The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

Cassette-bursting medium revived for latest Alien chest-burster flick

POLL: Is VHS back? If Alien: Romulus were a zombie movie, The Register could understand why 20th Century Studios has announced that it will release the film on VHS – the video cassette format that hasn't been relevant for two decades and had a crap reputation even in its heyday.

Given the flick is (SPOILER ALERT) about aliens, the decision seems inexplicable.

For those of you who worked hard to forget VHS (aka the Video Home System) or are mercifully too young to have encountered it, the format was developed by Japan's JVC and used recordable analog tapes. It offered a mere 480 lines of vertical resolution – which was OK-ish, given the standard definition of TV signals at the time.

By the 1980s, VHS machines made their way into a great many living rooms and boardrooms. Cheap blank tapes and timing mechanisms in VCRs – Video Cassette Recorders, the blanket term for machines that played VHS or Betamax tapes – made it possible to record live television and watch it later at your leisure. "Time shifting" – as the practice was known – begat Tivo, which begat Netflix, which brings us to the streaming era of today.

VHS tapes were horrible. They were unreliable. They wore out with use. They often spooled tape into the VCR. Picture and sound quality were dire.

When DVDs came along in the late 1990s, their relative resilience – plus superior audio and video – allowed them to dominate, even though they couldn't easily be used to record TV shows.

As The Register reported in 2008, the last Hollywood movie released to VHS emerged in 2006, and in 2016 the last manufacturer of VCRs quit the biz.

Which brings us to Sunday, when 20th Century Studios announced the release of Alien: Romulus – the latest installment in a franchise dating back to 1979 – on VHS on December 3.

The studio hasn't explained why it would effectively downgrade its own work by transcoding it to VHS, other than to say it's a celebration of the Alien franchise's 45th anniversary. (Fun fact: 1979's Alien didn't actually come out on VHS until 1982, so Fox should have made the fans wait a few years for the genuine retro experience.)

The movie has been received fairly well. Rotten Tomatoes rates it "Certified Fresh."

But The Register is struggling to imagine a large central region in a hypothetical Venn diagram charting people who want to see the movie again and people who have working VHS players. Even if we added another circle for collectors sufficiently optimistic to think that the first VHS release in ages might appreciate, surely the pool of buyers must be small.

Let us know what you think of the return of VHS in the poll below, or hit the comments. ®

JavaScript Disabled

Please Enable JavaScript to use this feature.