The only horror I could get

The closest I come to the hoary old thrill of browsing at the video store these days is when I go to the local library to load up on the triple features I need while I'm working, and I'm still amazed that it doesn't cost a cent. It's all free with the library card, and I load up on half a dozen films a week.

I'm amazed because having your own copy of anything used to be ridiculously expensive, especially if you had the audacity to want it for longer than one night. I once got hit with a huge $70 bill for a copy of Turkey Shoot that got stolen from my car while I was renting it.

If I actually wanted my own copy of something, especially one that wasn't second-hand, I had to save up for it. The first film I ever owned on video tape was Pink Floyd The Wall, and that cost me $35 in 1988 money. I could have bought 10 X-Men comics for that.

So the only way to build up any kind of movie library was to haunt the video stores, and pick up the stuff they've put out for sale. It didn't matter that they had been played hundreds of times already, or that they were covered in the store's stickers, or were just usually the shitty movies that nobody cared about anymore, every one was precious.

Or, at least, between 10 and 15 bucks, which was still a lot of money for young Bob. I still managed to scratch together enough spare change to get enough, and of course I tried to get as much horror as I could.

The first was the best - I picked up Dawn of the Dead at the Record Parlour in Timaru for $10 of birthday money, and I still have it now. I was also stoked to get my own Robocop, especially because the one I had taped off the TV was censored to hell, and I also still have the gorgeous Jean Rollin suckfest that I got in 1995 up on the bookshelf.

But those were rare gems, and I still ended up with a  load of very dodgy movies, like CHUD, or Waxwork, or a compilation of the Freddy's Nightmares show.

They weren't, by any measure, the greatest things in the world, but they were the start of a film collection, and I held onto them for years without watching them, (I'm still not sure I ever watched that Freddy thing.)

Now I own and have access to hundreds of films, the sort of movies I would have killed to see in the 90s. But those first films, picked up from video stores and second hand stores around the country, were somewhere to start, and we all have to start somewhere.