There are thousands of New Zealanders still collecting VHS tapes in 2026 – and Alex Casey is proud to be one of them.
It all began with a Marketplace score destined straight for the pool room. While scrolling through secondhand armchair options for our dog to destroy, I stumbled across a nearby VHS of the 1994 Australian cult comedy The Castle, still in its original factory seal, for just $2. Within 24 hours, I was picking up three Pak’nSave bags of VHS tapes from the next suburb over. Free, but coming at a huge emotional cost for my clutter-averse husband. He could see the twinkle of mania in my eyes as I lugged them inside – something ancient had been stirred deep within.
The VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) arrived in Aotearoa in the early 1970s, and breathless reports from the time signalled that a seismic shift was coming. “Just when some mortals – feeling oppressed by the flood of information that comes at them from all the media – are about to cry ‘enough’ another major revolution is looming,” reads a remarkably frightened story from The Press in 1971. “It comes in the form of video cassettes, cartridges that can be slipped easily into a special television set and that can play virtually anything.” Sounds… fine?
“It threatens to reshape the foundations of education, entertainment, and all communications.”
By the early 80s, there were dozens of different VCR machines available, ranging from $1300 to $3000. “Now available: VHS The World’s No 1 Home Recording System!” hollered a print ad for Ashby Berghs in Christchurch, which featured a television set plugged into a VCR that inexplicably appeared to be ‘playing’ the Mona Lisa. Renaissance appreciation aside, the ad boasted life-changing benefits: you don’t need to stay up anymore to watch the big international sports games, or miss out on the Saturday night feature if you’ve got plans.
Aside from taping things off the television, the VCR was also touted as an opportunity to curate your own custom viewing experience by purchasing or renting your favourite movies on VHS. Another bold prediction from The Press in 1971: “A library of tapes to supply all of Christchurch with each week’s episodes of Coronation Street would be a formidable proposition,” the report reads. “Television libraries of the future are more likely to be concerned with serials and will, perhaps, concentrate on accumulating stocks of classics or other popular programmes.”
We never did get our dedicated Coro Street video library, but we did get United Video, the first video store chain to open here in 1984, closely followed by Video Ezy in 1988 and later Civic Video. With 100s of video shop franchises across the country and countless more independent stores, these places were a brightly-coloured haven for running your fingers along the spines of film history and widening your eyes at the mysterious fleshy land beyond the beaded curtain. I once saw a man emerge with a big stack of “Fresh Meat” pornos, most likely five for $10.
Growing up in Featherston in the South Wairarapa, the nearest cinema was three towns over and about 40 minutes away. We didn’t have Sky, or even sexy new channels like TV4 or Prime in the late 90s. That meant that Star Video, a dark treasure trove nestled on State Highway 2, was my portal straight to Tinseltown. I can still see the precariously perched TV by the counter playing trailers, casting an alien glow on the already fluorescent yellow bags of popcorn. There were Tangy Fruits, there were tubes of old movie posters, there were endless possibilities.
When I wasn’t taking clutches of videotapes home myself, I was watching them with my friends. The terrifying 1991 VHS board game Nightmare saw a rapidly decaying Scottish gatekeeper bellow at you from the screen while you frantically rolled the dice and squealed with glee, trying to beat him before your time ran out. My childhood best friend wasn’t allowed to watch television but she could select from her parents’ small VHS collection, which meant we spent most of 1999 watching Silence of the Lambs, every single weekend, with the door and curtains closed.
Fast forward a few years later to the early 2000s, and things were changing fast with the introduction of the DVD, a smaller, sleeker and higher quality way of watching movies. Star Video downsized from its premium shop front to a smaller and creakier shack next to the Mobil. They began to sell off their VHS tapes en masse for $1 each, and I nabbed the murderer’s row of Bring It On, Miss Congeniality, Dumb and Dumber and Best in Show. I was 12 years old and watched them every night in my room, diligently rewinding each time for my future self.
When I moved up to Auckland in 2005, the video (now DVD) stores were even more impressive. The Civic Video in West Lynn shops, now a luxury indoor golf club, had enormous high ceilings like a cathedral, and a fairytale fibreglass tree in the centre of it that housed kid-friendly movies (it also had a dodgy beaded curtain nook too, but suitably far away). The nearby Video Ezy on Ponsonby Road was famously open for 24 hours, making it the perfect place for nerdy movie obsessed teens and/or shady characters who had been kicked out of nearby bars.
It’s hard to imagine what teenage me, or indeed that poor Press reporter who quaked at the prospect of VHS in 1971, would make of the catastrophic way we watch movies now. A weekend movie marathon no longer begins with an energizing trip to the video shop, but a paralysing dead-eyed scroll through thousands of titles, before making a half-hearted choice that you turn off after five minutes, just to repeat the process until you realise you actually just want to watch Bring It On, which is suddenly the only movie you can’t stream anywhere.
Perhaps it’s this cesspit of streaming platforms, where something as tremendous as a movie is shrunk down to a thumbnail often featuring whichever actress has the biggest boobs, that is making people return to physical media. When I first held The Castle on VHS, I felt the kind of spiritual zap that people buy big chunks of amethyst for. There’s nothing like being able to hold onto a real life representation of the pop culture that made you, even if that coveted piece happens to be a big box red clamshell edition of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
At least I’m not alone in my obsession with VHS that has lead me to own over 100 VHS tapes and two VCRS (one for playing, one for cleaning). There are at least 2,000 of us misty-eyed maniacs in a local Facebook group searching for their holy grail tapes, shuddering to think how many of our favourite movies have been thrown in the bin, or left in damp garages to grow mould. Many are after obscure horrors and big box 80s action movies, but you’ll find the occasional outlier with a bloodlust for old TV3 Suzy Cato tapes, or a hankering exclusively reserved for Bruce Lee.
My dredging of Marketplace and Trade Me has taken me inside some suburban scenes that wouldn’t look out of place in the exact kind of obscure horror film that would fetch upwards of $50 to the right buyer. I’ve found myself in a piss-reeking bedroom in Blenheim picking up Evil Dead videos from a woman who seemed to be – and I say this with love and adoration – an actual witch. I’ve weaved through rusted cars on a front lawn to pick up The Parent Trap off a sunlounger, and braved a scary dog to get my paws on a copy of Final Destination 2.
I’ve often wondered if I will be brutally murdered while picking up a VHS from a stranger on the internet. Once, while scooping up a copy of Halloween H20 in Woolston, I noticed the seller lock his front door behind me after I entered. “Sorry, bad habit,” he chuckled. In Auckland for a work trip last year, I dragged my then-editor Madeleine Chapman with me to pick up some foreign-language Disney tapes (another inexplicable kryptonite) from Morningside, and felt much better for it when the seller told us that the tapes were “down in the basement”.
Other times, I have roped in family and friends to enable my addiction. My mum picked up a Spongebob Squarepants VHS on my behalf in Whangārei, expertly packaged inside an empty Doritos bag and left behind a bike wheel. My 75-year-old father lugged home six banana boxes of free VHS for me from the Kapiti Coast, and I spent a weekend visit sorting through the mouldy tapes until I got a chest infection. One friend picked up The Polar Express (don’t @ me, it’s rare) from New Lynn, dodging what they described as “a giant poo” on the deck outside.
These examples may seem extreme, but they pale next to the dedication of some other titans in the VHS collecting community. When my dad sent through photos of the many, many videos he picked up from Kapiti, I instantly zoomed in on a Thomas the Tank Engine title – I knew there was a Thomas fiend in the Facebook group. I DM’d him the screenshot and he was immediately keen to nab it, sending me the address of his sourcing guy in Feilding, who was soon going to be shipping a crate of Thomas VHS back to his home… in New York City.
Even if there are flickers here and there of a VHS renaissance – Dead Video in Lyttelton is an ever-growing haven for collectors, Taylor Swift brought a VHS to the Toy Story 5 premiere last week and the first straight-to-VHS film in 20 years was released in April – there’s no denying that it remains a cumbersome and fallible medium to pursue in 2026. So why are so many of us still chasing the VHS thrill? I asked my fellow die-hards in the New Zealand VHS collectors group, and was inundated with dozens of surprisingly moving responses.
As you might expect, nostalgia was a huge factor. “Back in the day, anyone who had a large VHS collection at home was immensely wealthy,” wrote one commenter. “So my collection makes me feel old timey rich, especially considering my childhood VHS collection was some blank tapes with Ninja Turtles and the Masters of the Universe movie taped off TV.” Others connect VHS with certain chapters in their lives – inheriting the damaged built-in VHS TV after the Christchurch quakes, or escaping the “chaos of my household” through Pokemon tapes.
“The feeling of being transported into a romanticised retro past that – while fictional – is rejuvenating for the soul,” wrote another VHS fan. “Much like how I imagine the poets of the Romantic era would’ve felt about Arthurian legend.”
But several collectors are not even thinking about the past at all, but the future. “I collect for my future kids to watch the low-stimulating animated movies that I grew up on, instead of the addictive overstimulating ones that they produce now.” Parents in the group shared that VHS tapes can’t be scratched like DVDs, and builds patience in a world encouraging kids to swipe YouTube shorts every few seconds. “The endless options on YouTube and smart TV apps are so bad for kids,” wrote one. “This way we can be selective of what we want them to watch.”
And while the low quality may be off-putting to many accustomed to the high definition of 4K, VHS collectors live for the fuzziness, poetically described by one as “adding a dreamy feel, like a rainy day”. Several mentioned that older movies were made for VHS, and that “the blurry, low definition hides a lot of sins that HD brings right to the forefront.” The mechanical qualities of VHS were also of huge appeal: “the whirring and humming; the tactile interface – it all just scratches a part of my brain that I just don’t get with touchscreens and mouse clicks.”
You’ll notice nobody mentioned money – most VHS sell for less than a coffee. A mint copy of Star Wars might fetch $60,000 in the States, but you’d be hard pushed to find anything like that in this corner of the world, especially nearly 50 years later. With that said, our down-country ways do have their advantages – New Zealand held onto VHS technology longer than most, and as a result we were one of the only territories to distribute Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on VHS in 2005 (if you’ve got a copy, hold onto it like the almighty golden snitch).
As much as I try to convince myself my sealed copy of The Castle will be our ticket to a better life one day (tell her she’s dreaming!), my motivation for hoarding physical media is primarily existential. Like everyone, I spend most of my time on the internet. Apart from the one time I ghost-wrote a YouTuber’s book (find it in an op shop near you), the entire last 12 years of my professional life only exists online, which you can’t hold in your hands and you certainly can’t guarantee won’t get warped with upside down images and weird code as the years wear on.
There’s also the distinct suspicion that social media and streaming is rapidly fizzing holes into my brain like a Berocca and that the algorithm is shaping me into the worst, laziest version of myself. Do I actually even like true crime? Or is it just that The Dead Lady Living Next Door is number one on Netflix, and dissecting the death of yet another woman seems easier than thinking? I’m sick of not trusting my own entertainment instincts, waiting for Spotify Wrapped to tell me what music I like, and Letterboxd to remind me what my favourite movies are.
The most vulnerable reveal of all? I don’t actually even watch my VHS tapes. But when I peek at my collection, however corny and embarrassing some of the titles are, it serves the same purpose as the totem in Inception – this is the real world, this is what you like, and you really needn’t fritter away another hour of your life in a fugue state watching some guy review pies on your phone. The more time that passes, the more I yearn to return to that dusty $1 stack of Bring It On, Best In Show, Miss Congeniality and Dumb and Dumber, and just press rewind.
