Inside Black Lodge

How Memphis’ last video store became a cultural landmark.

by

Near the fictional town of Twin Peaks is a spot where the veil between worlds grows thin. Native Americans called this place the Black Lodge, and marked it with the symbol of an owl as a warning to unwary travelers.

In 1997, roommates Matt Martin and Bryan Hogue were watching David Lynch’s groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, which had just been released on videocassette. Their Columbia, Missouri, apartment was stuffed with VHS tapes. “We literally needed an extra bedroom wherever we lived just to hold movies,” Martin says.

This was the era of the video store, when every town had places to rent VHS tapes of the latest Hollywood releases. Easy access to thousands of titles from all eras of film history revolutionized cinema culture. “I was watching 15, 20 movies a week,” he says.

Columbia had only two video stores, he continues. “One was called Ninth Street Video. It specialized in art house and world cinema. Famous directors’ films were grouped together. It really opened me up to a universe of cinema that I didn’t know existed. A few blocks away was another place called Big Lizard Video that specialized in cult movies, drive-in trash cinema, exploitation movies, and weird subgenres.”

Martin had recently graduated from the University of Missouri with degrees in journalism and psychology. “You know, this is a college town. Now that I’m done with that, where should we go?” he recalls asking Hogue. “And he was like, ‘We definitely should go somewhere with good video stores.’”

“I think the original number was 900 tapes and 100 DVDs. A hundred DVDs was a big deal back then!” — Matt Martin

They hatched the idea to return to Memphis, where they had grown up, and become the change they wanted to see. “We knew an average Blockbuster Video had about 2,500 to 3,000 individual movies. I thought we could get close to that number.”

The friends brainstormed names for a new establishment that would combine the artsy aesthetics and cult film sensibilities of their two favorite video stores into a single, curated collection. “We went through a lot of iterations,” says Martin. “I think there was Dark Corner Video, but Bryan thought that sounded too much like a porn shop.”

Hogue suggested Black Lodge Video. “We fell in love with the idea of this alternate dimension infecting a town with weirdness,” says Martin. “That’s what we’re trying to do with the video store — bring this dark little weird thing into Memphis.”

Coming Attractions

Before Craig Brewer became the acclaimed director of Hustle & Flow and Coming 2 America, he worked at Barnes & Noble bookstore. “There was a Suncoast Video at Hickory Ridge Mall, and Matt and Bryan worked there,” says Brewer. “That’s where I ordered cooler movies than you could find at Blockbuster. That’s when I got to know those two guys. They always talked about how they wanted to open up their own video store called Black Lodge. And I said I always wanted to make an indie movie. I remember when Black Lodge finally went up in Midtown — it was right around the time I finished The Poor & Hungry. That was the only place in town where you could rent my movie, and it probably still is.”

After years of scrimping and saving, Martin and Hogue found a house on Cooper whose landlord would work with them. Black Lodge Video opened in October 2000. “We were thinking, let’s just plug it in,” says Martin, “and see if we can go six months.”

As stores like Midtown Video closed, Martin and Hogue bought their catalogs. Today, with more than 32,000 titles, Black Lodge has one of the largest film collections in the United States.

El Dorado Del Ray was home between tours with his band the Porch Ghouls when he saw “a little bitty ad on the back page of the [Memphis] Flyer that said something to the effect of ‘cult, horror, and sci-fi movies.’”

He was Black Lodge’s first customer. When he came in, “he looked around and said, ‘So it’s like a video store?’ says Martin. “And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s just more obscure stuff.’ He was like, ‘Oh, I can tell we’re going to be friends.’ To this day, he is still renting from us.”

“They were building shelves,” says Del Ray. “I remember Bryan was sitting on the floor … We talked a little bit about movies and stuff. I asked if they were going to have DVDs, and they said, ‘Not really.’ They had been building a VHS collection since the ’80s.”

“I think the original number was 900 tapes and 100 DVDs,” says Martin. “A hundred DVDs was a big deal back then! One of the reasons we met some early success was just timing. There’s this moment where videotape was giving way to DVD. It was that late surge, where people were renting both, that gave us enough money to build up the collection. I’ll never forget the panic I felt, because by the time DVD came along, we had so much invested in VHS. I had a similar panic when Blu-ray showed up years later.”

Another factor that helped attract customers in the early days was a lack of late fees. “It just seemed like a big hassle that we were trying to step away from,” says Martin. “Companies like Blockbuster were making more money on late fees than they were on movie rentals.”

As stores like Midtown Video closed, Martin and Hogue bought their catalogs. Today, with more than 32,000 titles, Black Lodge has one of the largest film collections in the United States.

Act One

”We tended to draw the weirdos out of the woodwork, we being weirdos ourselves,” says Martin.

“I started renting a couple of months after they opened. I think I was one of the first hundred,” says Barrett Rowan Argo. “[Matt] was a fascinating person. I loved talking to him about film.”

The Indie Memphis Film Festival and the nearby Digital Media Co-Op were creating a new generation of cinephiles. “It was thrilling for us, because all these filmmakers started to descend on the place,” says Martin.

“Over my career, it became a process,” says Craig Brewer. “I would go over to Lodge, sit at the desk, and tell them about the movie I was working on. Then I was put on a diet. Matt would walk around the store and say, you need to watch this movie, you need to watch that movie. It wasn’t always apples to apples. When I said, ‘I think I’m going to do a remake of Footloose, but I’d like to actually deal with the loss of Ariel’s brother,’ they gave me Ordinary People. You don’t usually associate that one with teens dancing.”

“Every Sunday night, people would still be hanging,” says Martin. To drive off the stragglers, he would play the worst films in the collection. “If you’re going to hang all the way to close, this is what you get.”

With movies from the collection constantly playing on a salvaged TV, customers were always hanging out on the store’s threadbare couches. “It kind of opened me up, I think, living amongst a bunch of artistic people who were driven to either write or make music,” says Argo.

“It was definitely a hangout place, and I loved it,” says Del Ray.

Musicians started asking to play upstairs, a former recording studio that was small but acoustically perfect. “I remember asking Hogue, ‘Are we qualified to throw shows?’” says Martin. “He said, ‘I don’t care, I just want some music up in here.’”

Soon, touring acts were joining the locals in the Black Lodge Microdome. “I remember Mastodon played, then four years later, I was at Bonnaroo, and they were on this mega stage in front of 10,000 people. I thought, ‘You guys were in my attic!’”

Being a Midtown hangout spot has its disadvantages. “Every Sunday night, people would still be hanging,” says Martin. To drive off the stragglers, he would play the worst films in the collection. “If you’re going to hang all the way to close, this is what you get.”

The plan backfired. “About 10 o’clock Sunday night,” he says, “you’d start to see people bleeding in. They’re in pajamas. They’ve got a six pack of beer and a pizza. They plop down with some blankets. By closing time, the floor was full of people, corner to corner, who had come just for that.”

Act Two

By the time we hit 2008, [Black Lodge] had taken on a new life,” says Martin. “It developed a mystique. We used to have, above the door, an old Masonic phrase: ‘Not a secret society, but a society with secrets.’”

The owl symbol from Twin Peaks was adopted as a logo, and after Martin and Hogue got tattoos, many others followed suit. “I can say every body part humans have has been tattooed with a Black Lodge owl.”

“We would hear rumors that we were a cult, with dogma and weird rituals. We read that it was a front for a porn operation. That did not happen. A lot of people believed we were a hub for sex workers. That was not true either.” — Matt Martin

The little video store had become the hub for a found family. “I think my first party was the masquerade ball that they used to do in July,” recalls Ash ‘Hardware’ Tierney. “I felt like the belle of the ball, because everybody had mohawks, and we were all complimenting each other’s tattoos. For the first time in my life, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m home. I found my island of misfit toys.”

As word spread, so did the stories. “We would hear rumors that we were a cult, with dogma and weird rituals,” says Martin. “We read that it was a front for a porn operation. That did not happen. A lot of people believed we were a hub for sex workers. That was not true either. They thought we were Satanists, and — this was my favorite — we had killed people over late movies. How is that even possible?”

On the weekends, fire breathers and acrobats stalked the lawn, as the festivities spread beyond the walls of the tiny house. “There would be these out-of-control parties, and the cops would show up, and they would just drink a beer with everybody,” says Del Ray.

“Maybe they realized we weren’t doing any harm. We were just having a good time,” says Argo. “And they liked renting from us, too.”

Among those who gravitated to the Lodge orbit were tech-savvy hackers who introduced Martin to social media. “I was asking, ‘How long until people can push a button on their computer and a movie starts?’ We call it streaming now, but we had no word for it then. ‘Because when that happens, video stores everywhere will meet their end.’ They said, ‘You’ve got four or five years.’ And we did.”

Intermission

By year 10, the place looked like a haunted house,” says Martin. “There were cobwebs in every corner, and every shelf was graffitied. It had become this weird museum, like a curio shop that also had movies.”

Netflix and Redbox had taken over home video, and even as the events got bigger, the core business was drying up. “I went to Bryan and said, ‘We should find a new home that has a stage, one where we can actually screen stuff.’ We didn’t feel like old dogs, but we certainly were smart enough to know we’re going to have to change.”

After 14 years, Hogue was done. “He had just burned out,” says Martin, “especially when we talked about how the new Lodge wouldn’t be as much about renting movies. We were about to become even more of a social business.”

In 2014, Black Lodge scheduled six months of live music, DJs, parties, and club nights to say goodbye to the old store. Del Ray, who appeared a few weeks before the end, says it was “one of my top-ten favorite shows that I ever played, just because of the atmosphere of it.”

After a final blowout in December, Martin started the long process of packing up the store. “I was lucky enough to have already met Ash, who would become my partner. She asked, ‘How long do you think it will take before we get a place?’ Oh, six months, tops. Turns out, I was startlingly naive about the Memphis commercial real estate market.”

Instead, it was four years of missteps, shakeups, and false starts before Black Lodge returned. Martin recruited a new team of owners who shared his vision. “The whole point was to have more to do,” he says. “I don’t drink alcohol, so going to bars is not much fun for me, because there’s nothing to do.”

On the weekend of March 19-21, 2021, 18 bands, along with stand-up comics, variety show segments, and a selection of made-in-Memphis short films, streamed from the Black Lodge website. The telethon raised more than $25,000.

A membership in the new Black Lodge would not only come with unlimited access to 32,000 films, but also an impressive collection of computer and board games. Argo and her company, Klaymental, provided the state-of-the-art sound, light, and video projection system.

As the exile dragged on, the whole project teetered on the edge of oblivion. Martin held it together by sheer force of will. He kept the brand alive with the Time Warp Drive-In, a monthly film series Black Lodge produces with filmmaker Mike McCarthy and Malco Theaters, and blowout Halloween parties, co-hosted by Craig Brewer. “Matt once said he’s a carnival barker,” says Argo. “He’s good at getting people interested and keeping them excited.”

Finally, Brewer introduced Martin to Crosstown Arts founder Chris Miner, who wanted to talk about locating Black Lodge in one of the properties his foundation owned near Crosstown Concourse. “I sat down with him the first time and he said, ‘Everyone knows what Black Lodge means to Memphis.’”

The Sequel

The 10,000-square-foot space at 405 N. Cleveland was in sad shape. “The roof was literally caving in,” Martin says. “We ran into every problem you can humanly imagine.”

After spending a year renovating, Black Lodge officially reopened in September 2019. “There was a huge New Year’s Eve with Lord T. and Eloise with about 800 people. We had gotten to that point where shows were booking, people were loving it. There’s no stopping us now! And then, there was stopping us now.”

By March 2020, the partners had saved enough money to build a new kitchen. “It was Ash’s birthday, and we planned a party. The next night was going to be a goth night called Dystopia. I’ll never forget, it was no different than when old Lodge was open during 9/11. People just started showing up, saying, ‘Have you seen the news? Something’s breaking out, some sort of viral contagion.”

Now, what started out as two film nerds’ dream has become a Memphis institution. Black Lodge has played host to everything from drag shows to wrestling matches. People still gather to make fun of the worst movies in the collection, and to experience classics on the big screens.

All shows were canceled, and the store closed indefinitely. “We started getting calls, texts, and messages on social media: ‘Please tell me y’all are going to at least open the video store in some way.’ We reached out to our members and said, ‘We are renting movies in the parking lot. No one can enter the building. If you want to freeze your membership now and not pay the monthly fee, you can.’ No one — not one person — canceled their membership.”

Black Lodge’s movie library provided a lifeline of entertainment during the pandemic. Crosstown Arts sold the building to a new investment group, who renegotiated the rental agreement. “By January 2021, vaccine rollout had begun, but was slow,” says Martin. “It had reached the point where we weren’t sure we could afford to stay around, even with reduced rent.”

Money intended for the kitchen instead went to keeping the lights on. “That’s when, for the second time, the generosity of our city came forward,” he says. “I was approached by an incredible artist and producer named Sarah Mosley, who had worked with Goner Records for their Goner TV streaming shows. She said, ‘What do you think about a telethon to raise money, to save Lodge?’ I wouldn’t even begin to know how to do that. She said, ‘Well, here’s the thing. I’ve already designed it.’”

On the weekend of March 19-21, 2021, 18 bands, along with stand-up comics, variety show segments, and a selection of made-in-Memphis short films, streamed from the Black Lodge website. The telethon raised more than $25,000.

“It was one of the most amazing moments in my life,” says Martin. “I had to sit down with Ash and just cry for a little while.”

Black Lodge’s troubles weren’t over. Later that year, co-founder Bryan Hogue died after experiencing years of health problems. After fully reopening for the summer of 2021, Delta and Omicron waves forced more cancellations, closures, and anxiety. But the Lodge abides, as it always has. The new year brought with it a new kitchen at last.

Now, what started out as two film nerds’ dream has become a Memphis institution. Black Lodge has played host to everything from drag shows to wrestling matches. People still gather to make fun of the worst movies in the collection, and to experience classics on the big screens. Instead of a cramped attic, musicians now have a state-of-the-art sound system and one of the biggest stages in Memphis. Martin says the years in exile, and the support they received during the pandemic, have been both humbling and inspiring.

“It just proved to me, once again, this is a town full of good people who love art,” he says, “who are willing to sacrifice a lot to keep it thriving so it can be there for that next wave of young people.”