Faded technology finds a new home with Secret Tape

Eli Leiss attributed his fascination with VHS tapes in part to having come up at a point in time when the technology was already on its way out.

“I turned 30 this year, so I was very much on the tail end of VHS being a thing,” said Leiss, who recalled his childhood bedroom being equipped with a tiny combination TV/VCR on which he would screen Disney tapes kept stored on his shelf in clamshell cases. “So, I’ve been lightly into VHS tapes my whole life, but then I got really into collecting four or five years ago.”

At the time, Leiss had just entered into a new relationship, and he said the two, who are still together, used to try to find cheap ways to entertain themselves. This led the pair to embark on treasure hunts at thrift stores across Columbus, where they would search for donated VHS tapes, the more obscure the better. “We’d go out and I’d say, ‘Give me every tape. I love the weird stuff. Give me the weird stuff,’” Leiss said. “And then you’d bring home a sack of VHS tapes you got for like a quarter and start to go through them.”

Leiss began to add these tapes to ones he’d preserved from childhood, which ranged from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (a gift from his mother and the first VHS in his collection) to a handful of skateboard videos he received as a teenager from an uncle. As this stockpile grew, Leiss began to brainstorm ways to share some of his more obscure finds with others, eventually launching the every-other-month Secret Tape roughly three years ago.

The event debuted at Double Happiness (RIP) as a more sprawling affair that incorporated video screenings, trivia, and a “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” PlayStation tournament, among other happenings. “It felt like it was a lot,” Leiss said, and laughed, “but it was sick.” In the time since, Leiss has scaled things back, focusing on VHS finds projected on a large screen, while also settling into a more permanent home at Needle Exchange Records, where the next Secret Tape will take place from 8-11 p.m. on Saturday, May 2.

Attendees are invited to bring their own tapes for the screening, which will be bolstered by selections from Leiss’ collection and could feature random instructional tapes in any number of languages; homemade documentaries (he pointed to “Ohio’s Abominable Snowman” as one favorite); videos featuring Mr. Donut Man’s puppet sidekick, Duncan; or even lo-fi films potentially made by Ohio State University students and then later discarded.

“There’s one I found in the trash, ‘The Mazinga Paradox,’ and it had to be an OSU graduate student’s film, or at least it feels like that,” Leiss said of the short, which centers on a man who travels back in time to steal toys from his younger self that he can then sell online. “And I literally found it in a dumpster on the side of the road. And those are the kinds of things I’m talking about, where it’s just the weirdest baloney that you can’t see any other place, and then you get to see it on a projector in a record store.”

Leiss traced part of his interest in these more obscure one-offs to having watched “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” from too young of an age, and some of his favorite audience contributions have tread similarly surrealist ground.

At one Secret Tape, someone brought a trippy video made with Legos and dubbed over a copy of the Eddie Murphy film “Dr. Doolittle.” For another, an attendee arrived toting a VHS in which a family had edited itself into classic episodes of “Star Trek,” parents and children dressed in costume and flailing about for the camera as they pretended to struggle with their balance during space battles. 

“And as far as I know, this was the only copy of this, and nobody knows who these people are. And it’s kind of beautiful, especially the homemade stuff like that. It’s a nice glimpse into someone else’s strange past,” said Leiss, who relished the unpredictability that comes with staging Secret Tape, where contributions can veer from random mainstream ephemera (the “Titanic” trailer) to wonderfully off-the-wall discoveries. “That surprise element is huge and is honestly probably one of my favorite things. I’ve had so many people walk in and hand me a tape, and it’s like, ‘You? This tape?’ … I’ve made completely whole new friends over Secret Tape. It’s cool to share an interest, but then also to be able to display that interest to other people, like, ‘Look at this cool thing!’ I’m always amazed how sharing weirdo art in this space can bring people together.”