Blog-o-ween 2022: Video Palace

Ahh, the good ol' days of picking up a few friends on a Friday night, heading on over to the videostore, and spending an hour or two judging movies by their clamshell case covers. Most of the time, what was happening in the artwork rarely happened in the movie, but the pleasure was in the hunt for that rare movie that gave more than the $5.00-for-three-days rental fee was worth. Usually, you just considered yourself lucky if you got a shot or two of topless ladies gallivanting around and a kill scene that was gory and imaginative enough to get you to rewind it a couple of times. Every once in a great while you stumbled upon a Re-Animator, a Phantasm, or a Pieces.

I suppose I should just count myself lucky that my friends and I never stumbled upon a mysterious white VHS tape like Mark Cambria did in the excellent horror podcast series Video Palace. Getting stuck with a crummy movie is one thing. Getting sucked into dark machinations of a cult is quite another.

Produced by all-horror streaming service Shudder, Video Palace lasted for a single season. Over ten episodes and five bonus minisodes, we follow Mark (Chase Williamson) and his girlfriend Tamra (Devin Sidell) as they dig into the story behind the white tape and its connection to a long-out-of-business video store in Vermont called...Video Palace. What Mark and Tamra uncover is, of course, scarier, more disturbing, and more nefarious than what you found behind the beaded curtain in the "Adult" section of your neighborhood video store.

Video Palace, like many other horror podcasts, is concerned with physical media and the archive. Mark is a VHS collector and exudes all the hallmarks of that obsessive subculture. In his set-up for the series, Mark talks about the history of video cassettes, and how there are tons of movies that sat on the shelves of video stores that will never see a modern DVD or Blu-ray release, will never stream on the internet unless people like him do the work of searching for them. Mark buys old VHS tapes in huge lots, digs through them, and hopes that he may find that one tape that everyone is looking for. The one tape that everyone thought was lost for all time. The archive isn't what is on the shelves of your local library or museum or historical society. It's in the basement and attics and living rooms of obsessive collectors like Mark.

Video Palace also shares another characteristic with other podcasts: it's a podcast that knows it's a podcast. Mark may not be an investigative reporter for NPR, but the story he tells is put together in much the same way. He records everything (much to Tamra's chagrin) then edits it all together. Mark says that Tamra insisted that their podcast have "real music," so he tells us their friend Kat wrote everything we hear. Everything about Video Palace is knowingly constructed, and that structure points to it being a real story, like the aforementioned NPR stories. This layer of verisimilitude gives Video Palace an extra layer of creepiness, much like the shakey, hand-held camera interviews with the townsfolk in The Blair With Project help us believe that the story we are seeing is possibly happening for real. Mark interviews many people about the mysterious video store and the white tape, and those interviews fairly drip with dread, but they also give the story a patina of plausibility.

You can find Video Palace on Shudder's website, as well as on YouTube and the usual podcast streaming sites. Here's the first episode...