In a basement in the Mission, the faithful worship at the altar of VHS

On a recent Wednesday evening, Mitsu Okubo was excitedly showing a guest his collection of VHS tapes. Those facts, in themselves, aren’t all that notable: Every Wednesday, Okubo and his friend and collaborator Luca Antonucci* *invite people to their basement space on 23rd and Capp streets to watch movies on VHS and, well, Okubo seems generally very excitable, especially when he’s talking about VHS.

Almost every inch of the windowless Mission basement, which also serves as the office for Antonucci’s art book publishing company Colpa Press, is filled with lurid, oversized VHS boxes. “We’ve been collecting for maybe like 15 or 20 years,” Okubo said of the 3,000 or so tapes he and Antonucci have amassed from defunct video stores, estate s…

The basement contains everything you could imagine and many things you could not: instructional videos like How to Style a Scarf (1988), teen exploitation crapola like Heavy Metal Summer (1988), and porn parodies like *Foreskin Gump *(1994). Auteurs such as David Lynch and Francis Ford Coppola get their own sections. There’s even a display of San Francisco-set movies that could serve as a to-watch list for Walter Thompson’s column for us, San Francisco Plays Itself.

Tower of San Francisco-set movies. Photo: Matt Haber/Gazetteer SF

Each lovingly preserved and more-or-less organized box is a relic of the era before streaming services flattened even the most epic movies to little tiles waiting to be selected or scrolled past and forgotten forever. The space that these tapes take up is part of their point: These are physical objects that exist in the physical world and, as such, they demand your attention. At the very least, they demand your acknowledgement.

As Okubo put it in the intro to The Basement Tapes, the art book he and Antonucci put out with the cult film restoration company Vinegar Syndrome in 2025, “The VHS tape stands as a reminder of a time when entertainment demanded more from us. It asked us to engage fully, to give space and time, and in return, it offered something deeper, richer, more tactile and more meaningful: a sense of wholeness and belonging.”

Okubo told me that the heart of the basement collection is horror, and it’s true that many of the boxes seem to feature slashers, killers, and hideous mutant freaks of one kind or another. Hundreds of horror tapes are packed into a small alcove that Okubo and Antonucci call (pace the ever viral Criterion Closet) the Cretin Closet.

It’s here that visitors pose with a box of their choice for Instagram, a way for grown-up ‘90s kids to celebrate the video nasties of their youth. I picked Blood Sucking Freaks (1976), a truly vile movie directed with a sledgehammer and power drill by Joel M. Reed that my best friend Brett and I rented for a middle school sleepover and that, as I recall, my mom grounded me over. It was so traumatic that I didn’t even want to rewatch the trailer to this bloody mess to link to it here.

“I’ve been watching horror movies since I was a kid,” Okubo boasted as we browsed. “I actually have very fond memories of seeing *The Texas Chainsaw Massacre *when I was, like, six years old.” (It’s worth noting that he was wearing a Leatherface T-shirt as he said this.)

Semi-organized tapes (including How to Style a Scarf) in the basement archive. Photo: Matt Haber/Gazetteer SF

Somehow Tobe Hooper’s 1974 gorefest didn’t give young Okubo nightmares. Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend (1986), shown to him by his cousins, did. Later on when he was in high school, Okubo got more serious. “I kind of went through this thing like, ‘I have to watch every movie on the fucking list.’”

As we spoke, about eight people, mostly regulars, were milling about, drinking beer, some eating their burritos they’d brought with them, waiting for the night’s screening to begin.

That night, Okubo and Antonucci were midway through a monthlong “Ghost in the Machine“ series, and were showing The Mangler (1995). Also directed by Hooper, it was a decently budgeted Stephen King adaptation about a demonic industrial washing machine in a small town in Maine.

The film stars Robert Englund (aka Freddy Krueger from the A Nightmare on Elm Street series) and Jame Gumb (aka Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs) and a steampunk machine the size of a monster truck that has a bad tendency to pull in laundry workers and smash their bodies into gory pancakes. Imagine a giant Play-Doh Fun Factory whose default setting is evil, and you pretty much get the plot of this one.

Soon, the lights were dimmed and the trailers began. One was for National Lampoon’s Senior Trip (1995), a film Jeremy Renner would probably like us all to forget, but which was written by Roger Kumble, who gifted the world Cruel Intentions (1999) and, to a lesser extent, Cruel Intentions 2 (2000). Another was for the sequel to Excessive Force (1993), the excessively titled Excessive Force II: Force on Force (1995).

It’s a safe bet that no one was there to see* The Mangler* because they loved it so much the first time around. (“With its hysterical Bible recitations and poorly choreographed battles and chases, it offers the horror-movie equivalent of visual and verbal gibberish,” wrote Stephen Holden for The New York Times in a review that was actually kind of generous.) The movie was no Blood Sucking Freaks, but was still pretty awful.

Everyone there had come for the pleasure of watching a (bad) movie with friends, cracking jokes, and never once looking anything up with our phones. We were also, in a way, honoring Okubo and Antonucci’s lifelong passion for VHS.

Earlier, Okubo told me about the unique attributes of the medium, sounding a bit like Virginia Madsen’s character in Sideways (2004) talking about why a certain vintage bottle of wine can be so perfect: “Our interest in this is mostly in the ritual of it and the temporal nature of the VHS.”

Vintage hardware. Photo: Matt Haber/Gazetteer SF

Each viewing carries with it the memory of every viewing before. Unlike a perfect digital movie you stream on your flatscreen or phone, every time you put in a VHS, the movie you see is a little different than the last time: the magnetic tape is a bit older or dirtier, the heads inside the VCR hit it slightly differently, there’s noise in the cable connecting it to your TV. There’s beauty in that, even if the movie itself is a mess.

“VHS is inherently a degenerative medium,” Okubo told me dreamily. “You’re slowly watching something die.”