack-O’s case. And Puppet Master 5 was crucial, to me, as it was yet another link in the chain of what became my biggest childhood obsession, though we’ll get into that later on.

There was one other, huge thing I loved about Tom Cat, though. See, we had a friend of the family who was also my babysitter through most of my growing up, and when I fell hard into loving horror, my mom made the ridiculous rule that “yesterday’s R is today’s PG-13.” Obviously she didn’t know how much the MPAA had cracked down on the genre since the gory exploits of the ’80s, leading the ’90s to be pretty watered down in comparison. My parents would let me rent horror, but not anything new, so I would turn to this family friend to get that particular fix.

Tom Cat kept me current. It was where I saw anything that had just come out, including movies that were absolutely huge when it came to fueling the fire of my ever-growing love of horror. Notable titles I distinctly remember renting include Scream, Scream 2, The Faculty, The Relic, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Halloween H20 and An American Werewolf in Paris.

Movie Gallery (Ellsworth, Maine)

Movie Gallery stands out from the rest of these childhood haunts because it wasn’t actually located in my home town. When my parents separated when I was a kid, my dad kind of bounced around from rented house to rented house or — not too uncommonly — hotel. He worked in Ellsworth, and most of the houses he rented weren’t too far from there, so whenever I would spend the weekend with my dad, that’s where we’d go for our movie rental options. And it was a blast, honestly. He’d let me rent pretty much anything, because (and I obviously didn’t really get this until years later) it was a tough time and he wanted to keep me happy. Also, he watched plenty of Sci-Fi Channel and had a deeper love for goofy, trashy movies than he ever really cared to admit.

Looking back, though, this Movie Gallery introduced me to so many of my favorite movies of all time. So many of the biggest obsessions started right here, a lot of them in that stretch of time when he’d moved into that first rented house and the transition into the new normal was at its most awkward. It was there that, having already become immediately obsessed just from hearing about it, I first saw Puppet Master. It was there I first saw the all-time fave Halloween. Or another major favorite, Fright Night, which I had just discovered through the comic book series.

Usually, my dad rolled his eyes at a lot of the movies I rented, but I remember when we rented Halloween for the first time, he sat there glued to his seat. At one point, he even remarked out loud, “Whoa, this is actually good.” He liked it so much that he let me take it back to my mom’s house at the end of the weekend, as Movie Gallery had a 5-day rental for older films, much to my mom’s annoyance. Which was understandable, as the video store was two minutes from where he worked, and a half hour away from her.

One time I got sick and my dad went out for soup and supplies and came back with a surprise stack of movies to keep me occupied. The stack consisted of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the original IT miniseries, which was spread across two tapes. Once again, these both became huge childhood obsessions. It was the first time I ever saw IT, and while I’d seen the 1992 Dracula as a very small child, my mom taped over it when she realized just how not safe for kids it was, so it felt like I was seeing that one for the first time all over again.

On another occasion I’ll never forget, I was looking over the Children of the Corn movies at one point, probably when I was on a huge Stephen King kick, and my dad said “screw it, let’s rent all of them.” And so we did, planning our night around a Children of the Corn marathon, and it was a decision he immediately regretted, as he was clearly unprepared for the diminishing budgets and amped-up campiness of each successive entry.

Other notable titles include Pet Sematary Two, Bram Stoker’s The Mummy, The Howling, It Came from the Sky, Repossessed, just a weird, weird mix I could not be more grateful for.

Southwest Video (Southwest Harbor, Maine)

It’s weird that Southwest Video was my second most frequented video store growing up, considering my uncle (well, great-uncle) ran it, at least for a while. To add insult to injury, when I walked down to the video store that was my favorite (and was closer) every weekend, I would usually cut through his yard. But that’s not to undercut Southwest Video itself, because make no mistake, it had the goods. I’d also say it was probably the favored video store in town. It was well-organized and had a leg up on the competition in that it also rented video games. Whenever I would go stay over night with the aforementioned friend of the family, this is where we’d go. It’s also the place that’s responsible for kicking off my love of horror, period. And that’s good, because horror was one of the few things divided by genre. Most of the store was divided by actor, which is novel in theory, but unless it was your classic Schwarzenegger or Eastwood or Jackie Chan movie, everything that wasn’t a new release was pretty impossible to find.

While I had been a fan of the Universal Monsters as a young kid, it was one of my best friends in elementary school who introduced me to Jason and Freddy and totally opened me up to a world I hadn’t even known existed. He’d seen all the movies, and told me wildly inaccurate half-remembered stories about them, building them up in my mind for weeks before my very first sleepover, in which we somehow convinced my mom to let us rent Friday the 13th. That blew my mind until the killer turned out not to be Jason, something I was not warned about considering my friend didn’t really know one entry apart from another. Before giving up on the series altogether, I turned once again to the family friend, who let me rent the then-fairly-recent Jason Goes to Hell, which I picked both because it was the newest and because it had Jason’s name in the title. I also remember renting Friday the 13th Part 3 with her and her eyes lighting up when that first in-your-face baseball bat shot came up and she gleefully remembered seeing it in 3-D in the theater.

She also had a Nintendo, which I did not. That was fun for any kid, because it offered a new gaming experience. But it was also great because Southwest Video rented games, and happened to have the Friday the 13th game. There were several occasions in which I wouldn’t even rent a movie, and would just rent that game instead, and even though it was impossibly difficult, I always felt like a satisfied customer.

Southwest Video also introduced me to the first horror franchise I ever fully fell in love with, thanks to a sale getting rid of a lot of tapes that weren’t doing business. Before I fully immersed myself in the genre with Freddy and Jason, I had Critters. These movies were the perfect introductory horror, because they weren’t R-rated, but weren’t so tame that I didn’t feel like I wasn’t getting the experience of a horror movie. My parents let me rent anything PG-13 and once we picked up Critters 1 and 2 from that sale, they became regular watches all through my youth.

When my mom eventually got remarried when I was a teenager and my whole family dynamic shifted once again, Southwest Video became a staple in a way I didn’t really realize how much I needed at the time. We were all wildly different kids and it was a hectic new situation for all of us, but those trips to the video store were the one thing we all had in common. We all loved renting movies. And while I thought absolutely nothing of it at the time, I love that shared experience looking back. Whether it was renting The Ring for the first time or sitting through comedies that time forgot like The New Guy, they’re all fond memories. And that’s huge, really, because fond memories are not what your teenage years are really known for.

Ya Gotta Love It (Southwest Harbor, Maine)

Ya Gotta Love It was the place. There was no beating it, in my mind. It was my home away from home. While I obviously have so many great memories of all the above video stores, this was where I spent my weekends, almost every weekend. My mom would put $2.50 in my hand and I’d just walk down on my own, or with a friend when it was the start of a sleepover excursion, and endlessly browse the horror aisle. I saw so many favorites for the first time from there, but really, I just loved being there. I loved the broken Slush Puppy machine and the faded Batman Forever poster. I was there so often that they knew me there, and — more importantly — they knew my tastes. Mary, the lady who ran it and whose name I can’t believe I still remember, would throw out recommendations, which often fell on deaf ears when my obsession with Puppet Master kicked into high gear. Ya Gotta Love It had the first three entries in that franchise, and while I loved browsing the horror aisle, I would often find myself just renting those three on a rotating basis.

But it goes back further than that, too. It’s hard to write about anything in particular when it comes to Ya Gotta Love It because it was the source of so many memories, including many of the earliest video store memories I have. Before I fell hard into horror, I remember renting the 1990 Captain America movie and the pilot of the Flash TV series, which was also edited into its own film. I also rented Carnosaur at that age, which I believe was mistakenly put in the kids’ section. When I would first browse the horror aisle, it was in a mix of fascination and fear. I remember being creeped out by the covers of the Night of the Demons movies, spooked and fascinated by The Gate, Silent Night, Deadly Night and Sleepaway Camp, but nothing terrified me more than the covers to the Child’s Play flicks. Before I finally conquered my fear, watched them, and became a fan, Chucky lived rent-free in my nightmares. As a young kid, I would literally have to turn the covers over just to be able to browse.

I saw so many favorites via Ya Gotta Love It that it’s almost hard to narrow anything down. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was a huge one. As I was renting my way though the series and not seeing the Jason I’d been expecting, that was the one that cemented the character and the franchise as a favorite, and I stuck on it for so long, renting it over and over, before I continued making my way through the franchise. Silver Bullet, Waxwork, Creepshow 2, Halloween 4 and 5, these were all movies I rented over and over again because they were just everything young me was looking for. I’ll never forget renting The Fog for the first time, and my friend and I watching the fog roll in as we walked down to return it, imagining ghosts closing in on us.

Eventually, I was such a frequent customer that she would let me go behind the counter, to take my pick of the movies that either stopped doing business or had never rented that well to begin with. This only led me to more favorites, and it was where I first fell in love with movies like Pumpkinhead for the first time. But it wasn’t all horror, of course. Ya Gotta Love It was my go-to for everything, and was where I saw such defining films of the ’90s as Austin Powers and She’s All That for the first time as well.

She was the best video store clerk a young weirdo could ask for. Her favorite actor was Lance Henriksen and her favorite Stephen King adaptation was Silver Bullet, so naturally her taste was impeccable. The whole video store was a disorganized mess, but it was my disorganized mess, and I cherished it. Even the brief, ill-conceived time that it attempted to sell pizza. When the store was closing, she tried to give me those first three Puppet Master tapes for free and I declined as I’d already gotten my hands on them by that point, but man, do I wish I’d taken them now. Some of the video stores I grew up with now sit as empty husks, most have been replaced by successful businesses. And all of that feels natural, except for this one. Whenever I go back to visit my hometown, it always feels weird to see that building now home to a successful restaurant, because no matter what, it will always be Ya Gotta Love It to me.