AINEWS
When everything streams, the cost of caring is friction
Vinyl, cassettes, and a straight to video horror film are not a nostalgia wave. They are a rehearsal for paying attention.
Vinyl, cassettes, and a straight to video horror film are not a nostalgia wave. They are a rehearsal for paying attention.
A new horror film is shipping on VHS this month, and the reason says more about how we watch now than about the format itself. "This Is How the World Ends," directed by Robert dos Santos, is being released straight-to-video — billed as the first straight-to-video feature in roughly twenty years, per The Guardian's editorial on the analogue resurgence. It arrives on a format whose last manufacturer stopped production in 2016, a decade ago. Funai Electric, a Japanese electronics firm, was the final remaining VCR producer before ceasing operations that year.
The film was shot in HD. The VHS release is cropped and fuzzier by design. The director's stated reason is not that VHS looks or sounds better. It is that the format's scarcity changes what the viewer has to do: commit to a physical object, find a working deck, and sit through the artifact on its own terms. The friction is the point.
That same logic runs through the rest of the analogue turn. Vinyl sales are at their highest level in over thirty years, industry data shows — part of a resurgence that has seen physical formats clawing back market share from digital streaming for nearly two decades. Cassettes have crept back into release schedules. The market framing is usually "warmth," "ritual," or "authenticity," but those words do not survive contact with the VHS case, which is openly worse than the digital original it is sourced from. The Guardian's editorial board is honest about this: the appeal of vinyl and VHS is not that they outperform streaming, but that they impose a cost on consumption that streaming has stripped away.
What the editorial gestures at and does not quite name is the constructive version of the trend. A.R.E. Taylor's essay collection "The Analogue Idyll," cited in the cultural conversation around physical media, frames the return to physical formats as a "remedy" to a "digital ailment" — meaning the algorithmic, frictionless feed that has replaced the act of choosing. On that reading, the vinyl record is not nostalgia. It is a rehearsal for the older skill of picking what you want to listen to and committing to the side of the room it lives on.
Three things follow from that frame, and they are worth holding together.
First, friction-by-design is a practice, not a purchase. Buying a record player, a cassette deck, or a working VCR is the entry fee, not the practice. The practice is what the constraint does: twenty minutes to find the right sleeve, a side you cannot skip, a film you cannot queue. The market wants to sell the gadget. The use is in what the gadget refuses to do for you.
Second, the market packaging is real and should be named. The "analogue bag" — the curated tote, the styled shelf, the influencer VHS unboxing — is partly aesthetic positioning. Younger consumers, the editorial notes, are reaching for formats that are genuinely new to them, and that is the most interesting part of the story. It is also the part most easily flattened into either "kids are so nostalgic" mockery or "the kids are saving us" boosterism. Neither is right. The desire underneath the packaging is real: a way to be a participant in your own media diet rather than a target for it. The tote is a side effect.
Third, friction-by-design is not a moral position. Physical formats are a niche. They cost more per hour, they are less accessible, and they do not replace streaming for most people. Pretending the analogue turn will dethrone the algorithm is a different kind of nostalgia. The honest claim is smaller: that some people, in some weeks, can use physical constraints to practice a kind of attention that the feed does not encourage. Setting aside Sunday for a single record, with the phone in a drawer, is closer to the point than the record itself.
The straight-to-video horror film landing this month is a small, dated artifact. It arrives on a format that is technically inferior to the digital master sitting on a hard drive next to it. The director's bet is that the degradation is worth it because the audience has to show up differently for it. That bet, more than the format, is the story.