On a cloudy afternoon in April 2010, Daniel Hanna had trouble getting into his Queen Street video store. There was a lineup all the way down the street, and he was fairly certain nobody was waiting to rent movies.
Eyesore Cinema, which he founded in 2008, was then located upstairs from Rotate This on Queen Street West, sharing an entrance with the record shop. Hanna soon realized he had arrived at work on the third annual Record Store Day, a celebration of independent record shops that draws crowds queuing up for exclusive vinyl releases.
Once upstairs, he looked online to see if anyone was running a similar “Video Store Day.” He found nothing.
“I thought to myself, well, that’s a crying shame. Let’s do something about that,” he told the Star.
Now in its 16th edition, Video Store Day falls on Oct. 17, a North America-wide celebration of physical media and the video stores that once dominated the way we watched movies.
This year brings 12 exclusive releases to participating stores through a partnership with home video distributor MVD. Hanna, whose shop is now on Bloor Street West, is particularly pleased about Deaf Crocodile’s edition of the 1975 Estonian film “Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel,” a favourite of his. “I love my Soviet-era crime and science fiction,” he said.
Toronto is a video town
Even with streaming a household fixture, Toronto has customers buying enough movies to support new stores, while shops offering rentals, like Eyesore and Bay Street Video, continue to sign up new customers. Collectors come looking for everything from new discs from boutique labels like Arrow, Kino Lorber and Severin Films (in the 4K Ultra HD format, which offers a sharper picture than standard Blu-rays) to VHS tapes and LaserDiscs that require decades-old machines to play them.
Video stores and movie theatres intersect across the city. On Roncesvalles Avenue, friends meet at Vinegar Syndrome to browse new releases before crossing the street to the Revue Cinema. In BMV’s Bloor Street basement, a search for cheap DVDs or film books can precede a movie at Hot Docs Cinema. Eyesore, near the Paradise Theatre, has its own screening room in the back. Bay Street Video, in business for more than 30 years, is across the street from Cineplex’s Varsity Theatre.
Until now, Vinegar Syndrome, which opened in 2023, was the most recent addition to Toronto’s brick-and-mortar shops. Cinema Cellar, the distributor formerly called Unobstructed View, launched its John Street retail space with a Criterion Closet takeover during September’s Toronto International Film Festival and is scheduled to reopen under its own name Oct. 16. BMV’s four locations have kept used tapes and discs circulating within the city for decades.
For Hanna, who once worked at the legendary and now-closed Suspect Video, owning a copy of a film means keeping control over what you watch: a streaming service can pull a title or replace it with an altered version, but the movie on your shelf stays yours.
At Bay Street Video, manager Brendan Whelton estimated that some 450 people have joined its rental membership roster so far this year — a 25-per-cent increase over 2025. The shop’s biggest seller so far this year has been Matt Johnson’s Toronto-set comedy “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” which prompted a disbelieving call from a supplier. Had the store really meant to order 250 copies, rather than 25?
“We blew through that in a week,” Whelton said.
At BMV on Bloor, buyer Dan Corbett regularly purchases older DVDs and Blu-rays from collectors who are replacing their copies with new 4K editions. An unusual influx of “Miami Blues” discs tells him a restoration is looming; Criterion’s forthcoming “The Complete Kubrick” 4K collection has resulted in a lot of Kubrick trade-ins.
But not everyone is a videophile; some just want to watch movies. At BMV, DVDs still outsell Blu-rays and 4K discs roughly two to one. “You have a lot of people who never upgraded to a Blu-ray player, and a younger generation who just really need to own ‘Space Jam’ on DVD,” Corbett said. But people looking to sell their collections should arrive with realistic expectations about what they’re worth.
“We know what we’re looking for, what we’re not looking for,” Corbett added. “I see too many seasons of ‘Yellowstone’ coming through.”
Everything old is new again
New disc releases often make hard-to-find films available again. David Marriott of Canadian International Pictures, a home-video label that restores and releases overlooked Canadian films, says most of the movies CIP has released were previously available only on VHS or had never been released for home viewing.
“To find your next favourite film, you need to be able to see it,” he said. One example is Allan Moyle’s 1977 comedy-drama “The Rubber Gun,” long out of print on VHS. CIP’s restored Blu-ray edition released this summer gave audiences a chance to finally see an important film in Canada’s indie-film history.
Of course, a gorgeous new restoration doesn’t mean everyone’s ready to part with that battered VHS tape. Yasmina Ketita says her VHS collection connects her to her 1980s childhood, while the trailers on tapes (“Coming soon to a video store near you”) introduce her to some films still awaiting release on DVD or Blu-ray. She scours thrift shops, tape swaps, online groups, and is sometimes tempted by overpriced tapes on eBay. “The thrill of finding tapes in the wild is worth holding off (buying online),” she said.
Ketita, a columnist for Rue Morgue, a Toronto-based horror-movie magazine, brings her passion for VHS-era films to the Paradise Theatre through her screening series, “The Rewind Zone”; she’s showing the 1991 slasher “HauntedWeen” on Oct. 18.
Musician James Harding collects LaserDiscs, those shiny, LP-sized platters that were a high-end alternative to videotape in the ’80s and ’90s, offering a sharper picture years before the arrival of DVDs.
“It’s a wonderful format to discover Japanese and Hong Kong films, given its relative popularity within those markets,” he said. The big sleeves offer a larger canvas for the cover art; the reflective discs themselves resemble “an artifact from a forgotten future,” he said.
Many of the machines that screen these formats are more than 40 years old, and maintaining players requires “patience and the will to fail,” said Harding. YouTube tutorials come in handy with tips on cleaning and replacing rubber belts. Inspired by local programmers, Harding started a monthly series at Eyesore screening films on vintage formats, such as 1991’s “Body Parts” on LaserDisc.
Before the feature presentation, Harding screens 8-millimetre shorts on a Bell & Howell film projector. “Sometimes they’re home movies I’ve found in thrift shops,” he said, “or condensed versions of kung-fu films.”
Experimental filmmaker and media archivist Christine Lucy Latimer has followed a stranger and rarer technological path: the Capacitance Electronic Disc. SelectaVision was RCA’s wildly ambitious attempt to put movies on a vinyl record, right down to using a stylus to read its grooves. After 17 years of development, it finally hit stores in 1981, only for RCA to stop making CED players three years later, when VHS won the format war over Betamax and RCA’s losses reached hundreds of millions of dollars.
After finding CED videodiscs in a junk shop about 15 years ago, Latimer bought a working player for $25 on Craigslist. She now owns five players and about 600 discs.
It was a notoriously fickle technology, but even malfunction has its charms. A disc can skip, repeating seconds of sound and picture for hours. “It turns anything I’m watching into a video installation,” she said.
Latimer — whose own Blu-ray collection, “Fragile Systems,” is stocked at Bay Street Video, courtesy of local label Black Zero — recently screened her CED copy of the 1984 crime drama “Thief of Hearts,” for Harding’s “Space Jail” video series at Eyesore. The audience, mostly VHS collectors, were “gobsmacked and amused” by the technology, she said. “It’s a cautionary tale of how VHS and Betamax were able to roll out seamlessly, yet here’s a home video format that failed to do so.”
That shared enthusiasm gives Toronto’s video culture its life. “These places are welcoming enclaves for anyone with curiosity,” Latimer said, “and I’ll protect them with all my energy.”
