The Dead Format Society is a film club dedicated to obsolete media, forgotten formats, and the beauty of physical film culture. All screenings are presented on VHS and it’s a space for cinema that exists outside the clean edges of streaming platforms; films shaped by wear, repetition, and the systems that once carried them from hand to hand.

Coming soon to The Ill Repute, The Dead Format Society will focus on films that feel inseparable from the formats they arrived on. Programming will lean toward cult cinema, regional oddities, straight-to-video legends, and films shaped as much by their distribution as their content. The club is interested not just in what these films are, but how they were watched, sold, and survived.

Screenings will often feature unusual versions, obscure edits, and presentations you won’t find on streaming platforms. This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but an appreciation of texture, imperfection, and accident; tape hiss, tracking issues, strange transfers, and handmade packaging included. The flaws are part of the experience.

Hosted downstairs at The Ill Repute, the club will embrace a DIY, underground spirit that values curiosity over polish. The Dead Format Society is a space for collectors, obsessives, and the merely curious to gather and share endangered cinema in its natural habitat.

The aim is simple: keep these formats alive by watching them together. Some films demand to be seen this way while it’s still possible.

Please find below the society's Provisional Rules, Codes & Observances.