Other more playful touches, like the sticker collages on the walls or the cut-out mouth on the Dead Alive poster that is cleverly placed atop the video return slot, feel wistfully familiar; the kind of accumulated personalization that made retro video stores destinations in and of themselves, and the starting point of many a teenage weekend.

Heidi, the thirty-something mother of the two boys I’d been watching earlier, can especially relate to this. “This was our Friday night, right here. You'd come to a video store with your friends, pick out your favorite snacks, and spend hours finding the perfect movie or two to take back home," she tells me.

Of course, patrons can’t actually rent the videos here; they’re just on display. In fact, you can’t even touch them at all. This precaution is largely practical (many of the videos are rare and out-of-print).

Also, without being able to flip the tapes over for summaries of the movies' plots, viewers can better appreciate the artwork and remember just how much could be portrayed in such a small rectangles of space.

Without a huge budget or the constraints of respectability, horror movie artwork often used invention to get attention. It had to scare viewers just enough without scaring them away.

"Whatever picture caught your eye as you were racing up and down the aisles — that was the movie you would pick," a balding dad in his 40s named Jose says.