I'm talking about a time that people under twenty cannot know. A bygone era when video cassettes and VCRs reigned supreme in homes. That of a technology for recording video signals on magnetic tape which is changing the face of cinema, upsetting the industry and democratizing video. Not bad for a small black box and the bulky device that allows you to read it.

Betamax is dead, long live VHS

It's impossible to talk about VHS without first mentioning its big competitor, Sony's Betamax format. In 1975, the Japanese firm was the first to take the plunge. His recording machine and magnetic tape cassettes started the wave of mainstream rewinding.

Here are the four commandments: insert your tape, start recording; rewind the tape and watch. Revolutionary, because until now, the video recorder, invented in the early 1950s, was a tool almost exclusively reserved for professionals.

A 1975 Sony Betamax

The device is expensive, but viewers are snapping it up. It's a tsunami that floods the American market and upsets the balance of power established in the film entertainment industry. Even if Betamax was quickly dethroned by JVC's VHS standard (cheaper and with a longer recording time), it was the spark that ignited the cultural revolutions that would punctuate the following decade.

Stop, thief!

The cassette, this Robin Hood of modern times. Reviled by the major American film studios and television channels in its early days, it redistributes the cards of an industry deemed to be very conservative. The Majors cry robbery and looting, consumers freed from the constraints of the television program rub their hands.

It opens up new horizons for smart people who use it to remove advertising from recordings and watch their films without cuts. A huge shortfall for Hollywood at a time when advertising is everywhere on television.

VCR and VHS tape

Add in copyright infringement and you're done. Faced with the financial abyss, the industry plays its all in sticking a lawsuit to Sony, without more success. The Majors are dismissed after almost ten years of legal battle and a passage before the Supreme Court.

The massification of VHS is on the way, tens of millions of people are using it and nothing seems to be able to stop it. From a threat, it quickly becomes an economic opportunity for producers. However, they are far from being the first to feel the good vein. A new type of store appears, the video club, a place dedicated to the rental of cassettes, which are still too expensive to be accessible to everyone.

Porn to be alive

The rise of recorders has nothing to do with the giants of cinema. By investing crazy sums for the distribution of their blockbusters a few years later, they will end up controlling the market. On the other hand, it is a completely different bird that makes it take off: the pornographic film, a rare species and a forbidden fruit.

Promotional voucher for erotic VHS

They feel the potential of the new technology and X films invade the stalls of video clubs. Unsurprisingly, the Americans adhere and sex on tape is also a place of choice in the intimacy of living rooms. So here are the VHS tapes and their porn questioning the moral values ​​of cinema by pushing puritanical America to its limits. She is not at the end of her troubles and quickly, the horror film makes her go from one horror to another.

VHS of some of the most cult horror films (credit: Collectors Weekly)

Cannibal Holocaust, Evil Dead or Anthropophagus... so many trashy and gory films, symbols of a new, uninhibited wave that finds its medium in VHS. The directors do not forbid themselves anything and show on the screen atrocities that they would never have been able to project in theaters. To the delight of teenagers and young adults of the time.

Back to the niche for the pioneers

All good things must come to an end. Gore, porn and other subversive content almost monopolize the market for a while, but in the end, Hollywood (almost) always wins. The sector brews too much money to remain indefinitely the prerogative of a few precursors. While films for the general public are now massively available and sold on cassettes, video-club channels are appearing and Hollywood is gradually regaining control.

Disney cassettes are a good symbol of the studios taking control (credit: SoBusyGirl)

In 1987, the famous Blockbuster franchise brought VHS rental into a new era, that of cassette and VCR capitalism. The sector is lining up and becoming much wiser under the impulse of the studios. Distribution revenues exploded, so much so that they soon exceeded those of films in theaters.

Few would have predicted it, but the VHS tape relegates cinema to the role of simple loss leader, a banal marketing tool useful for the promotion of small black boxes. Unprecedented at a time when dark rooms were still the entertainment par excellence.

Interior of a Blockbuster franchise store (Credit: Kim Komando Show)

Hollywood took the turn in time and saved the furniture by reversing its jacket. Since then, the pattern has repeated itself with DVD and the cinema is also facing competition from SVOD platforms such as Netflix. The VHS format has done its job and other technologies have long since replaced it, never revolutionizing the industry as much as it did during its decades of glory.

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