Do you ever really get too old for Halloween? That’s the question underlying several of the segments in V/H/S/Halloween, the eighth installment in the ongoing, and now annual, found-footage horror-anthology franchise.
By taking on everyone’s favorite spooky season, the series producers have finally embraced the inevitable and potentially most dangerous gamble of the series. The first three films were all simply a grab bag of found footage shorts from often unexpected directors. This was followed by a trilogy, each element of which was locked to a specific year. Finally, last year’s V/H/S/Beyond went to infinity by giving the filmmakers an all-sci-fi remit. But while a Samwain-centric selection provides great possibilities, the producers here are far from the first filmmakers to realize that the scaring season makes for good short stories. As a result, they’re trying to find open ground in a very overstuffed pumpkin patch.
No one is ever going to say that V/H/S/Halloween is the best Halloween anthology ever, since that title will always go to another Fantastic Fest selection, the portmanteau masterpiece that is 2009’s Trick r’ Treat. And, unless someone greenlights a standalone film from one of the installments, it won’t unleash a horror icon on the scale of Art the Clown as the All Hallow’s Eve films did. But it may well be the franchise’s best of the decade.
Let’s begin at the end with closer “Home Haunt” in which directors Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman go behind the scenes of Dr. Mortis House of Horror, a classic American backyard haunt made of cardboard and papier mâché that’s surprisingly epic. Well, foam carving skills, years of experience, and a demonically possessed record will do that.
Well, the real end is also the beginning, in that every V/H/S film has a set-up expressed through a wraparound that pops up between each segment. This time it’s the British taste test trials for a new soda called Diet Phantasma – zero calories, but with added occultism! Directed by music video veteran Bryan M. Ferguson. it’s like Look Around You’s evil twin. As is increasingly the way with the series, it’s fun but also clearly not robust enough to have stood alone as a chapter in its own right.
Actual opening segment “Coochie Coochie Coo” by Anna Zlokovic (Appendage) proves that you may indeed be too old to trick or treat, as a pair of high school seniors on their last ever Halloween 2009, only to get on the wrong side of a wicked spirit called the Mommy, who may go down as one of the series’ creepiest monsters. She’s also possibly the most likely protagonist to spawn a spin-off feature, something the franchise hasn’t managed since Jason Eisner sent horror-comedy Kids vs Aliens into the cosmos from the launch pad of his V/H/S/2 contribution, “Slumber Party Alien Abduction.
“Ut Supra Sic Infra” sees the return of found footage royalty as REC/REC 2 writer/codirector Paco Plaza as pushes the form. It’s the same underlying instigating event as “Coochie Coochie Coo” (young people out partying on Halloween get tricked hard and catch it all on their own cameras) but he wraps this within a second set of footage, this time of the police investigation into the mutilation of a bunch of Madrid 20-somethings.
By manipulating found footage within found footage, Plaza creates horror through structure and gore. By contrast, Adult Swim regular Casper Kelly (“Too Many Cooks”) gets suitably weird with a tale of monstrous off-brand candy and an extremely unsettling mascot (just steer clear of the Larry Find bar). It’s gruesomely absurd rather than just absurdly gruesome, a marked improvement for series has increasingly relied on gore over the last few editions.
In both, there’s a lot of dependence on adults acting like big kids, and so the key is to find an interesting hook within those constraints, which both Kelly and Plaza achieve. Mercifully, Alex Ross Perry’s “Kidprint” throws the formula out with the poisoned candy, instead bringing the chills from a classic fear-filled part of Halloween mythology: kids getting abducted while trick-or-treating. That’s not the only way it’s a throwback: it also feels like the closest a segment has come in years to the early, edgy, innovative shocks of the first two V/H/S movies, when the films were still built around true lo-fi innovation and weren’t afraid to be truly emotionally disturbing, to push the potential of the image as much as the imagery. There’s a transgressive quality that the series has lacked for a while, aided greatly by Stephen Gurewitz‘s performance as electronics store manager and naïve geek Tim.
Real standout segments in the ever-growing V/H/S archive, although not impossible, as shown most recently by Kate Siegel’s haunting abduction chiller “Stowaway” from V/H/S/Beyond. So that Halloween manages two is a real treat. “Kidplan” may be a return to the time when the Mumblegore crew brought their lo-rez arthouse sensibilities to horror, but “Home Haunt” represents the other side of the coin from that era. In its sprint through a home haunt gone ghoulishly wrong, there’s all the giddy fun of no-rules horror experimentation shown by future Loki showrunners Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead in V/H/S: Viral‘s “Bonestorm,” or V/H/S/2‘s “A Ride in the Park” from The Blair Witch Project filmmakers Edúardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale. If “Kidprint” feels like something you’d find on an unmarked tape in a swap meet, “Home Haunt” brings back the giddy thrills of channel hopping at 3am and finding something stupid cool that makes you laugh and scream.
V/H/S/Halloween
World Premiere
Wed., Sept. 24, 11am
Fantastic Fest 2025 runs Sept. 18-25, Passes and info at fantasticfest.com.
Find all our news, reviews, and interviews at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.
