I was part of this, however briefly. My family ran a video
rental store in my small town and I worked there from 1985 to 1988. It was the
best of times, to be sure, and I got to see (by acquiring for the store) lots
of stuff that wasn’t making it to Waco, Texas, for some reason or another. Because
I just liked this stuff, I was somewhat indiscriminate, which made our horror
section the best, most eclectic selection in the area. As a consequence of
this, many of my initial viewings of classic 1980s horror were on good old VHS
magnetic tape.
The decade was one of weird contradictions; the surface,
Cosby Show normalcy was a cover for the AIDS epidemic, a weakening of the
public trust in government, drugs and crime in record numbers, and the dawn of
Big Media in the form of cable television. MTV told us everything was going to
be all right, but we didn’t really believe it.
