The V/H/S horror anthology series began with the vintage technology of VHS camcorders and found footage on video tapes. Now it’s started its own high tech space race with the latest film in the series, V/H/S/Beyond.
The seventh installment in the smash-hit horror anthology series (not counting feature spinoffs SiREN and Kids vs. Aliens), V/H/S/Beyond takes the series into strange new territories by being completely science fiction themed. Its interstellar nightmares received their world premiere at this year’s Fantastic Fest, ahead of being released on streaming platform Shudder on Oct. 4.
Segments in earlier films have picked up on the SF vibe before, such as “Slumber Party Alien Abduction”, the inspiration for Kids vs. Aliens from V/H/S/2 and most memorably “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger,” Joe Swanberg’s evil ET entry into the original film.
That segment was a major influence on series newcomer Kate Siegel, who makes her directorial debut with her segment “Stowaway.” A self-proclaimed huge fan of the series, Siegel is far better known as an actor for films like Hush and TV shows including The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher. “I’d never directed, I’d never picked up a camera, I’d never though about doing it, and this was my very first thing, so I felt the pressure of being a fan. I was able to rely on the fact that I knew all of the great filmmakers that had come before me. … So many of them were individual and exquisite, and then they told me a little about the filmmakers I’d be working with, and the pressure was intense.” She laughed. “I have a long history of jumping out of planes without looking.”
The V/H/S films have often gone international, and that continues with the series’ first Indian segment, “Dream Girl” by Virat Pal – another first timer to the franchise. But the nervousness about living up to the franchise’s legacy knows no borders. Pal said that he first read the announcement on horror news site Bloody Disgusting that the producers were planning a sci fi-themed installment of October 13 last year – his birthday. “I went, ‘Wow, I wonder who the directors are going to be?’” That November, he was out eating burgers with a writer friend, “and I asked him, ‘How do people get V/H/S?’ and he said, ‘Oh, it’s so exclusive.’ … So I feel very lucky, I feel very blessed, and sometimes being around these filmmakers I feel like a clerical error. I was shaking for a week when I found I got it.”
However, the newcomers weren’t just thrown a budget and told to hand in their finished assignment. Christian Long, who codirected the body horror segment “Fur Babies” with his brother Justin (a Fantastic Fest veteran from Tusk and The Wave), praised producer Josh Goldbloom, who has been running the franchise since V/H/S/94 in 2021. Long called him “the best producer I’ve worked with and been around, in that he is both very giving of freedom but also has great ideas and gives great notes. He’s there, but he isn’t in your way ever. He’s supportive and smart, especially in this space.”
While there’s not really a core V/H/S team, there has been some continuity. For example, filmmaking collective Radio Silence has been a regular part of the equation since the original in 2012. RS member Justin Martinez co-directed “10/31/98” (which Pal called “The greatest segment of all time”) from the first film and has handled VFX duties for five of the seven films including Beyond. However, this is the first time he’s had solo directing duties on a segment. ”I’ve been begging them to let me direct since V/H/S/94,” Martinez said, “So when they finally said ‘You’re gonna do one,’ I jumped out of my seat, and I was shaking.” His segment, “Live and Let Dive,” may arguably be the most ambitious in the whole series, depicting an alien invasion during a sky diving adventure. However, that wasn’t his original pitch. “I wanted to have a bank robbery that goes bad and the bank robber gets abducted [and] I held the skydiver idea in my back pocket because it sounded insanely difficult.”
However, he got the same kind of encouragement from the producers as the newcomers did. “The sky dive, I initially took it easy on myself on the way down because I didn’t know what I was going to get. Then I had a phone call with the producers, and [producer[ Brad Miska was going, ‘Maybe it would be cool if an alien was attacking someone on the way down’ – and you see that in the movie now.”
Yet there’s another universal constant for all filmmakers in a V/H/S segment – working out how to do found footage. Or, as Siegel put it, “using character to define camera movement, and vice versa.” In Siegel’s segment, UFO hunter Halley (Alanah Pearce) is supposed to be using a mid-90s VHS camcorder, a completely different piece of equipment to what Siegel was operating: an Alexa with an infrared sensor lens package on a gyroscoping crane head on a Steadicam system. Siegel explained, “It was a big camera, and I had the thing on that looks like a body brace, and as I was walking I had to remember that the video camera is a very light camera, and how the breath affects it.”
Every segment had its own cinematographic demands, and sometimes that would require some ingenious solutions. Jay Cheel (Cursed Films), who directed the wraparound narrative titled “Abduction/Adduction,” found himself in a battle with state-of-the-art technology. “We had issues with a lipstick camera,” he recalled. “It was very janky and would continually cut out. So I purchased off of Amazon, for $25, this snake camera for your drain. I actually bought two of them, just in case, and stuck a light on it, and after running it through multiple generations of VHS tape, and we had a great artist that was filming the tape off of a TV and hooked up the TV somehow to a toy piano, and when they play the toy piano the image would warp. I don’t get it, but it looked amazing.”
But sometimes the simple solution is to use the same camera the character is using. Cheel was able to shoot some sequences on a Canon GL2, just like what he used to shoot movies on in high school. Meanwhile, Pal set “Dream Girl” on the set of a Bollywood movie, giving the franchise both its widescreen tracking shots and its first song-and-dance routine. “It’s absolute genius,” said Siegel.
Because the filmmakers were working in isolation, it’s only now that the film is complete and has received its world premiere at Fantastic Fest can they appreciate what they and their fellow V/H/Sers have pulled off. The Head Hunter director Jordan Downey joins the franchise with his segment, “Stork,” and now can relish being part of the audience and of the V/H/S legacy. “I’ve been living in my thing for so long,” he said. “Now I’m soaking in the stories of how everyone else made it.”
V/H/S/Beyond debuts on Shudder on Oct. 4.
V/H/S/Beyond
USA, India 2024, 114 min.
World premiere
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This article appears in September 27 • 2024.
