In its 13-year, 8-film existence, the found footage anthology franchise V/H/S has seen some high highs and low lows. With talent ranging from high-powered Hollywood creators to virtual unknowns, each short film’s quality can vary, but all share the same goal of offering quick, freaky, down-and-dirty little spots of horror and bewilderment for your viewing (dis)pleasure. The franchise’s post-2021 revival installments (seven years separated V/H/S: Viral from V/H/S/94) are loosely tied to a frame story or an overarching theme, such as V/H/S/Beyond’s alien throughlines or, in this collection’s case, V/H/S/Halloween’s titular season.
With two outstanding exceptions, V/H/S/Halloween barely achieves its goals due to a lack of empathetic characters and outcomes. Save for a few victims who definitely didn’t sign up for getting kidnapped, ritualistically murdered, or killed by decorations brought to life (among other methods), almost every person getting their comeuppance in these shorts deserves it. This gives V/H/S/Halloween a more pointed, mean spirit; some may enjoy that angle of attack, but for me, the better stories in the V/H/S series always lean toward bad things happening to good people, regardless of whether they survive or not. Most of these stories here are driven by folks who don’t want to listen to their colleagues, friends, or loved ones when they voice objections, and this similarity found each story dooms this installment to sitting somewhere beneath the better installments, but not alongside the forgettable ones.
The wraparound story, featuring the testing of a poltergeist-infused diet soda, is indicative of how we’re to take this entire movie. In the six chapters that bookend each short story, we see a researcher mistreat his technicians as they march human test subjects into a secure room to try a can of this stuff, a trial which ends in horrible death, dismemberment, disfigurement, or possession for participants 99% of the time. (The remaining 1%? You’ll have to stay until the credits.) This frame story, written and directed by Bryan M. Ferguson, features a lot of shouting and overacting, and it’s hard to really get into watching a purportedly real video when the lead actor has been given the okay to outsize his performance, amping up his tyrannical corporate bullying to the point of fatiguing the viewer.
But that’s not just a problem endemic to the frame story; many of the stories herein feature one or more characters who are annoyingly forthright, as if everyone else is dumb for not wanting to go along with them. Of course, if they didn’t go along, we wouldn’t have a movie, would we? In the first full story, “Coochie Coochie Coo,” Lacie (Samantha Cochran) basically harangues her bestie Kaleigh (Natalia Montgomery Fernandez) into going into a dark house after getting creepily taunted by its candy-giving owner while trick-or-treating. Same with “Fun Size” and “Home Haunt,” two stories where tragedy could have been avoided if their lead characters weren’t so full of greed or hubris, respectively. The former shows disgusting consequences for those who take more than one piece from the bucket left on the porch; the latter features a father desperately hanging onto his tradition of making the biggest and best haunted house on the block, only to have his creations turn real and attack visitors.
The second and fourth full stories in this anthology launch us toward the two extremes on the “pure evil” spectrum: the fiendishly supernatural and the terrifyingly psychotic. The second, an import from Spain called “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” disorients us with footage from a present-day murder investigation and smartphone footage of the events leading up to said murder. It’s a scary bit of business, involving a group of trespassing friends looking to have a Halloween party in a purportedly haunted house, but when one of them sees strange words on a wall and starts chanting them… yeah. Nothing goes well in this one; it’s a merciless short film that glues you to the spot with its performances, an honest-to-gosh interesting story, and its action, which doesn’t happen a whole hell of a lot in this franchise.
The fourth is a frustrating, sad, and horrifying look into the disappearance of several children and how an enterprising electronics store owner is trying to help in his own way. “Kidprint” is a public service program where parents bring their children into the store to shoot a video with the kids standing in front of a height chart while talking with them—a record of their face and voice that can be given to police if they go missing. Those of you who’ve read Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon or seen the two filmed adaptations or the brilliant final season of “Hannibal” might know where it’s going; for me, as a parent, this one hit all too resoundingly. The film’s conclusion that these disappearances and murders will keep happening because evil hiding in plain sight—especially looking as innocent as the perpetrator does—is chilling. It almost makes you want to take a bath after watching it to get the ick factor out of your head and off your crawling skin.
That’s another thing that galls me a bit about V/H/S/Halloween: Children—not partying or misbehaving teenagers, but children—are targeted more than any other installment in this franchise. Yes, it has to do with the fact that most Halloween/trick-or-treat participants are children, but there’s something unsettling about these depictions of child murder or endangerment. At least three stories (including the wraparound) feature outright or implied violence toward children, and it’s not something I enjoy watching.
As far as how V/H/S/Halloween stacks up against its forebears, there’s no question that it’s still a fair one, but it’s not something I’d revisit with great regularity, nowhere near the way that V/H/S/2, /99, /85, and /Beyond have become yearly staples for me. Two standout stories in this collection are enough to balance out their ho-hum companion pieces, where the twists and action feel like the filmmakers were trying too hard to create something shocking or impressive. All the same, it’s not a bad entry into the V/H/S pantheon; it’s that these movies work a lot better when they try to reach out and involve the viewer rather than merely going for surface-level frights and alienating the viewer with characters you’re glad you’re only stuck with for a few minutes. Your mileage may vary with this V/H/S/Halloween, a respectable yet uneven eighth entry into the V/H/S canon.
