It was bound to happen eventually: with the current V/H/S production schedule bringing us a new entry every year since 2021, the level of quality was going to level off. While V/H/S/Halloween delivers some memorable splatter moments, the film overall doesn’t eclipse the heights of last year’s V/H/S/Beyond or 2023’s V/H/S/85.
Some of that might be due to the holiday theming, which is clever and makes a lot of narrative sense, because of course people are going to be toting cameras around, capturing costumes, decorations, pranks, haunted houses, ghost-hunting, and other reasons for the season. It also offers a fun callback to the very first V/H/S release, which contained the excellently chaotic Radio Silence short “10/31/98”—a cautionary tale about always checking the address before you wander into the wrong party.
But the focus on a specific holiday allows for some noticeable repetition across V/H/S/Halloween segments. It’s possible it was planned to have multiple instances where kids who are clearly too old to go trick-or-treating decide they want some candy anyway—then come to regret it in various terrible ways—but it still feels a bit like “This again?” when it reoccurs.
Across the board, most of the segments are styled as the classic found-footage shaky-cam; V/H/S has proved it’s capable of innovating beyond the “scared person filming” technique (think V/H/S/85’s “Dreamkill,” which pushed the genre’s boundaries with freaky creativity), but Halloween sticks pretty closely to what’s been done before.
The frame story, Bryan M. Ferguson’s satirical “Diet Phantasma,” documents focus groups taste-testing a soda with a special additive harvested from the spirit world. It’s unclear what the company’s ultimate goal or motivation is; there’s no Halloween III: Season of the Witch-style explanation involving Stonehenge and masks that make heads explode—though to be clear, heads do explode. It’s just “consume and be doomed.” (The cheery Diet Phantasma commercial, which comes after we’ve seen its demonic effects, is a nice touch.)
Next, Anna Zlokovic’s “Coochie Coochie Coo” offers up the first of those warnings against trick-or-treating when you’ve clearly aged out of it. Its truly distressing horrors (two words: adult babies) slyly incorporate the idea of dreading having to embrace adulthood, as two friends realize too late they should have gotten their kicks doing literally anything else to commemorate their last Halloween before heading off to college.
Paco Plaza, the co-creator of Spanish zombie film series Rec—one of found-footage’s most acclaimed franchises—next adds “Ut Supra Sic Infra” (“As Above, So Below”), the one V/H/S/Halloween segment that would make an intriguing feature film were the story to be expanded. It’s about a group of kids who sneak into a famous medium’s former spirit room on Halloween—and the cops who go a few days later, accompanied by the sole survivor, to reconstruct the horrific and inexplicable massacre that transpired. It involves a haunted telephone that rivals the creep levels of The Black Phone—directed by “Dreamkill” helmer Scott Derrickson, incidentally.
“Fun Size,” from Casper Kelly (Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, Too Many Cooks), again reminds us there’s an age cut-off for trick-or-treating, though it also bundles serious consequences for violating a “one per person” sign taped to an unattended bowl of porch candy. Having two characters whose Halloween costumes are “camera operators in a found-footage horror movie” is maybe a little too meta, but “Fun Size” makes up for its familiar strokes with some gleefully disgusting gore and an energetic tone that borders on sheer hysteria.
Less successful is “Kidprint,” from Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell, Listen Up Philip), which compresses a child-abduction plot into a segment that feels both underbaked and bleakly out of place.
V/H/S/Halloween ends on a high note with the joyously sinister “Home Haunt,” directed by Micheline Pitt-Norman and B.H. Norman, about a suburban dad who takes his backyard haunted house to extremes, to the annoyance of his teenage son—and, hilariously, legendary special effects artist Rick Baker, who cameos as a shit-talking neighbor. If you only want to watch one V/H/S/Halloween segment to get into the spooky season spirit, “Home Haunt” will definitely scratch that itch.
V/H/S/Halloween hits Shudder October 3.
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