Video tapes live again through VHS Haven

VHS Haven’s Hiram Dobbs demonstrates the radical resurgence of a once-dead media format

Hiram Dobbs, a long-time connoisseur of the VHS format, practically grew up at the video store.

“All of my earliest memories of movies or anything, it’s always on tape,” the 32-year-old CEO of VHS Haven recounts. “It was always at a sleepover, it was always hanging out with your cousins or something — an adult puts on a tape to keep you busy.”

Dobbs initially launched VHS Haven as an Instagram account, primarily to show off his extensive collection of video cassettes. 

“It really blew up and I just wanted to take it to another level,” Dobbs said. 

His vision? To start a business that released actual, honest-to-goodness, physical VHS movies … this, in the age of Netflix and ubiquitous digital streaming.

“I started to reach out to people, I tried to find licensing deals,” Dobbs said. “And that’s what kind of led me down to Troma and Full Moon.”

It wasn’t long before VHS Haven started re-releasing iconic B-movie titles like “Class of Nuke ‘Em High” and “Bad Channels” in snazzy, collector’s edition packages. But the products aren’t just aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake — the VHS cartridges themselves (which oftentimes come in dazzling, vibrant color schemes and patterns) actually work in any functioning VCR. 

“We actually like printing designs onto the tapes,” Dobbs said. “I searched a long time to get these shells from different suppliers … it’s really been an adventure trying to go out and find all this stuff and collect from all around the world, these tapes, to make something interesting.”

Case in point? VHS Haven’s special edition re-release of the fishing-themed slasher opus “Blood Hook,” which comes encased in bright orange plastic and features the tagline “You’ll Be Hooked” — with no less than four different printed hooks for emphasis — stamped onto the tape itself. 

Ditto for “Subspecies V: Bloodrise” — a bright, azure cassette spattered with (simulated) plasma spray.

“That’s one of the most fun things, trying to figure out some cool design to put on the tape,” Dobbs said. “People love them.” 

Hitting rewind

Today the VHS Haven portfolio includes a mixture of both old-school, revivalist eighties cult flicks like “Redneck Zombies” and brand-new, indie genre favorites a’la “Cannibal Mukbang.” The company also has a deal with Not The Funeral Home for VHS releases of several “The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs” episodes, which are wrapped around such vaunted and revered classics as “Demon Wind” and “Mother’s Day.”

“We try to pay people either a license fee or reimburse them with free VHS to sell,” Dobbs said. “Recently, we had a huge deal with Vinegar Syndrome … they got a bunch of exclusive versions of the movies we made for ‘Street Trash’ and ‘Eight Eyes’ and ‘Black Eyed Susan.’”

Right now the VHS market is white hot. Pristine video cassettes aren’t just fetching big dollars on auction sites — as in, tens of thousands of dollars per tape — but collectors are actually paying to have their own VHS goods graded and assessed like baseball cards and comic books.

“Tapes are shooting up in value,” Dobbs said. “I’ve got tapes that are worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars now and people really want them.”

VHS nostalgia is obviously “in” at the moment. 

“Every year I see more and more products,” Dobbs said. “Every major retailer has several VHS products, if it’s not a full VHS release of a modern film like you saw with ‘Alien’ it’s either a VHS box or something that looks like a tape or Blu-Rays that have a VHS theme — it’s huge, it’s giant.”

Even the look of old VHS tapes, scan lines and all, is en vogue. Dobbs notes that movies like the fittingly titled “V/H/S” certainly make use of the “shot on video” (SOV) aesthetic.

“There are some movies that are literally shot on tape,” he said. “Like ‘Bum’ we’re releasing … there’s a huge community for the SOV horror.”

Dobbs notes that there is a tremendous amount of media out there that never made the transition to DVD, Blu-Ray or even internet streaming.

“It’s insane the amount of stuff that’s on tape that never made it anywhere else,” he said. “A certain amount of it is like we need to archive some of this and sometimes it’s not just the movie, it’s the print of the movie, the specific edit — it’s just not available anymore.”

The VHS resurgence has plenty of parallels to the vinyl revival that’s reshaped the global music market. The video format may be lower tech, Dobbs said, but it definitely offers its own unique consumer experience that newer devices just can’t replicate.

“Just like putting on a record, you get to put the record down and put the needle on it, the whole act is kind of an activity in itself,” Dobbs said. “You get to open the box, stick the tape in and it starts playing … if it’s not rewound, you’re watching it at a random moment, you get to see what the last person was watching, what scene they left it at.”

And there is a noticeable visual difference with VHS, as Dobbs explains.

“Of course it’s not the best picture quality, it’s not 4K, but where you get the most out of it is watching it on a cathode ray television (CRT), because how the CRT displays an image, it looks completely different and the VHS plays great on a CRT,” he said. “The motion is great because of the interlacing on the TV, the colors are really, really good and I think there’s something to be said for that as far as enjoying a movie or experiencing it as you originally experienced it.”

Dobbs said the format even has appeal and allure when the video quality is less than optimal. 

“Even if the tapes look really awful, sometimes that adds to it,” he said. “To watch an old scary movie and the tape just looks kind of bad, it can make it a little bit scarier.”

Fast forward …

Dobbs said it took “a ton of trial and error” to figure out the best processes for manufacturing brand new cassettes. 

“Trying different duplicators and rack systems to get a really good production line,” he said. “We’ve put out a lot of tapes, there’s been times where I’ve put out hundreds of tapes, so we have a large duplicator rack — right now, I run about 16 VCRs on the rack and it’s definitely a process to get all of that set up and get the best possible video and audio going to the VCRs.”

Therein lies one of the biggest questions about the future of VHS entertainment. Making new cassette tapes is obviously doable, but finding functional VCRs to play them is becoming scarcer and scarcer. Indeed, there hasn’t been a single new commercial VCR produced anywhere since 2016. 

“I would like to believe that just like vinyl, people are going to eventually come in and make some new VCRs, maybe some new CRTs,” Dobbs said. “Going way further into the future, the only thing that makes sense are rips of VHS tapes on maybe more common forms, like Blu Ray or 4K and streaming VHS.” 

Dobbs said he’s already working on his own streaming platform plans. 

“To actually be able to watch a really good tape copy on streaming and kind of get the experience, at least as much as you can watching them on a computer like that,” he said. “It’s possible to emulate, it’s not crazy — but the reason we do it is because there is something to have the tape, it’s still really special. So I think it’ll go on for a long time.”

VHS Haven is already testing the waters there. In February 2026, for example, the website streamed “Sword of the Nightingale” and “The Tad Nightingale Trilogy” — a collection of mini-movies helmed by Anthony Leroy of “Bum” and “Holy Cripes! It’s Pipes Mackenzie” fame.

Dobbs said the current VHS Haven release schedule includes an assortment of Troma offerings, a cavalcade of nostalgia-tinged re-releases and a collection of newer indie genre movies.

“Like Tate Hoffmaster, ‘Pizza Guy 8,’ he’s got some new projects going on,” he said. “That’s another tape we did.”

In the not too distant future, Dobbs said he’d like to be on the front end of the films themselves.

“Helping produce and to make some of these movies,” he said. “A lot of people we know are all making their own SOV projects that we try to help and do everything we can to further those …that’s kind of the future of the scene, just stay with the movie makers and have fun.”