My local used DVD store is my happy place. I love to wander the shelves and see what kinds of things I can find. It’s a bit of a hunt, honestly. There are shelves and shelves of DVDs, and it takes a good eye to find the good stuff. Sometimes it’s award winning films I’ve never seen, sometimes it’s movies I loved as a kid, something I loved a long time ago and haven’t thought about since, or (my favorite) two dollar films I’ve never seen that look delightfully awful.

I’ve had a few DVDs that were considered mine for a bit, mostly Christmas or Birthday gift movies when I was a kid like Aquamarine or Hocus Pocus. I didn’t properly start collecting until a bit after college. Being the gothic and horror fan that I am, I was gifted a stack of six horror DVDs as a secret santa, and it became the humble start. It was nice, having a little stack from someone who cared about me who picked out some films they knew I’d like.

From there my collection started to grow. The local place offered a deal of “buy three films, get three free” and I was more than happy to take advantage of that. I picked up so many different films—though at first I called it research. I was starting my Frankenstein project and was just hoping to find any of the old universal films or some other random Frankenstein films out there. I found a few, but mostly I got lost in the aisles, finding all sorts of gems of movies I loved and decided I should take home.

Doing movie nights with friends started to become a favorite go-to activity. I would direct them to my shelf and have them pick something from it. It was a pretty eclectic thing, even then. Certainly a number of horror films, but also a number of odder and whimsical picks, like Big Fish, Mr. Right, and I Love You Phillip Morris. It felt fun to both have my friends see my personality as laid out by what I chose to have on shelf as well as see theirs by seeing what they chose to watch.

At some point, my father asked me why I was bothering with DVDs and physical media in general. I hadn’t really considered the why; I just knew I got excited with the collecting. But, stopping to think about it, there were many reasons. First and foremost, you cannot trust streaming services. Even if you “buy” a film from them, if they lose the rights to that film, you simply lose the film you paid good money for. So many good shows and movies have simply quietly vanished from streaming services, and there is just no legal way to watch them anymore. As someone who really loves media and feels like I process things through it, I don’t want to lose any of the ones I love.

Secondly, a DVD feels better. I know I sound like a pretentious vinyl fiend when I say so (which, for the record, I also collect), but it is unfortunately true. I love being able to hold up a movie to show what I’m talking about or take out a few to prepare for an evening.

When I do a movie night at a friend’s house, I never show up without anything less than four DVDs on hand. There have been times where this didn’t work out as my friends didn’t have a DVD player, a fact that baffled me, but I still did it anyways. It simply felt right to come prepared with a selection, if nothing else than to help narrow down choices. I have marvelous friends but a lot of them are not great at decision making, especially when streaming offers so many different options. At the very least, holding up the physical DVDs immediately helped narrow things down.

On top of that, it was a fun exercise for me to make my initial selection. I feel like a wine sommelier, finding the perfect things to pair with the evening. There’s a lot of factors: mood, genre, how am I feeling, how are my friends feeling, what are no-go topics, what haven’t we watched before. I flip through the boxes until I find a handful that would do well and let my friends take it from there.

I also just find joy and relief in that space. A few years ago there was a sort of protest on Calvin’s campus while Synod was making the first of their infamous decisions regarding queer people and eventually got so overwhelmed I started breaking down. I left. I left and I went straight to the used DVD store to calm down. After walking the aisles a bit, I felt a lot better. While I was there I found a few copies of two of my favorite movies and met a phenomenal trans woman that I quickly became friends with, bonding over Rocky Horror and other queer cinema. It felt good that while things on the campus were unfolding in their awful way, places like this and people like us could still find each other to just be ourselves together.

Eventually I had to move and my DVD collection was put into a box. This didn’t stop me from continuing to collect. If anything, it made things worse because as long as it could go into the box, I didn’t think about how many DVDs I actually had. It wasn’t until I moved AGAIN and started trying to put things back on shelves that I realized just how massive my collection had gotten! What I thought was just my small little box just about filled the bookshelf I’d gotten immediately.

Since then I’ve only collected more and my shelf is starting to get a little tight. Before too long I’ll have to weed things down and get rid of some of my finds (not all of those two dollar delightfully awful films paid off). But for now, I love my collection. I love walking over to it before a night with friends and picking my favorites. I love sorting it—seeing how many Werewolf to Vampire movies I have and sticking Underworld and Twilight right in between. I love that when the internet is down, I can still watch my favorite movies. And I will continue to love walking through used stores, library sales, and vintage shops to find DVD copies of things I love.

Sam Koster

Sam is unsure what exact words describe them best: Lunatic has been used, Gothic Romantic is apt, and Big ol’ Nerd is reductive but true. Mostly they just like stories in whatever form stories can be found. Sam specializes in Frankenstein, running “The Uncanny Productions” on YouTube, but they also dabble with podcasts, singing, and theatre as well. They have a DVD collection that’s long outgrown its shelf, a coffin they use as a desk, and an unrelenting joy for things that are spooky, ridiculous, or magical.