V/H/S/Halloween

Trick-or-treaters, haunted houses, and demented candy, oh my! The seventh entry in the V/H/S horror anthology series arrives with a madcap installment that plays with Spooky Season vibes and décor. V/H/S/Halloween consists of six solidly assembled short films, each presented as a “found footage” snuff film captured on videotape or, in some cases, on a modern digital recording device. Although not all of the filmmakers adhere to the VHS tape conceit, that’s not uncommon for this series. What’s more significant is that each of the short films included, even the loose wrap-around story, manage to be worthwhile. As expected, some are better than others. But for nearly two hours, V/H/S/Halloween kept me engaged; I jolted in my seat, gasped, laughed, and felt both disturbed and grossed out. To be sure, this is one of the most enjoyable additions, alongside V/H/S/99 (2022), mainly because most of the directors opted for a playful blend of horror and comedy. 

Each V/H/S movie features one story that weaves between the others, creating an overarching narrative that pulls the viewer from one short to the next. Bryan M. Ferguson directs the gnarly framing piece, called “Diet Phantasma,” presented as a corporate document with “For Internal Use Only” appearing along the bottom. A demented researcher (David Haydn) observes from behind protective glass as willing test subjects try out a new soda imbued with the essence of ghosts. You know, for Halloween. The only problem is that the soda causes possessions, spontaneous combustion, and horrific retching of black bile. Taking a cue from the conspiratorial thread of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1983), the scientists plan to release the soda to the public just in time for Halloween. 

After the first group of test subjects in Ferguson’s film goes bye-bye, V/H/S/Halloween offers one of its better episodes: director Anna Zlokovic’s “Coochie Coochie Coo,” about two teen friends, Lacie (Samantha Cochran) and Kaleigh (Natalia Montgomery Fernandez), who go trick-or-treating and enter what they think is a local haunted house attraction. Instead, they’ve stumbled into an inescapable nightmare that’s home to a local urban legend called “Mommy,” who kidnaps unfortunates and turns them into freaky childlike monsters. With its teens running around dark spaces where every room reveals some twisted sight, the segment set high expectations for what’s to follow. Less successful is the Spanish-language “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” helmed by [Rec] (2007) director Paco Plaza, which follows Enric (Teo Planell), the lone survivor of a massacre who takes local authorities to the scene of the crime, only for them to experience the same fate. Plaza plays fast and loose with the “found footage” rules for this one, but it boasts some nasty eye-related horror. 

The best of V/H/S/Halloween comes next, with Casper Kelly’s “Fun Size,” complete with the same surreal, hilarious, and demented energy as his popular Adult Swim short “Too Many Cooks.” Two couples raid a “One Per Person” bowl of obscure candies on Halloween only to find themselves sucked into a fucked-up candy factory, overseen by two gleefully morbid mascots who turn them into caramel- and chocolate-covered treats. Using head-mounted GoPro cameras and a handheld digital camera, the couples manage to capture the action with relative clarity. By contrast, director Alex Ross Perry (Queen of Earth, 2015) embraces the low-fi aesthetic with “Kidprint,” a grim and unsparing tale about kidnapped children and a videotape shop that records kids in case they disappear. It’s no surprise when the store proves responsible for the missing children, and Perry shows an unsettling lack of restraint when depicting violence against kids that’s bound to sober the viewer up before the finale. 

Fortunately, Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman’s “Home Haunt” is my second-favorite chapter in V/H/S/Halloween after Kelly’s entry. The story follows an enthusiastic father who runs an annual haunted house in his backyard, called Dr. Mortis’ House of Horrors, even though his angsty teenage son now thinks it’s lame. This year, the dad sets the haunt to a record called “Symphony of the Damned,” which he stole from a local antique store’s forbidden room. It turns out, the LP opens the gate to hell, unleashing bedlam on his guests (among them, practical make-up legend Rick Baker), from bedsheet ghosts that liquefy their victims to a Halloween witch who impales several trick-or-treaters. It’s a ridiculously gory segment, albeit in a funhouse splatterfest kind of way.

With each of these V/H/S movies, there’s often a weak segment in the bunch. However, that’s not the case with V/H/S/Halloween. Even the lesser two—“Ut Supra Sic Infra” and “Kidprint”—have their moments and never look cheap or prove uninvolving, which cannot be said of each segment in the last two features, V/H/S/85 (2023) and V/H/S/Beyond (2024). Of course, the movie suffers from the same patchwork quality as most horror anthologies, where the stories never feel connected or feed into a larger narrative. But its production values remain consistent across the segments, assured and even inspired by their low-budget innovations, technical ambition, and small-scale storytelling. It makes for a welcome addition to the franchise and a must-watch on Shudder this Halloween.