The video store was never just a store. It was a sanctuary of mood lighting and lurid box art, a secular chapel where the sacred texts were VHS clamshells, and the acolytes were anyone killing time between movie nights and minor existential crises. For kids who grew up in the 80s and 90s, the cultural memory of those aisles is tactile: plastic drawer labels, rewind penalties, magnetized red-and-white shrink-wrap security stickers, and the smell of dusty carpet.
It was in those fluorescent labyrinths that many of us learned how to become moviegoers rather than merely watch movies. My own education ran the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime. One week it was Porky’s—a syllabus of locker-room humor and secondhand embarrassment. The next it was Cinema Paradiso, which taught me that movies could break your heart into a hundred warm pieces and stitch it back together with a flickering projector bulb and a kiss cut from a reel. No algorithm made those connections. A human did—some minimum-wage cinephile mystic who’d nudged me toward Tornatore when I returned a stack of Jean-Claude Van Damme tapes.
Videoheaven, the new essay-documentary by Alex Ross Perry (Pavements), understands that the video store was more than a retail format. It was a cultural organism. Narrated with warm, sardonic grace by Maya Hawke, and constructed from hundreds of film clips, TV commercials, and archival detours, the movie is less history lesson than seance. Over 172 minutes, Perry summons a half-forgotten social ecosystem: the mom-and-pop empires, the big-chain homogeneity, the adult cinema backrooms, the eternal figure of the video-store clerk as gatekeeper and guru.
On November 13, Videoheaven lands in Catskill for a screening and Q&A with Perry himself, hosted at The Community Theater—mid-glow-up, back in the role it was always meant to play: a civic hearth for collective viewing. The 500-seat auditorium feels like a declaration that small towns can hold big cinematic ideas without apologizing for scale. Partnering for the event is Sleepover Trading Co., Catskill’s proudly analog torchbearer and purveyor of the exact sort of physical-media ritual the film enshrines. If the pandemic gave rise to Zoom pods and sourdough starters, Sleepover answered with laminated membership cards and a new age of rewound enchantment.
Before the screening, Night School, the Athens pizzeria, will sling pies at 5pm. Afterward, Perry will talk shop with Sleepover co-founder Rob Ribar about the film, the era, and the stubborn thrill of VHS—its flaws, its humanity, its refusal to recommend anything based on your “viewing profile.”
There is something vital about watching Videoheaven in a resurrected community theater, in a town making its own post-retail myth in real time. Sleepover will also use the evening to herald its new video rental program, launching by year’s end, resurrecting the tactile social contract of browsing shelves, borrowing tapes, and returning them—rewound or otherwise—with no late fees and every member holding their own analog talisman: a laminated card, smooth at the corners, ready to be swiped across nostalgia itself.
The old video stores taught us discovery by accident, by chat, by gesture, by proximity. Videoheaven reminds us that our movie education was never happening on the screen alone. It happened in the aisles, in the margins, in the judgment-free transaction of handing a stranger a tape that might rearrange their interior weather.
