Scarecrow Video isn’t just Seattle’s only video store—it’s also Seattle’s largest. To be precise, it’s the world’s largest. With more than 150,000 titles in its collection, Scarecrow Video is the largest publicly accessible film archive in the world. “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,” marketing coordinator Matt Lynch told Seattle Met in an interview.
A temple for physical media
Scarecrow Video opened 1988 with just 600 titles and became a Seattle institution, surviving the rise and fall of Blockbuster, the proliferation of streaming services, and other industry pressures. In 2014, Scarecrow Video became a nonprofit and now sustains itself through memberships, on top of its retail operations. And, yes, you can rent by mail, for anyone who misses the early Netflix days.
With its size and variety, Scarecrow’s collection is a global time capsule of cinema, spanning 128 years of cultural history and featuring films from 138 countries in over 120 languages. Thousands of titles in their archive are out of print or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. Many of their rarest titles aren’t even held by the Library of Congress, and some may be the only publicly accessible copies in existence.
Flipping through records at a music store just hits differently compared to downloading MP3s online. It’s the same with films. When you visit Scarecrow Video, you’re not scrolling through just an algorithm but wandering through decades of film history. Maybe it’s a weird cult classic, or maybe it’s that one movie your friend won’t shut up about. When you step through the doors of Scarecrow Video, you’re stepping into a time when movie nights started with a trip to the video store, not just clicking “Play.”
The Details:
- Location: 5030 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105
- Hours: Monday–Sunday
Fifi Ding is a journalist and travel writer. She has interviewed numerous figures in the world of entertainment and genre fiction, including actor Nathan Fillion and manga artist Hiro Mashima.