VHS Box "Art" That Made an Impression on You

Whoops, I must correct myself: "that most" = "the most."

WHORE

I present this without comment.

The midget guy on the cover of ‘Gothic’ creeped me out.

We were fascinated by the Sleepaway Camp box art as kids/early teens. We obsessed over it in the video store for weeks before my mom finally let us rent it. Thank god she did! What a completely bizarre, fucked up movie! Still love it!

This artwork haunted my childhood

Well, you can see pubes and almost dong here: SEBASTIANE. I was so aroused.

R6 omg me too! It was a poster in a local video rental place.

For some reason, horror film covers really resonated with me! One that really freaked me out: Fright Night.

The video rental section of the Shop and Save grocery store of my childhood always had the strangest selection of movies.

Angel is one that sticks in my head, as well as the talking box for Frankenhooker.

Child of the 90’s here, I remember thinking the lenticular vhs cover for the Jack Frost horror movie was funny and very memorable.

This.

Imprinted on my psyche.

The entire Nightmare franchise had great covers.

Monkey Shines!

This is a cheat since I saw the movie on TV before seeing it in a video store but this artwork has always haunted me. Terrifying!

The artwork for Blue Sunshine made an impression on me. I still haven’t seen the movie.

R17 Elvira did at great episode on it. It's schlocky but not unwatchable.

Bad Education:

Humanoids From the Deep (1980)

I love Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2. Mary Lou was a DLer.

Not Michael Caine's best, but I liked it at the time.

Mephisto. My teenage friends and I made a point of renting all the weirdest looking foreign films: The Night Porter, Black Orpheus, and Aguirre, Wrath of God, and many others. I'm sure there was a LOT that went over our heads, but it was a great introduction to films outside of the Hollywood mainstream.

Fox Mulder’s soft porn

Dirk Shafer’s pec crevice on the Man of the Year box at Blockbuster

Lots of people at our local videostore fell for the cheesy but totally cool Troll 2 cover. Well, turns out the creature and the boy on the cover have absolutely nothing to do with the movie - the actual trolls in the film (who aren't even called trolls but "goblins") look more like midgets wearing potato sacks. But I'm still glad I was duped into renting it because it's one of the most unintentionally funny movies I've ever seen.

Oops, that was a stinky linky.

This one stood out on the shelf.

My parents had this copy of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was too scared to watch it for quite a while.

Blood Beach even made me laugh as a little kid

What's a VHS? Is that like an 8-Track?

Never seen this but still remember the cover

Some Fulci

Couldn't find the English cover but this is more or less the same.

Another obscure gem

This one is classic

I still have yet to actually watch the movie, but the first one that comes to mind is Dead Presidents.

One of my favoirtes. As the case with many 80s films, the covers got progressively worse as the titles got reissued.

Pretty fun movie

Underrated slasher

Seemed like a cooler version of the Goonies

Another link

Here’s the box for Frankenhooker in action. Though I always thought it said “Wanna’ neck” when I was a kid. Must be the Mandela Effect.

Cheerleader Camp. This artwork really freaked me out as a kid.

Another eye catcher. They really knew how to market movies in the 80's and 90's. Movie advertising today is so boring and without character.

Unforgettable.

The first three in this franchise had great, creepy artwork.

This one sticks out for some reason. It made it look like the most insane and lurid movie ever made.

You can't leave this one out. So simple and terrifying.

I have no idea why the VHS Nightmare series dropped the poster art for part 2 and part 5, but this remains my favorite image of Freddy Krueger.

I always loved the VHS art for Freddy's Revenge, too. I think I like it more than the theatrical art.

This one was very memorable as well.

This movie was pretty good, too, if I remember correctly.

BASTARD!

Every time I saw this art, I was filled with dread. It seemed like it was going to be the scariest movie ever made.

Was disappointed to find out this was more of a teen drama/action movie than a horror flick.

Haunted me for years.

I always loved when they'd put people on the cover who weren't in the movie.

The Dream Master had some of my favorite art in the series. Before I was old enough to rent these, I used to look at the back, see the pictures, and try to come up with an idea of what the context of each one was.

Another great one

This one always drew me in. Looked like some of those cheap paperbacks my grandmother had.

I've still never seen this, but I remember the artwork.

This one's pretty campy.

Always loved those bright, colorful Key Video designs.

A lot of covers used to emphasize the T&A aspect. I always had to rely on the pictures in the back to see if there was an equal amount of male flesh.

A classic. Great movie, too.

As a 5 year old, this movie looked like the scariest movie ever made.

Key Video strikes again!

Great tagline.

It seemed like only horror movies and family fantasy films had the really striking artwork. Most dramas or comedies would just slap pictures of the cast on the front and call it a day. This one always stood out to me.

Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre series always had beautiful artwork. Loved renting these as a kid.

This thread is a little depressing. Why can't they bring back this style again? Even if the movie ended up sucking, this artwork would always entice you to give it a chance. Scrolling through Amazon Prime and looking at badly rendered Photoshop art just isn't the same.

Although not as good as the original, this one had a better cover.

To Capture the Mother's Heart

Take the Child's Hand

I wasn't allowed in the horror aisle but this movie was always close to the aisles due to alphabetical order. I wanted that hair noose.

The straight porn spoof, "Edward Penishands" which looked more like Maggie Smith than Johnny Depp.

Warner always had some of the most boring art for their horror titles. This is a great movie, but who'd want to see this with artwork like that?

Can't forget Carrie.

This was the Carrie artwork I always saw the most.

Vestron and Arrow still produce great covers with original artwork for older titles. Shout Factory is hit or miss.

This art always made me uneasy. Something about Louise Fletcher's cruel, cold stare.

Phantasm was one of the creepiest movies I'd ever seen when I was a kid.

....

R78 Preferred the original poster art. That cover is boring as hell.

Jamie Lee Curtis and disco death!

Even more Jamie Lee. She just couldn't stay out of trouble.

Vestron always delivered.

Horrible movie, but cool art.

That mask still gives me the heebie jeebies.

R76 That is eerie because (a): I just watched "Sisters" a couple of weeks ago, and (b): I had a dream last night that I was rushing to scramble up all the rare VHS tapes I could find to copy onto DVD, particularly on that WB label (WCI). I worked at a video store in the 1980's and 90's that had a huge collection of rare titles. As it is, I have many of the films from that very dull looking label. They had little creativity on VHS in the early 80's. Even worse were the Magnetic Video where the tapes didn't always play very well. "Valley of the Dolls" was rented so much that the picture, even though the tape was fine, began to distort the top of the screen so everybody looked like they had huge Beavis & Buthead foreheads.

The Gremlins VHS had one of the best covers of all time. They stupidly never reused it for future releases.

This artwork is still genius.

This one gave me nightmares as a kid.

For the 50th Anniversary of "The Wizard of Oz", they came out with a VHS tape that had a lot of extras at the end (or maybe on a separate tape), but that blue cover was not my favorite. There were various cheap looking clam-shell boxes for it, but the red cover that focused on the witch was the one that has remained in my mind.

More nightmares for children.

I would've rented this for sure had this been the American cover.

Terrifying!

So lurid.

This was the one I'd always stare at. Tried to persuade my parents into letting me rent it, because it looked like Little Red Riding Hood, but they never caved in. Saw it years later and the movie itself was worth the wait. Really spooky movie.

They had this movie in the store when I was very young but I was always too scared to hire it. As an adult, I doubt I missed much.

Friday 13th usually gave good cover. I didn't see them until I was a teenager, but part 3 always looked the scariest when I was a child although the picture of the final girl on the back confused me because I assumed she must be the killer even though there's a man on the front.

Madman, it's the combination of messy hair and axe.

The cover we had in the UK for Nightmare on Elm Street was this one, which made it look really fucking cool.

R84 This is the VHS cover I remember. I like the theatrical art but this isn't bad. It looks like it inspired those R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike novels from the late eighties/early nineties.

R27 That's an awful cover to an awful film but the original troll had great VHS artwork. The effects in the first film hold up especially well today. It also helped that I had a crush on Noah Hathaway at the time.

Even this cover could not prepare me for what a mind fuck this movie was.

Monkey Shines is the box I most remember. The horror section was my favorite.

I thought this movie name was hilarious and would always look for it when I went to my local video store. Never rented it, though.

The [italic] other [/italic] Shining.

r106, I still regret not buying that VHS when I saw it at Half Price Books years ago. It was even housed in one of those oversize video boxes like a Falcon video. That video company was smart - they knew the true audience.

There is a scene in SLEEPAWAY CAMP II where two camp counselors put on the Freddy hat and gloves plus hockey mask to scare that other counselors, r57.

But it's a tacky ripoff of superior slashers and that poster with the costumes was the WORST, lowest kind of plagiarism you can get away with.

Alien. Loved the cover and the movie.

My local video store was called Captain Video and I spent a lot of time there as a kid. I loved looking at all the movie boxes. It had an adult section behind a red curtain and my brother was always trying to sneak in there to see the porn movie covers while I was camped out in the horror section.

I was so sad when they closed.

The poster and video cover for ELM STREET 2 were definitely the same, r50.

Seeing Kevin Yeager's magnificent makeup in that image was the first exposure I ever had to Freddy and it was in the video shop on the VHS cover.

This one

OP, that scared the shit out of me as a kid

I thought a monster would eat me while I was going to the bathroom

The Nightmare on Elm St 2 cover we had in the UK was this one, I vaguely remember seeing that as a poster at the cinema too.

Oh, that's awful. I'm sorry!

This was the poster they used in Yugoslavia (Croatia). I worked out what the film was from the cast names and this would have been around 1988, so it was playing in cinemas there about three years after it was actually released.

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

Happy Birthday to Me is a movie that made a huge impact on me during my youth, for reasons I shall not get into here.

I'm amazed you even got Freddy movies behind the iron curtain back then, r119.

The cover you got is what we in the U.S. got for the soundtrack / score to ELM STREET 2. I actually like this image, too as it's creepy, illustrated, surreal and stylistically similar to ELM STREET 1's artwork.

But I do prefer the photo realism of Englund in the best-ever Freddy makeup. It truly scared me!

I had this exact cassette:

I remember this one

This one traumatized a whole generation of kids.

I Dismember Mama

I also think the video artwork for Elm Street 2 is far better than the theatrical/soundtrack art. Freddy really was at his scariest in that film.

Well, I'm glad the cover traumatized you, r125.

The movie certainly didn't traumatize anyone.

I remember :Erik Estrada being shirtless on the cover of some sex comedy in the video store.

But I was always too ashamed to check it out.

I regret it too, r111.

FOR LADIES ONLY hasn't been released for streaming and I still haven't watched the whole thing. I search for a bootleg now and then.

Quilombo

Puppet Master

The Mutilator

Becoming Colette

Laser Disc, DVD and Blu-Ray have gradually made films look better and better. But VHS will always be special to me because I saw so many horror films in that format and even as clear and crisp as a 1080p disc or 4K disc can make Halloween, Friday the 13th, April Fool's Day or Vamp look, nothing beats the low resolution, dark horror scenes. There was something endearing about them and VHS actually heightened the horror.

This is a great thread that reminds me of going to the video store and being overwhelmed by the VHS art was such a part of the movie-renting experience. Many people forget that back in the '80s, renting was a new and big deal to families. Some of us even RENTED VHS machines! When a film was released on VHS, they were sold for expensive prices. It's not like it is today when a film is released on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD in multiple formats.

I love the Cat People (1982) cover art. As well, love the Bananarama Greatest Hits Collection cover for some reason. VHS music videos were big back then. Also loved the double VHS releases like Doctor Zhivago or New York, New York.

But agree with many others that the horror ones stood out. Love The Fury VHS.

Thanks, OP for this great thread.

I rented this one more than a few times

Back in my youth I wanted to be a bmx champ so this video made an impression

I remember being so excited the first time I saw this at the video store.

Has Mackenzie Astin made a statement on Sasha Newley's claims about his father?

I had a crush on Mackenzie Astin when I was a teen

The best

Never seen the movie but liked the cover.

Loved this artwork for class of 1984.

^ Kelly Ripa looks great in that photo!

The Shining had a horrendous theatrical poster. This image remains the defining one of the movie.

Never had an interest in watching this movie, but it was certainly camp looking from the box cover art.

I saw this cover and had to rent the movie. I was about seven, but my mom let me. Yay for permissive 80’s parents!

The video store didn’t have part one, so I didn’t see that until a few years later.

Not a very memorable movie, but I remember seeing this vhs box at the store

Loved this one growing up.

The Gate scared the hell out of my when I was 8

I loved the Gate. 80s PGs were amazing.

There really is something about watching a low budget horror movie on VHS. The Blu-Rays are almost too bright and crisp these days. It feels weird to watch a Friday the 13th sequel all cleaned up.

I know all things change and usually in the name of progress, but I hate that video stores are so scarce these days. They were just like libraries to me. They served an important function to society and culture. Netflix and Amazon aren't the same. At least you knew that the video store would have the same movies every time you went there. You wouldn't usually stop by and find out that something you'd had your eye on for months was now suddenly off the shelves unless someone else had already rented it for the week. That's what bugs me the most about streaming. They take movies off all the time without warning.

This one

And this one

I rented it

This one and the second one with the water skier in front of the shark scared me

I disagree, r161.

I LOVE watching every movie on Blu Ray up to 4k. The images are noticeably better and closer to what film looked like in the theaters. Low and dingy resolution always sucked.

And although I loved video stores ‚— I worked for 2 of them — you can still keep track of movies you want to watch digitally. Netflix used to have a queue feature for discs; now they have "My List." Amazon has its "Wish List" and suggestions for similar titles of any title you like.

Personally, I keep a Word document with all the titles I want to watch eventually. It's a movie bucket list and I can pick by genre whenever I'm in the mood.

Tremors

I still love this movie

I always found this one kind of creepy but also cool, the zombie is raised from the cover and the eyes light up.

Why don't any of the VHS Collector links work? I'll try a link to the entire page.

Michael Berryman (pictured) is not featured as much in the movie as you might think and is arguably more goofy than scary, but this cover always gave me chills.

Surprised how few people have heard of this movie.

Only found out when I watched this years later that Kirk Cameron wasn't in this movie.

[quote] There really is something about watching a low budget horror movie on VHS. The Blu-Rays are almost too bright and crisp these days. It feels weird to watch a Friday the 13th sequel all cleaned up.

It's become quite an expensive hobby. Even VHS players are rare to find cheap and in good condition. I think I'll stick to just admiring the covers.

R171 I saw FTB at the theater when I was 13. Love it and I own the vhs still!

Jason Goes to Hell disturbed me!! I rented all the Friday the 13th movies at some point, but I could not bring myself to rent this one. I don't think I ever ended up watching it.

[Quote] I don't think I ever ended up watching it.

You're not missing much. I think it's the worst Friday movie.

How dare you. What other Friday the 13th movie has a mutant Jason-slug thing crawling up his long lost sister’s cooter?

Jason Goes To Hell has its defenders. I don't think I've seen it in a good 15 or 20 years, so I'm excited to check it out again when that box set hits next month.

Jason Goes to Hell isn't as bad as people say. They only hate on it because Jason has less screen time. It's a fun and brutal body snatcher type of flick. I know many people who are excited it's finally being released uncut.

In retrospect, I'm glad the VHS cover for Jason Goes to Hell. It sounds FUCKED up!! Sounds like it would have given me nightmares.

[quote]Jason's heart, which has grown into a demonic infant, crawls out of Randy's neck. Steven and Jessica pull Duke out of the basement as Jason's heart discovers Diana's body and slithers into her vaginal orifice, allowing him to be reborn.

In the mid 80 to late 80's I was anywhere from 8-13.

Anyway, for years, NOTHING enticed me more than the cover of Angel, starring the brilliant thespian, Ms. Donna Wilkes.

I KNEW this was my film and I would see it someday when I was old enough!!!! It looked dirty, scary, tawdry, lurid, and even more dirty.

Snoochie Boochies

He went warp speed at the end there

I was always fascinated by Slap Her, Shes French, but my friend saw it and said it wasn't very good.

R182 Well, that film certainly would have traumatized me had I rented it! 😬

I rented Jason Goes To Hell for a slumber party when I was 8 or 9 and the kid that came to our house made us call his mom to come pick him up. He was so traumatized. I felt like an asshole, but it was just a movie.

Haha that’s funny. I rented it for my 12th bday party and we all thought it was hilarious when that lady who was fucking that dude in the tent got bisected with a tent pole or something like that.

A few years before that I showed Candyman at a sleepover and one of the kids called his mom to be picked up. But that was a creepy movie so I understood.

And I traumatized my best friend when we were six and we watched Child’s Play. He was scared as shit and legit threw my My Buddy doll out in the woods. Lol, good times.

That takes me back. I used to love renting scary movies for sleepovers and freaking out my classmates.

This one

Loved it then

Love it now

I can still recall the trek I went on trying to find Eyes of Laura Mars at a local video store. Neither of the two around my house had it, so my mom and I had to drive across town to find a copy. That was part of the fun of movie rental stores. There were some that had just about everything, but none of them had everything. It was like a scavenger hunt to track down sequels in big franchises sometimes. One store would have A Nightmare on Elm Street 1, 3, 4, and 5, but none of the others, so you'd have to find 2 and 6 somewhere else.

Loved this movie then and still love it now.

Not a great movie but I still get overcome with nostalgia every time I watch it.

So awesome

I totally forgot about this cover which differs from the current artwork on the dvds.

All the Police Academy films had great artwork. But this one was my favorite. The movie itself was awful.

r186, my brother tried to kill his My Buddy doll after Child's Play came out