Exclusive | New NYC video store reviving nostalgic experience for movie buffs tired of streaming including new films on VHS and DVD
Streaming didn’t kill the video star.Dust off your VCRs, ’90s kids — a new NYC video store is reviving a brick-and-mortar movie scene pushed to the brink of extinction by streaming platforms.Opened last week in Williamsburg, Night Owl Video is now the only full-service video store in NYC.
They offer around 1,500 unique titles from 1980 goresploitation flick “Cannibal Holocaust” to new releases like Oscar-winning “Anora,” spanning VHS, DVD and other mediums from the halcyon days of physical media.Both new and secondhand movies are available for purchase with prices ranging from $5 to over $100 for the rarer VHS tapes and they plan on doing rentals in the future.“We’re trying to stock every kind of format, every kind of genre, every kind of movie, so that the store can appeal to everyone,” co-owner Aaron Hamel, 35, told The Post.Hamel founded Night Owl alongside Jess Mills, 39, a fellow cinephile he met while the pair worked at NYC’s legendary B-movie studio Troma Entertainment, with the goal of filling Gotham’s ever-widening video store void.The film buff said the concept harks back to “family movie nights” growing up in Detroit, Michigan, when visiting the video store was an event and not a mindless scroll-fest.Nostalgic New Yorkers are feeling these analog withdrawals — during Night Owl’s soft opening on April 5, 550 people showed up over five hours.This fervor is perhaps unsurprising given the NYC video institutions that have been Netflix and killed over the last decade due to price, convenience and other perks afforded by virtual video vendors.“What really inspired us to open it was we loved Kim’s Video and Videology when they were around and stores like that in New York,” Hamel told The Post of the beloved downtown institution, which also doubled as a Gen X clubhouse in its St.Marks Place heyday.Alas, Kim’s shuttered in 2014, one year after NYC’s last corporate-owned Blockbuster.
“When they (Kim’s) closed, we just ...