Universal Harvester
book
Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It's a small town--the first "a" in the name is pronounced ay--smack in the center of the state. This is the late 1990s, pre-DVD, and the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut. But there are regular customers, a predictable rush in the late afternoon. It's good enough for Jeremy: It's a job; it's quiet and regular; he gets to watch movies; he likes the owner, Sarah Jane; it gets him out of the house, where he and his dad try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck. But when Stephanie Parsons, a local schoolteacher, comes in to return her copy of Targets, starring Boris Karloff--an old movie, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store--she has an odd complaint: "There's something on it," she says, but doesn't elaborate. Two days later, Lindsey Redinius brings back She's All That, a new release, and complains that there's something wrong with it: "There's another movie on this tape." So Jeremy takes a look. And indeed, in the middle of the movie the screen blinks dark for a moment and She's All Thatis replaced by a black-and-white scene, shot in a barn, with only the faint sounds of someone breathing. Four minutes later, She's All Thatis back. But there is something profoundly disturbing about that scene; Jeremy's compelled to watch it three or four times