Somniloquy

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Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. All static, and noise, and barely discernable moving shapes. Sometimes you'd make out a dark form, but then the static would overtake the frame. I haven't thought about it since, but... Listen to this. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. 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I'm Mark Cambria, and this is the story of a strange videotape in a real mystery waiting to be solved. Welcome to Videopalice. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Subscribe to Videopalice on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Everyone has their obsessions. My girlfriend Tamara loves deep dive investigative podcasts. So when I told her I was making one about the white tape, she insisted that I have real music. All the good ones do, she said. Thank you, by the way, to our friend Kat. Any transition music? That's her too. Like this. My obsessions movies. VHS really. I worked in a video store when I was in high school and there was something amazing about finding a movie on the shelf and getting seduced by the outrageous box art and then making that physical commitment to watch an actual tape. DVDs came along and sure they looked and they sounded fine, but they were missing something. Something, I don't know. Nothing tactile. Plus VHS only lasted about 20 years so there were all these underground trash classics that'll never be released digitally and they'd be lost forever if it wasn't for people like me searching them out and collecting them. And I'm always buying huge lots of VHS cassettes cheap off eBay hoping for some kind of, some hidden treasure. I actually own a copy of Death Row Diner and one time I bid on a single copy of Tales from the Quad Ed Sound, but when it got to 250 bucks it just I bailed. I got the white tape in one of these boxes not knowing that there was something special in between copies of Chud and Jimmy the Boy Wonder. I watched it for a few minutes and soon after I began talking in my sleep. Was that a coincidence? Or is the white tape something more? I don't even know where to start so I got some experts I met online. My name is Steve Bart, I am a creator of DreadCentral.com and I'm also the co-host of Brain Leaves Horror and Paranormal Talk Radio. My name is Adam Green, I'm a filmmaker, mainly horror and comedy type stuff. I did a movie called Frozen, The Hatchet, Franchise and I also have a TV series called Holliston. Oh, and I do a podcast. Yeah, I call them movie crypts. Yeah, every Monday. I'm a curator of Shutter, which is a means programmer. I'm a big horror fan and some would say aficionado. My name is Brian Collins, I'm a horror kind of a horror reviewer, ready for a second-birth movie's death and one called Horror Movie a Day. My name is Jacob Banders and I am an avid movie collector, particular on VHS or laser disc. Pretty much anything you have to do with movies I like to collect. My name is Eric and I own Spudix Movie Empire. I'm a die-hard VHS collector. I owned a store for two years and I've been selling online for, I don't know, 18 years. I've sold 40,000 or 50,000. I just love tapes. [music] [music] So, when I mentioned the white tapes to you, you knew exactly what I was talking about. Of course I did, by the way. Which was not surprising to me. Repeat what you told me earlier about. For me, actually it started in middle school. Remember the first time you heard about Faces of Death? Oh, yeah. There'd be that one person who claimed like they had it. For me, I had a friend named Shannon and I don't know where she got it, but I remember after school one day, when I first heard about the white tapes, we were watching Faces of Death and I want to say it wasn't, people weren't calling it the white tapes back then. It was like the ghost tapes or something. That was at least where I grew up. That's what they were saying. I heard about these things. They were supposed to be, what the hell were those things called, like magic eye? Remember those magic eye things? You were supposed to like look at it and if you stare at it like cross-eyed, you'd see like an image come out or something. Yeah, yeah, that never worked for me. It was almost like the same thing. Some sort of weird kind of acid trip take on that particular thing. It's like if you watch these tapes it's supposed to scramble your brain. I mean, I don't know. I just know that the white tapes are super rare. They don't have UPC codes so you can't find them in the store. I've never seen one on eBay, nothing on Amazon. I've never actually seen ones. I don't even know if they exist. If I find one, I'm going to pay like 2,500 bucks at least. [music] I heard the tape looks back at you and I don't know what that means. Like I was interpreting it like whatever the shot is or whatever it's going to be like eyes, like looking back at you, like a close-up of eyes, that it specifically says your name. Do you remember David Friedman? Sure. Shot a lot of pictures in the 60s. He's dead now. He died, I don't know, seven years ago, eight years ago. The rumor was when they're digging through his claws and they're getting his estate ready to sell all the stuff, somebody said that he had a white tape. There was a video store in Manhattan, it was called Kim's Video and this place had like everything and I hounded the dude behind the counter there for ages if he ever saw a hide nor hair or whatever to just let me know and I would totally be all over that. I was ready to pay anything that I could afford within reason but pretty much anything and he never found it. I mean it was always like this case of like everybody knew somebody, who knew somebody who had seen a copy or knew somebody that had seen a copy but fucking no one ever once was able to like track it down. So this thing to me is like very much like a unicorn. I know it's out there somewhere and I know it's lurking but dude I've come up empty to a frustrating degree. I notice actually on your show the core, you have white tapes on there, is that a deliberate thing? 100% yes, we really, when we were designing that old space, this sort of extra-dimensional video store where I exist and program shutter, what better thing to do than not do something extra-dimensional, weird and frightening and and missing. Yeah, love that. I have on my site, I have this recommendation thread, because I used to watch a movie every day so I was always kind of running out and I'd be looking for stuff. Every now and then somebody would be like you should watch the white tapes or do you know where to get the white tapes or help me get the white tapes. Is this like a weird stunt or is this some sort of just mistranslated thing from somebody in like Japan or it seemed to be more like wanting me to help them get it. And it almost sounds like the video game, Polybius, that people swear they played, you know, that didn't exist. That's what it sounds like to me when these people ask me about the white tapes. I don't think they are fake. You know, let's just like urban legends, it starts somewhere, you know, it does someone that doesn't just make up the story, like it all came from somewhere. Like you, I'm into this stuff so if someone's going to find one, I want it to be me. I hope you would keep me abreast of the journey because you know, I really want to follow this and you know, I might be so bold as to suggest that Shutter might as well. So you're going to have to let me know how this is going. I said, yeah, that'd be great. Sam made some calls and well, here we are. You are sort of known amongst other collectors as being someone who's particularly interested in the white tapes. Okay. Is that right? Well, yeah. I don't know if I'm interested in, but I have had experiences. So have you seen one? Yeah. Yeah, I saw one. It was, you know, a while back, but yeah, I've seen one and it was part of an estate sale. I just went there. I often go to state sales and you know, buy lots of VHS tapes, you know, any kind of movie, memorabilia I can find, but yeah, this particular one, it was just a lot of tapes and when I got home and started going through it, I found in the bottom a white tape. Were you able to verify that it was really, it was a real white tape? Yeah, well, I believe it was. Did you watch it? No. Well, I thought about it, but I ended up selling it on eBay before I got a chance to sit down and watch it. So I sold it and never actually watched it, but Why didn't you watch it? Well, I mean, I had heard the rumors about it that if you watched it, it would do something to your mind that it would get in there and change you in some way. And I didn't really know what that meant or how it would affect you, but I didn't want to find out. This is a hobby for me. I told Mander's that I saw it as a hobby too, but then he got me talking about how many hours I'd already spent looking into the white tapes unless I'd interviewed. I think he could hear it in my voice. This wasn't just a passing interest. But I insisted that it was. Really? Cause, you know, it sounds like you're kind of into this, you know? I'm just wondering how far are you willing to go? It was a fair question. So far I had some good interviews, but I needed to know more. Was the white tape in my possession one of the white tapes? Was it a hoax? Were they ever real? Some people believe they were, but no one knew where they were from or who could have made them. And if they did cause some sort of physical effects on the viewer, why? What was their purpose? I wasn't sure what to do next, so I turned to the one piece of concrete evidence that I had. The white tape itself. Okay. Okay, I'm using a handheld digital audio recorder that I got for work and I'm now going to take a closer look at the white tape. What? What? What are you laughing at? You! You're so serious about this. You're like, okay, here I am. I'm going to solve the greatest mystery in the world. I'm trying to work. I don't go to your library while you're working. Knock all the books over and make a huge noise. I'm just kidding. Sorry. I didn't mean to snap. Whatever. I have to remember to cut Tamara some slack. She's always been so patient about the amount of space my VHS collection takes up in this tiny place. Because of me, she's not really sleeping a lot lately. But the truth is I'm really getting into this. The possibility that there's a real mystery here and maybe I'm the only one who can figure it out. It's intoxicating. Okay, so there are no identifying markings of any kind, no labels, no serial numbers. Oh, what about the box? It's called a clamshell. Really? Really. If you've never seen one, clamshells are these puffy white boxes usually reserved for kids movies. There's a layer of colored plastic, in this case white over the actual box itself. And this one was beaten up. A little ragged. I took a closer look. And I found an incision alongside one of the edges. Took out some scissors and slowly cut along the edge until I was able to peel away the outer plastic and tucked inside there. I found something. The laminated membership card. The kind video stores would give out. You'd have to show it whenever you rented a movie. And this was for some place called Video Palace. There was a partial address. Conway Vermont. Mark, are you going to record all of our conversations? The one about the white tape, yeah. I just, ugh, you know I don't like this out of my voice. Don't worry about it. I don't have to listen to it. I won't listen to it. Okay, let's see. There's no Video Palace in Conway Vermont. What's the name on the card? Thurman Mueller. She knows a thing or two about research. So with just this one clue, she goes to town trying to find Thurman Mueller. She doesn't find any listings in Conway, but she finds 25 listings for T. Mueller in nearby cities. King's Corner Vermont. We're sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service at this time. I'm Teresa Mueller? Uh, no. Wrong number, bro. Are you listening? Yeah, I am now. Hello? Hey, um, can I speak to Thurman Mueller? He's not here. Do you know when he'll be back? Is some sort of joke? Um, no. He's been gone over 20 years. Who is this? My name is Mark Canary. I was hoping to ask Mr. Mueller some questions. What kind of question? Did he used to go to a place called the Video Palace? Um, what is this about? I'm investigating these, well, they're called the White Tapes. Don't ever call me again. That was weird. You did just dig up the memory of her long lost husband though. I think, you know what? Don't bother the nice lady anymore, okay? Okay. I could sense what Tamara was getting at, that this was probably a dead end. But I'm not so sure. If Thurman Mueller is really gone, then this woman may be my only chance to find out more about the White Tapes. More I thought about it, more I knew what I had to do next. Here goes. Who is it? This is Mark Canary. We spoke on the phone. Video Palace is a shudder original podcast. Please, be kind, rewind. All episodes of Season 1 of Video Palace are now available exclusively to Shudder members. Download the app or visit shudder.com and keep listening.