Symsonia is quite literally a one-stoplight town.
The small western Kentucky community of less than 500 has several churches, an elementary school, a dollar store and a country restaurant. It’s also home to one of the last movie rental shops in the state.
A dimly lit sign welcomes passersby to the unassuming building that houses Symsonia Video, the movie shop that Carol Turner has run for more than 35 years.
For first-time customers, going into the shop can feel like going back in time. Cardboard cutouts of stars and movies from decades past still deck the walls. Shelves are often sorted by actor and the selection on those shelves is a mix of DVDs and VHS tapes.
Symsonia Video sits near the main intersection in the small Graves County community, along State Route 131.
Turner said, since the rise of streaming, she hasn’t seen as many new customers as she used to at the shop.
“Used to take two of us to run it, and they kept us both hopping. And now it’s, it’s definitely dwindled down,” she said. “There’s new ways to see things and just progress. What are you going to do?”
The Symsonia native does everything at the shop. She stocks the movies, rewinds the tapes, works the counter and connects with her customers, though she says she misses a lot of her old regulars who’ve stopped coming in recent years.
“Sometimes people just stop in and say, ‘Howdy.’ They don’t rent nothing, they don’t buy nothing,” she said. “Sometimes you see them out somewhere else, and they don’t even realize you are still here in business. That’s how much things have changed.”
The video rental industry, which blossomed in the 1980s as home video technology became more affordable for consumers and overhead for stores became more manageable, once supported more than 19,000 shops across the U.S.
Turner’s competitors used to be chain store titans like Blockbuster and Family Video. She outlasted them both. Blockbuster shuttered its last Kentucky locations more than a decade ago, and Family Video pulled the plug on its last shops in the state – and across the country – in 2021. Even more recently, other physical media borrowing services like Netflix’s long-running rental by-mail business and Redbox, with its colorful kiosks stocked with DVDs, have shut down.
Now, nearly two decades after the launch of Netflix’s streaming video platform in 2007, it’s hard to say exactly how many are left.
Customers have flocked to streaming in recent years as more and more media shifted into the space. In 2024, IndieWire reported that Netflix’s total subscriber count had eclipsed 260 million and that the relative newcomer in Disney+ had more than 110 million, with several other streamers like Hulu, Peacock and Max all boasting between 30 million and 100 million subscribers.
Kate Hagen, a Los Angeles-based writer and a senior vice president for The Black List, launched a project during the COVID-19 pandemic – when many of the shops that had weathered the first decade of the rise of streaming were forced to close their doors – to figure out how many video rental stores remained.
That Symsonia Video has lasted until now, Hagen said, is meaningful.
“A store like Symsonia [Video] proves that if you build it, they will come,” Hagen said. “If you maintain it, they will come. That can stand the test of time, that can sort of fight against the winds of change, the winds of this digital age.”
Born out of a piece she authored on the economic challenges to running a video store during the streaming era, Hagen set out to develop a directory of the last remaining places – aside from public libraries – where people can physically rent movies. She called it The Last Great Video Store project.
Currently, she estimates that there are less than 200 movie rental shops still open for business across the country.
Symsonia Video is now in Hagen’s directory, one of the few online traces of the shop’s existence. Apart from listing the shop’s address online so that it’s discoverable via a web search, Turner has never had a website or social media page for the shop.
Her store is the sole entry on Hagen’s list in Kentucky, though a small handful of stores – including Star Trax Video and Tanning in Owensboro and Movie Vault & PETropoliS in Lawrenceburg – are still renting movies out in the Bluegrass State.
Hagen said that video stores can be a third space for people in an era where those are becoming increasingly uncommon.
“Places where you can access that kind of media that then ends up shifting your perspective become sort of holy in your mind, because it’s not just about the movie you rented,” Hagen said. “I think we really underestimate how much we’re all missing these third places that were not work or school … just being in a space with other like minded people, or at least people who are interested in the same things that you’re interested in, and the bliss that can come from just that experience of being surrounded by other folks who are enjoying the same things that you’re enjoying.”
For John Holt, who grew up in Symsonia, Turner’s video store was something of a second home.
He remembers hassling his dad to take him to Symsonia Video before he was old enough to walk, bike or ride his four-wheeler to the shop on his own.
“That was my spot, man, for doing everything from trick-or-treating to Christmas parties that they had out in the neighborhood. On summers, my dad would take me up there. I’d watch a movie, go back and get another one. Watch a movie, go back and get another one,” Holt said. “I mean, all day – all day. He would have to stop mowing to go take me to get a movie to rent.”
Holt remembers checking out all of the shop’s James Bond movies and haunting the store’s horror section, going through most of the movies in it.
The love of film that the shop helped to foster in Holt, paid off for him in the long run. He worked at the now-defunct Movie World in Murray during college, watching all of the movies he could, and directed his first film in 2016.
Now, a DVD of “The Dooms Chapel Horror” – a regional horror movie Holt made with his friends and named after a local road – sits proudly in Turner’s shop.
“Never in my wildest imagination would that have happened at all … having a movie actually on the shelf,” he said.
The communal aspect of the video store is one of the big draws for 23-year-old Paducah native Ash Culp, one of Turner’s most devoted customers.
Culp loves to explore the depths of the store’s collection, which boasts more than 3,500 movies on VHS and more than twice that on DVD. Customers at Symsonia Video can check out the newest Marvel movie as easily as they could an out-of-print John Wayne western, a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire musical or a 90s Jackie Chan flick.
Culp, a lover of cult cinema, digs a little deeper. They revel in the experience of checking out titles like “Killer Tongue,” a British-Spanish coproduction that features aliens, dogs who turn into drag queens and “A Nightmare On Elm Street” star Robert Englund.
“I’m a fan of stupid movies. I like the diamonds in the rough nobody else cares about,” they said. “Some of my favorite movies are B and C movies that I’ve found on Carol’s shelf.”
Culp, an aspiring filmmaker, said their six years as a Symsonia Video regular have exposed them to new movies and brought them close to Turner through their discussions about film and life between video rentals.
“Carol has always managed to make Symsonia Video feel like another home, and it’s always comfortable to come in here and talk to her,” they said. “She’s practically like family to me at this point.”
Turner says making those connections with her customers is one of the things that’s kept her in business this long.
“I met people here that I probably never would have met any other way, and friends that I have had for a long time and hope that I have for the rest of my time, and some very interesting people have come through this store,” she said.
Though she knows she can’t just rewind to better times, Turner says she just doesn’t know when to quit.
“It’s not what it used to be. It probably never will be,” she said. “Right now, I have new clientele, which is grandkids and great-grandkids of the people that started out coming in here. They want their children and grandchildren to see the things that they did. Then I got the collectors that are coming looking to buy them. Everything old is new again.”
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, and WEKU, WKMS and WKYU in Kentucky, along with NPR.
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