There was a time when the phrase “straight to VHS” was a slur, code for a bad bargain-bucket movie that was worth almost nothing but sported a very pretentious jacket. Today that is nothing. VHS tapes were replaced by DVDs and eventually streaming. The last VCR player was manufactured in 2016. Most machines are broken, gathering dust, or have long since been sent to the scrap heap.
But one filmmaker wants to bring back “straight to VHS” and adapt it for the digital age.
South African director Robert Dos Santos says “This Is How the World Ends,” a low-budget sci-fi adventure about a brother who goes looking for his sister at a hedonistic party deep in the desert dubbed “The Last Party on Earth,” will be the first direct-to-VHS release in 20 years.
“The concept for us was what VHS will look like in 2026, and how this can reimagine what it means to be ‘straight to VHS,'” Dos Santos told Variety. “It used to be that if someone said ‘direct to VHS,’ it meant something terrible and was a proper slur. But the point of this issue is that when you take it back and say, look, direct to VHS, you’re actually saying that this is a well-made movie, a movie that was meant to be made for an audience.”
Of course, only a limited number of viewers own VCRs. But it’s not as limiting as Dos Santos, a former lawyer who was repeatedly held at gunpoint in South Africa and realized that he was going to die, could either chain himself to his desk and die unhappy, or embrace who he is and seize the moment.
Physical copies of “This Is How the World Ends,” which is being released to coincide with National VCR Day (June 7th, in case you didn’t know), were shot primarily at Afrikaburn, South Africa’s equivalent of Burning Man, and will soon be shipped by dos Santos’ production company, And Films. And pre-orders from around the world have already exceeded 1,000 copies.
“It was far beyond what we thought,” Dos Santos says. He insists that the film had no intention of making money.
But he has now joined boutique American physical media specialist VHS Haven to distribute the film in the US, and there are hopes of eventually releasing This Is How the World Ends in theaters after promising meetings in Cannes (with Neon and AMC, among others). Of course, a VHS release followed by a theatrical release would be a complete reversal of the already outdated model, but Santas insists that many industry executives he has met with have not balked at it.
“Certainly, if you go to a distributor and say, ‘Hey, this is our movie, sorry, but it’s actually already been released on VHS and DVD,’ they might not understand. In a way, it’s like shooting yourself in the foot,” he says. “But actually, some people think that’s cool, because we’re building an audience. We’re building a group of people who say they like what filmmakers are doing, they like organic filmmaking, they like the process of filmmaking as much as the final product.”
“This is how the world ends”
“This Is How the World Ends” arrives in the midst of the dual box office phenomenon of “Obsession” and “Backroom,” both from YouTube creators who arrived in theaters with already sizable followings.
“They drew an audience,” Dos Santos says. “Obviously, it’s going to be in a completely different theater, but I think what you’re seeing is the filmmakers saying the traditional route doesn’t necessarily work well for us.”
Of course, the tag “First VHS Direct in 20 Years” also lends a certain novelty to This Is the Day the World Ended and helps it get some much-needed attention. But Dos Santos insists that the main reason for such an unconventional approach, which he came up with while editing last year, is actually a “deliberate middle finger” to the growing intrusion of AI.
“This is a movie made by humans, for humans. This is a movie you can hold, touch, and most importantly, own,” he said, adding that he was “frustrated by all the headlines saying, ‘Hollywood is cooked,’ ‘Hollywood is over,’ ‘filmmaking is dead,’ and wanted to say, ‘That’s not true. There are people like me who really care about movies, who really care about filmmaking.’
“This Is the End of the World” itself centers around AI and is set towards the end of a war between humans and an AI machine state, with no hope that the humans will win.
“What I realized while making this is that there’s a very organic part of being human, being creative, and being someone who wants to tell stories, and hopefully teach lessons through stories,” he says. “There’s an organic process to it, and AI is taking away that organic process. The existential threat in this movie is AI. In the background, AI is slowly taking over the world. And that’s how I feel as a creator.”
And as someone who quickly jumped into filmmaking and creativity and built a dramatic career, Dos Santos says it was disappointing to suddenly be told that AI could “push a button and do everything for you.”
“So I wanted to release it to express that this is organic, this is real, it’s okay to touch it, it’s okay to feel it,” he says. “I want other filmmakers and people who believe in the movie and believe in the story to be able to say, ‘I own this movie,’ and for people to come in and say, ‘Hey, what is that?’ And you can’t do that with a Netflix subscription.”
