Succubus & the Heuristics of Video Shops

People will miss video-rental shops. Lovefilm etc is a poor remedy. The pleasure of finding 'classic' movies wasn't related to the pleasure of being told about classic movies; this wasn't a place for recommendations, in fact, 'recommended' massively missed the point. This was about pure discovery, the pleasure of a badly misinformative blurb or a nastily rendered bit of artwork.

This has been inspired by finding this image over at the ever reliable Breakfast In The Ruins:

Mostly, I just like the 'This Motion Picture is rated Adults Only, naturally'.

I still haven't even seen Succubus yet but I can remember gazing at a poster of it in the dilapidated backroom video store in some Yeovil offie or other... it wasn't the best looking video rental shop (that was a mythical place somewhere East of Forest Hill) but it was the only one which would reliably let clearly 13 year old boys take out Certificate 18 movies so it was the one we always used. One wet Summer we trawled through hundreds of terrible / brilliant movies: Italian horror gores; odd mini sexfests with cheerleaders (never quite got over that one); Herschell Gordon Lewis splatters; 'banned' zombie flesh-eating and muto-movies; strange badly recorded 'death documentaries'; The Hitcher, with Rutger Hauer; various stuff with Nerds in the title and teens vs Commies 'agenda' movies like Red Dawn (and it's even duffer progeny) - I reckon I could 'recommend' about 7% of them but I'm undoubtedly a better, less-balanced, person for watching the crap ones too...

Maybe there needs to be some kind of collective 'non' recommendation system - I have no truck with 'ironic' recommendations, either - an in built bit of (almost) randomness, a retro-configuration, a heuristic that prevented knowledge creeping into our choices. Maybe that's what Youtube will become. Maybe there's still a place for .mkv files out there in the net, with labels full of signifiers (GORE-SEX not GORE-TEX; UNSEEMLY; BLOODBANKS; SM-UT) or newly commisioned artworks (there's a place for all those great DeviantArt guys*).





*it's non-gendered and you fucking know it...