On a Saturday afternoon in late October, the auditorium inside Akron's Main Library will fill with the sound of kids discovering that Dracula has moved into the neighborhood. The occasion is the Little Monsters Matinee Series, a free monthly partnership between the Akron-Summit County Public Library and Killer Video Retro Horror Museum, and the October installment is a screening of "The Monster Squad," the 1987 kids-versus-classic-monsters comedy that has spent nearly four decades being passed from one generation of VHS kids to the next.
The pairing is unusual on its face: a nonprofit museum devoted to horror on analog video, tucked into a downtown Akron building, joining forces with the public library system to program family movies. But the two institutions are chasing the same thing. Killer Video's stated mission is the preservation, study and celebration of physical media, with a specialized focus on horror cinema and the VHS era, and its programming leans on screenings, exhibitions and public events rather than glass cases alone. The library, meanwhile, has long treated film as part of its public service. Its Main Library at 60 S. High St. runs Movies@Main, a free series in that same auditorium, with screenings on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons programmed by a librarian with a background in film history and preservation. The Little Monsters series is that idea with a seasonal twist and a partner who owns a lot of monster memorabilia.
Killer Video itself is a relatively young institution with an old soul. It is the creation of Jonathon Carmichael, a Coventry High School graduate who describes himself as a "100% across the board nerd" and who grew up renting tapes at Roadrunner Video in the Portage Lakes area rather than at Blockbuster. Carmichael spent years as a sales manager in California for Manhattan Beach Studios before moving back to Ohio, and the museum reads as a love letter to the ritual he grew up with: the trip to the store, the aisle, the forbidden fruit of a horror tape you were probably too young to rent. His partner, Erika Fritz, is co-owner, and Michael Tolva serves as director of development.
Inside the Selle Building, the museum recreates a video store circa the mid-1990s, complete with fluorescent lighting and vintage posters, and holds roughly 1,700 VHS tapes organized by obsession, including a wall devoted to films with "of the dead" in their titles and another to creepy crawlies. Alongside the tapes are standees for "Gremlins 2" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2," a lightbox for "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3," issues of Fangoria, vintage Halloween blow molds and an especially unsettling Chucky doll. There is also a working rental section of DVDs and Blu-rays for members, plus a gift shop stocked by local makers. The museum has drawn attention well beyond Akron, with coverage from Cleveland Magazine, Ohio Magazine, Pittsburgh Magazine and Ideastream Public Media, and in fall 2026 it announced plans to expand and launched a fundraising campaign, along with an Akron Independent Horror Short Film Festival.
That institutional story matters to what happens on Oct. 24, because the Little Monsters series is exactly the kind of public engagement the museum says it exists to do. Earlier installments in the series have included "Scooby-Doo" in June, and the library's event listings describe the program as scary movies "perfect for kids and grown-ups alike," with costumes encouraged. The October pick is well chosen for that brief. "The Monster Squad" was directed by Fred Dekker, who wrote it with Shane Black, and released by Tri-Star Pictures on Aug. 14, 1987. Its premise is a kid fantasy with real teeth: a club of suburban children who know their monster lore discover that Count Dracula has escaped Van Helsing and come to modern-day Earth hunting an ancient amulet that would tip the balance between good and evil. Dracula brings friends, the Wolfman, the Gill-Man, the Mummy and Frankenstein's monster, and the kids of the Monster Squad are what stands between them and the amulet. The film runs 82 minutes and is rated PG-13, a rating worth noting for parents of younger children, though the library frames the series as family-friendly.
The movie was not a hit on its first release, which is part of why it fits a museum built around the afterlife of physical media. Like so many titles that found their audience on home video rather than in theaters, "The Monster Squad" became a cult favorite through rentals, cable and word of mouth, and it is now a staple of repertory and genre programming. That is the arc Killer Video exists to document: the movies that missed in the multiplex and lived on the shelf.
For the library, the appeal is simpler. A free screening gives families an outing that costs nothing, and gives kids a first taste of seeing a movie the way their parents did, in a room full of strangers who gasp and laugh at the same moments. The library asks interested families to contact the Children's Library and Teen Division at 330.643.9050 or [email protected] for more information and to register. The matinee runs from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at the Akron-Summit County Public Library, 60 S. High St. in downtown Akron. Costumes are encouraged, and the organizers promise giggles along with the scares.
There is a small irony in the setting. The museum's whole premise is that analog media and the places that housed it are disappearing, and that the communal ritual of watching a movie together is worth preserving. A public library, one of the last free indoor places where anyone can walk in and sit down, is a fitting venue for that argument. For two hours on an October Saturday, the fluorescent-lit video store and the marble-quiet library become the same thing: a room where a bunch of kids learn that the monsters are real, and that you can handle them if you know who to call.