The new Scream movie is in cinemas today but let’s head back 26-years to when the original Scream hit video rental with this original UK VHS TV commercial from 1996!
VHS
Mama, Papa, Zombie (1984)
A fun find today via our good friend Kosmas, here’s a German TV documentary from 1984 looking at the boom in VHS horror films in Germany and how they maybe effect kids and teenagers. Turns out German documentaries on this subject seem to turn out just as inconclusive s any other countries, a lot of talk about not vert much, but it’s still a fun watch along for us! It’s all in German with no subtitles, but if you use the YouTube auto translate option you can just about follow along.

A real highlight is when a group of unsuspecting parents sit down to watch Lucio Fulci‘s City Of The Living Dead – it doesn’t go down well!

Watch the full documentary now and don’t forget to turn on auto translate!
Violent Tapes – 1990 USA News Report On Horror VHS!
Here’s a 1990 vintage 3-part news report from Channel 3 USA that looks at the impact of Horror videos on teenagers. Includes footage of vintage VHS rental stores, kids watching Hellraiser II, interview footage of horror star Linnea Quigley and director Brian Yuzna on the set of his film Bride Of Re-Animator.
20th Century Fox – The VHS Years
This 20th Century Fox VHS trailer tape turned up on ebay recently, it was odd to see as I’d never come across this series of tapes before despite having worked in the video retail for a good few years by that point, I figured I would have seen these tapes around somewhere. Unless that is they were for Rental stores, which is very possible as well.
Anyway I knew it would be very mainstream titles on it, but was hoping for at least some sort of dealer info or maybe a fun intro, but now, it’s simply 7 theatrical trailers played back-to-back with nothing else. Still it is interesting to see how different films looked and felt even just 19-years back, there’s no superhero films and only one sequel. I’ve uploaded it now to our YouTube channel, take a watch below.
Featured on the tape are:
Legend Of Bagger Vance
Say It Isn’t So!
Tigerland
Dr Dolittle 2
Monkeybone
Men Of Honour
Anti-Trust
And heading back about 20-years from this tape, here’s a look back to the very early 1980s and the second in the CBS / FOX The Hit List trailers tapes!