Alright, where are you hiding you little bastard?" Natasha grumbled under her breath as she dug through a cardboard box.
"I know you're in here somewhere..."
It was the Thursday before Halloween weekend, and having finished her homework, the teenage girl needed something else to do.
She had recently acquired a new shelf in her room thanks to Craigslist, and planned to fill it with all the horror VHS tapes she collected.
Though she owned most of the same films on Blu-ray which offered a picture of higher definition, she loved the retro, analog feeling of VHS tapes. She would spend many hours of her spare time hunting for VHS tapes of cult films on ebay, and had started quite a collection.
Natasha wanted to sort the tapes on her shelf chronologically by the year the film came out. Unless it was part of a series, in which case she would place it next to the other installments in sequential order.
She had almost finished placing the 70's horror tapes on the shelf, but remembered she also owned the second Halloween film on VHS. So now she was digging through the box, looking for the followup to the Carpenter classic.
"There you are, you little sucker!" Natasha grinned, retrieving the tape from the box and admiring its scratched up cover.
Pushing Alien and Phantasm to the right on the shelf, she made a space for the film and inserted it beside its first installment.
"Alright..." Natasha began as she slid her arm back into the box.
"Are there any other 70's films who'd like to object before I move on to the 80's flicks?"
She dug and dug through the box for anything that might stick out as a 70's movie cover, until her fingers came into contact with something... unusual.
Buried under a pile of schlocky 80's creature features, she couldn't see what she was touching. But it most certainly didn't feel like a VHS tape...
Her hand recoiled at first, due to the unexpected texture of what she felt.
It was... warm, organic, and seemingly alive.
She cautiously gripped the item, and hoping to be able to identify it, she yanked it out from under the pile.
Sadly, a visual reference for what she was holding only seemed to increase her confusion at the time.
The item in question appeared to be, in fact, a VHS tape to some degree.
It had no case, and there was no label to identify what film was on it.
But it had the same shape and dimensions of a traditional VHS tape.
Except it was a deep, midnight purple instead of the traditional black plastic shell they came in.
Testing out its consistency, Natasha gave it a firm squeeze, and it deflated a bit, before inflating back to its initial dimensions.
She was driven by her curiosity to open the top flap of the tape, to see what it contained.
The flap didn't seem to be on a normal hinge, and peeled off as she tugged on it, revealing a row if dripping teeth on the underside.
"What kind of Videodrome shit is this?" she said aloud.
Part of her wondered if this were a gag item that one could find at a place like Spencer's Gifts. Had her brother planted this in the box as a prank?
Why hadn't she noticed it earlier when the box was more organized?
Something spoke from within her, and she knew none of these theories were the truth. Natasha senses reacted strangely toward the mysterious tape, and she knew there was something very foreign about it.
