I’m not a movie buff, but I play one at Scarecrow Video. I walk through the doors of the University District shop and nod in recognition at a cardboard cutout from 1988’s The Great Outdoors—underrated John Candy classic—and spot Danny DeVito’s face on the cover of Steven Spielberg’s near-forgotten series Amazing Stories. I count the options behind the shelf tag for Tajikistan (it’s four). Scarecrow is a veritable trove of VHS and DVDs; it’s Aladdin’s fabled treasure cavern but for copies of Aladdin. (If I were a real cinephile, I’d probably cite something like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)

When Scarecrow opened in 1988 with just 600 titles, working at a video store was known as a teenager’s gig. But with the rise of chains like Blockbuster, the indie movie outpost became the almost-as-cool cousin of the record store, a place to build and show off taste. For the kids: Letterboxd, but IRL.

Even as it grew to its two-story Roosevelt Way home and added laser discs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and a distribution label for indie films, Scarecrow Video eventually faced the reality of shrinking profits in the digital era. A collection of owners, employees, and friends of the store helped fashion Scarecrow into a nonprofit in 2014. Today, their collection of more than 150,000 titles dwarfs anything online; Scarecrow’s staff, including marketing coordinator Matt Lynch, likes to compare. “If you took Amazon and HBO and Hulu and Netflix and combined all of their available titles, we would still have about triple of that number,” he says. Here, sections are by theme, country, and sometimes specific interests like “Clowns (Evil)” and “Nunsploitation.”

Scarecrow is now a cultural museum and video archive, says outgoing executive director Kate Barr, even if it still looks and acts like a hip video store—which is an artifact in itself. “Part of what we are offering is something that has begun to disappear from our cultural landscape,” she says; it’s more than the sum of its 150,000 parts.

Netflix’s categories are an endless scroll of only a few thousand titles, the same stuff positioned to look limitless. Scarecrow’s heart lies in its finite but massive inventory, like a Japanese-issued laser disc of the late David Lynch’s show On the Air that’s so rare renting it requires a $1,500 deposit. In its multiple versions of Anne of Green Gables, including a prequel-sequel I’d never heard of until I spotted it in Scarecrow (it looks awful).

Now a 501(c)(3), Scarecrow raises money through fundraising drives and memberships; the highest tiers include the chance to curate a special section. Like any institution that involves physical media and personalized service, it struggles in an era where venture capital chases automation. But the shop is holding on strong, celebrating a million dollars raised in 2024, and it has a rent-by-mail program that recalls, yes, the early days of Netflix. The U District shop manages to preserve a vibe of being too weird for the popular kids table, a mishmash of 1980s and ’90s counterculture and fandom culture.

Every time I visit Scarecrow I think I should visit more often, since I’m as guilty as anyone of a half-hearted scroll through Netflix before hitting play on my seventh rewatch of Gilmore Girls. I blame that on the paralysis of choice, but when I walk into Scarecrow Video I realize that’s not what’s happening at all. Scarecrow has a mind-boggling number of options and yet it drives, not stupefies, the art-hungry corners of the brain.

I stop for handwritten recommendations on the shelves—one warns “Okay, the main characters can be douchy. BUT....” and I’m already curious. I scan the shelves of the Noir Around the World special section and feel a little more sophisticated. Lynch—the staffer, not the director—likes to point out that at Scarecrow, unlike with an online algorithm, suggestions come with “a brain and a heart” at play. Even I get that reference.