It makes sense that one of the largest and oldest video rental stores left in the country is located in a town famed for its association with 1980s film culture.
Astoria’s Video Horizons will celebrate its 40th anniversary this December. Owner Neal Cummings says one movie is more popular than all others. You likely can guess which one.
“I probably sell a ‘Goonies’ a week,” he said.
The video store boom has been over for decades, but after the COVID pandemic, business got particularly hard.
“It was just easier to stream,” Cummings said. “Grandparents got their grandkids to show them how to stream, and then they just never came back.”
Across the country, a wave of remaining video rental stores finally gave up and went out of business.
But instead of closing up, Cummings doubled down, buying out the stock of two Rain City Video stores that had closed in the Seattle area. He added some 20,000 titles to his inventory — movies that are slowly making their way onto the sales and rental floor.
Today, Video Horizon’s inventory includes 60,000 DVDs for sale or rental, plus some 5,000 VHS tapes for sale. A couple hundred more movies are added to the shelves each day.
Most of the new titles are from Rain City, but people will also drop off boxes of old VHS tapes and DVDs at Video Horizons rather than taking them to Goodwill.
“I end up getting a lot of inventory that way,” Cummings said. “I’ll just take whatever they have.”
Only a handful of video rental stores remain in Oregon. There’s Great American Video & Espresso in Milwaukie (since 1983), the nonprofit Movie Madness in Portland (since 1991), and the last Blockbuster in Bend (since 1992). Universal Video in Seaside, which opened in 1983, has been closed for several months while one of the owners undergoes cancer treatment.
Scarecrow Video in Seattle has the country’s largest video rental collection, with 148,000 titles. But the nonprofit store recently announced it would have to “go into hibernation” unless it raises $1.8 million by the end of the year.
Video Horizons is a for-profit business, but running it is also a higher calling for Cummings.
“My goal is to save physical media of all forms,” he said.
During the pandemic, Cummings moved the business to a smaller location to save on rent, but he still has a massive selection spread across 4,300 square feet. And he’s grown Video Horizons beyond movie rentals and sales into a place that also sells CDs, vinyl, video games and cassette tapes. Business is about half rentals and half sales, he said.
“I think people realize that when they stream, stuff goes away, you don’t really own it. If you have it on physical media, then it’s always there for you,” Cummings said. “I do find that younger people are starting to come back to renting. I carry things that aren’t in the mainstream, that you might not be able to stream, or you have to pay $20 for it. Instead, the rental is $4 here.”
On a recent day in the store, there appeared to be two kinds of people frequenting Video Horizons: the old timers looking to watch movies the way they’ve always done it, and the youngsters intrigued by the retro novelty of a video rental.
Jeff Campbell was one of the old timers, who stops by about once a week to load up on movies.
“All this streaming and all this other stuff, I can’t even figure it out,” Campbell said. “I just stick with the old school because, hell, I’m 70 years old. I don’t need all this stuff.”
Shortly after Campbell left (with a rental copy of “Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny” on Blu Ray) a trio of young woman came into the store. One picked up a Video Horizons T-shirt.
“Do you take cash?” she asked, which solicited a chuckle from Cummings.
Of course he does.
When Video Horizons opened in 1984, it was quite the career pivot for Cummings. He had graduated from Washington State University with a degree in architectural studies, and later got an associate’s degree in solar engineering. But after a close call where he almost fell off a two-and-a-half-story condo roof, he decided solar panel installation wasn’t for him.
“I quit that afternoon,” he said.
Cummings got a job in the video rental section of a 7-Eleven (yes, this was a thing) and he loved it. He soon moved to Portland, which was then a video rental destination and birthplace of one of the first big chains: National Video. Cummings landed a job there, and the company sent him to the Oregon coast to open a new store in Warrenton.
He later decided he wanted to go into business himself. Cummings borrowed money from his dad and started Video Horizons with an initial inventory of 600 VHS tapes.
Four decades and thousands of movies later, he’s one of the last men standing in the business.
Cummings, 69, doesn’t have immediate plans to retire but said he’d love to find someone to buy Video Horizons.
“I don’t want to just have a big sale and sell everything for a buck and get rid of it,” he said. “There’s too many gems here. I’d really like to find someone with a passion who wants to take it over.”
Interested? You’ll find Cummings the same place he’s been since 1984, behind the video store counter.
If you go: Video Horizons, 1156 Duane St. in Astoria, is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. New release DVD rentals are $4 for three days, or three for $10 (with a bag of popcorn). Older movies are $2.50 for a week, or four for $8. Video Horizons will also clean and resurface CDs or DVDs for $3 a disc. Don’t miss shopping at the separate vinyl record shop, Play It Again, located in the basement.
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