Gnarly horror anthology V/H/S/Halloween hits like a sugar rush
The latest entry in Shudder's bite-sized horror franchise has enough standouts to be more treat than trick.
Photo: Shudder
The found-footage anthology franchise V/H/S has gone from disposable underdog to shlock-horror mainstay by serving two important roles. After the summer release of V/H/S/2 and the November nadir of V/H/S: Viral (which seemed like the franchise’s last, odious gasp back in 2014), it’s become a Halloween perennial and a launchpad for fresh creative voices in the genre. It can toy with its format—even venturing into sci-fi with last year’s V/H/S/Beyond—but its foundation as a terror tale anthology remains solid. V/H/S/Halloween, in keeping with its title, might be its most obvious outing yet. But so what? Its frantic, splattery mayhem bodes well for Shudder subscribers looking forward to their holiday season.
V/H/S/Halloween isn’t a perfect quintet of shorts, but its wobbly curation fits within the franchise’s evolution into a horror party mixtape, as euphoric hits are balanced by amusing B-sides. Its farcical framing device sets the tone: “Diet Phantasma,” from Scottish music video director Bryan M. Ferguson (who’s shot for Ladytron, TR/ST, and Garbage), features hapless taste testers sipping a Cthulhuan soda made by a dodgy scientist, which wreaks havoc on their insides. The fragmented short does little to thematically connect the four entries nestled between its recurring beats (Halloween, naturally, is the sinister cola’s launch date), but whatever. It’s funny enough, and messy enough.
“Phantasma” also sidesteps the usual logistical gymnastics filmmakers perform to justify the franchise’s demand for handheld cameras. Casper Kelly’s “Fun Size” gets around this using two trick-or-treaters dressed as “filmographers in a found footage movie.” Others, like REC‘s Paco Plaza, who directs “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” discards the need for video, cutting together “recovered” cell phone clips of a costume party massacre with the taped (and ill-advised) criminal investigation of its aftermath. The absurdity of a victim-to-be shooting camcorder footage as a smothering mom-monster chases them, like in Anna Zlokovic’s creepypasta-coded “Coochie Coochie Coo,” is there to be ignored. Most of these shorts are jokes building toward punchlines, and they play out that way.
