By George & Josh Bate
The V/H/S franchise has been a mixed bag to date. Naturally, this is often the case with anthology movies as given segments are bound to differ in quality from one another, although there have been, broadly speaking, more successful entries in the series – namely V/H/S/99 and V/H/S/94. After a number of installments named after and focused on specific years, the V/H/S franchise returns for its first specifically holiday-themed anthology. And what better holiday to hone in on than Halloween.
Watching V/H/S/Halloween is very much like eating your candy after you’re done trick or treating. Some pieces of candy are going to be delicious, others may not be. Some may be sour, some may leave a bitter taste in your mouth, and some will hit just right. Horror anthologies almost always follow such a pattern of hits and misses, and the latest V/H/S/ movie is no exception. Out of the six shorts, two or three creatively embrace the Halloween holiday and make for gripping, unsettling viewing, while the others falter conceptually despite strong filmmaking.
Generally, V/H/S/Halloween makes for far more bloodthirsty viewing than previous installments. The kills never quite hit Terrifier levels of blood and guts, but the film makes it clear that no one (including children) is safe from pure, unadulterated carnage. This hasn’t always been what the V/H/S/ franchise is known for, and yet all but one of the six shorts features some pretty extreme violence. The spectacular practical effects that bring this violence to life imbue each kill with ingenuity, terror, and even morbid humor, often making one cringe and laugh in equal measure. Just when you thought you’ve seen every kind of horror movie kill, V/H/S/Halloween arrives to prove you decidedly wrong.
As the first Halloween-specific entry in the franchise, overall, V/H/S/Halloween falters in living up to its subtitle and evoking the spooky, cozy atmosphere of what is clearly the best holiday. With stories involving trick or treating gone wrong, the shorts “Coochie Coochie Coo” and “Fun Size” make for the most Halloween-y of entries, and it’s no coincidence that these are the best of the bunch. “Coochie Coochie Coo” director Anna Zlokovic, whose directorial debut Appendage went criminally overlooked, masterfully helms one of the more twisted haunted house stories we’ve seen in recent years, with the filmmaker brilliantly evoking dread through all sorts of disturbing imagery. It’s the kind of V/H/S/ short that could easily be expanded into a full feature, which had us disappointed when it came to an end and gave way to lesser vignettes.
“Fun Size,” meanwhile, will forever have you rethink the candy you eat on Halloween. Although similar to “Coochie Coochie Coo” in being another short centered around trick or treating, director Casper Kelly crafts a distinct, yet similarly twisted tale, albeit one imbedded with far more morbid humor. In fact, only one of the six shorts – director Paco Plaza’s “Ut Supra Sic Infra” – could be considered dark and humorless, as all the others (including the undoubtedly unnerving short from Zlokovic) feature plenty of laugh-worthy moments. Admittedly, the humor is often the kind you find you in horror movies – the kind of laughs that come about when something so uncomfortably crazy happens that you can’t help but crack a smile. Nonetheless, in addition to being a bloodier outing for the found footage franchise, V/H/S/Halloween also proves funnier than what we’ve come to expect from these movies.
The humor is at its most overt in “Diet Phantasma,” the frame narrative that the film keeps cutting back to in between each of the other shorts. Director Bryce M. Ferguson, best known for his work on music videos, borrows from Halloween III: Season of the Witch for a short that follows a villainous corporation out to harm children on Halloween through a product they are selling, in this case a soda rather than a Halloween mask. There isn’t much substance to “Diet Phantasma” and it is arguably one of the weaker frame narratives across the V/H/S franchise, although admirers of practical carnage will have a good time with it.
Other shorts, namely “Kidprint” and “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” feel mostly out-of-place in an installment focused on the Halloween holiday. While “Ut Supra Sic Infra” employs an interesting narrative structure that sees footage cut together from two different time points, Paco Plaza’s short is almost entirely devoid of tension and suspense until the very end, which wraps the story up in underwhelming fashion. “Kidprint,” meanwhile, feels like a short that would have been more effective had it been a full feature film. Director Alex Ross Perry makes some unusual story decisions that create a distance between its characters and the audience and, like Plaza’s short, saves its horror for an unsatisfactory finale.
Directors Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman helm the short “Home Haunt,” which, like “Coochie Coochie Coo” puts a spin on the haunted house genre. Perhaps more than any other short in the film, “Home Haunt” delightfully embraces the Halloween holiday with a story about a father and son who put on a yearly haunted house every Halloween. Unfortunately, the relationship between the father and son at the heart of the story is underdeveloped and, although its conclusion features some interesting visuals, the short lacks the punch some of the others do.
From its inception, the novelty of V/H/S films has come from the universal language of found footage that each and every short utilizes. At this point, the horror subgenre initially popularized by The Blair Witch Project is quite saturated, which places even greater demands on each subsequent V/H/S/ outing to stand apart and do something unique with found footage. Without exception, the shorts don’t try to rewrite the rules of found footage or bring something different to the subgenre, but they are all competently made, with some more than others taking creative advantage of the storytelling medium at times.
VERDICT: 5/10
Watching V/H/S/Halloween is very much like eating the candy you’ve collected after you’re done trick or treating. Some pieces of candy are going to be great, others not so much. Out of the six shorts that encompass the new Shudder film, “Coochie Coochie Coo” and “Fun Size” stand out for their embrace of the Halloween holiday and the twisted dread they evoke. Although other shorts feel out of place in a Halloween-specific installment and are marred by underwhelming endings, the shorts of the new V/H/S/ film are united by far more blood and far more morbid humor than what has come to be expected from this franchise. As another installment in the V/H/S/ franchise, V/H/S/Halloween finds itself in the middle of the pack of the other seven movies. But as an installment that specifically centers around Halloween, the new film disappoints.