Whether it was because they fascinated, excited, or downright terrified me -- I couldn't go into the video rental place without at least sneaking a peek at these VHS covers when I was a kid.

These were just some of the VHS covers that would always catch my eye at Home Video Gallery (the store we rented from) back in the 1980s. Initially, this list was up around 35, but that's just too damn many.

The funniest part about the entire list is that I still haven't seen the majority of these films, despite the fact that most of them are in my favorite genre. I watched horror movies all the time in high school, but have only seen two of the ones on this list. There's a pretty obvious reason for that, but I'll get to that later.

I was maybe 5 when we got our first VCR, which was right around the time home video really took off. You have to remember, before VCRs (and BetaMax) came around, watching a movie of your choice at home was damn near impossible. It seems so weird, because now you can watch movies anywhere thanks to smartphones and iTunes and Netflix... We take these luxuries for granted now.

Once the home video industry took off, it was like a gold rush for entertainment companies. Many of them began cranking out these low-budget, straight-to-video movies (which was also not common before VHS) to make a fast buck. A lot of people chose what to rent based solely on whether it looked cool, so these studios would put more effort into making an awesome VHS cover than they would the movie. It is for that reason that I never watched most of these. By the time I was old enough to rent them -- I was well aware that they were probably unwatchable junk. When I was a 5-10 year old kid though, I was fascinated by them.

So here are the VHS covers that, for some reason, I still remember staring at when I was younger. I would look at or pick up most of these boxes every time I was in the store. For all but the two I've seen -- I think what I imagined them to be was far better than what they actually were. I kind of love that I kept it that way.

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