Acorn Media International / Shudder
I’m usually a bit of a seasonal purist when it comes to horror movies. Or any movies, really. If it’s not Christmas I won’t watch Christmas movies or Christmas specials. If it’s not Halloween I won’t watch Halloween movies (not just the franchise, the entire theme. Any day in Spooptober, we’re good. Otherwise no). Die Hard in April? Fuck off.
But the films themselves have kept up — the pro- and antagonists now use smartphones and the like. The central conceit remains largely intact, though, with the framing device in this latest instalment being an old (’80s-looking) industrial recording of a new soft drink’s testing process. The sequence Diet Phantasma (by Brian M Ferguson) plays out much like a recurring frame sketch in Kentucky Fried Movie or Amazon Women On The Moon, only for horror. Except that it’s also very funny.
Which kind of illustrates the point that by now, the V/H/S films, despite still leaning in to the found footage thing, owe more to the classic horror anthologies like Tales Of The Crypt or The Twilight Zone than they do to The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity. And there’s nowt wrong with that — it’s definitely something we need more of. Nice digestible bites of horror that don’t overstay their welcome and give established film-makers a chance to fuck around a bit while also being able to offer opportunities to less well-known creators without betting the farm on a whole-ass movie.
Of course, this does mean there are some jarring tonal shifts, but that’s very much the nature of the beast. If you thought that would be lost as the series heads more into themed anthologies, you were wrong. So we go from the gleefully disturbing Rob Zombie-esque madness of Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo to Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra, which goes a step further by cutting between the characters’ own footage, police tapes and the cops recording themselves filming (another word that largely makes no sense these days, but like VHS is still with us) a crime reconstruction.
The centrepiece of the movie takes a sharp turn into comedy, as Casper Kelly’s Fun Size (including the line “We’re making a found footage horror movie!”) plays out like a horror take on Charlie And The Chocolate Factory by way of the Glasgow Wonka Experience. It’s probably my favourite, tbh, because it’s the most self-aware and treads a proper (almost ’80s) line between horror and comedy.
But oh boy, we very quickly get VERY dark again, with Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint proving alarmingly topical, given the recent viral (and so far unproven) stories connecting school photo company Lifetouch with Jeffrey Epstein. Honestly this is some of the darkest shit V/H/S has tackled so far, and sandwiching it in between Fun Size and Micheline Pitt-Norman and RH Norman’s Home Haunt is a stroke of (evil) genius, because going from severed dicks played for laughs to a child predator really drives home the nastiness of the latter.
Home Haunt rounds things up with the Twilight Zone-esque tale of a man who runs a VERY EC Comics-coded haunted house exhibit for Halloween 1971 which inevitably becomes all too real. Capped with a quick conclusion to Diet Phantasma, it means we go away feeling pretty good, and spoopy in a fun way, rather than just grossed out.
With this and the recent V/H/S/Beyond, the series seems to have found a new lease of life, and if they can keep it up then I’m very much looking forward to what happens next. The world needs more stuff like this (especially because we all need cheering up after hearing about Bruce Campbell’s cancer diagnosis), and Shudder seems like its ideal home.
So yeah. It’ll be a while before I watch it again, but that’s more the fault of the calendar than the film, which I heartily recommend.
-Justin Farrington-
