For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, there is a market for old VHS tapes. This is a real life phenomena. Collectors and people who just have an affinity for old media actively seek out VHS copies of their favorite movies of the VHS era. I remember seeing an old acquaintance looking for (and later trying to sell) old movies. I live in south Texas, where there is no guarantee that old heat sensitive media would still work, so this never made sense to me. I would never buy VHS at a thrift store because there’s no way of knowing whether it was stored properly.

SexTape is the story of one such collector/reseller. Thomas likes to buy boxes of random VHS tapes at garage sales and thrift stores hoping to find treasures. Even if he doesn’t find something valuable, he still manages to flip almost everything. Every once in a while he finds an unlabeled tape in the box. It’s usually home movies. A sex tape, if he’s lucky. There’s a market for amateur porn. One day, he takes home a box of tapes and finds an unmarked one that will change his life. It is a sex tape, but it’s unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He becomes obsessed with the tape, watching it repeatedly examining all the details. And masturbating, because it’s a sex tape. But he’s disgusted with himself because it’s dark and depraved. The girl might be underage, and the things she does turns a simple sex tape into a gruesome snuff film.

Thomas destroys the tape, thinking that’ll be the end of his unhealthy fixation. But then he starts thinking he’s seeing the girl in public. Is he imagining it or is it really her? When he buys another box and finds another unmarked tape with the same type of content starring the same girl, he realizes there’s something much bigger than he realizes going on. And there’s no going back.

I am a reader with simple needs. When Matthew Vaughn says he has a new story coming out, I read it with gusto. He writes disgusting and bizarre situations that set my imagination ablaze. Vaughn is really showing his range here. You probably know him from his more extreme titles like Bowery, House Call, or The Sexorcist, but it’s becoming clear that he is not a one trick splatter pony.