This horror bonanza, the eighth instalment in the V/H/S anthology series, is a mixed bag, with some very high highs and regrettably poor lows. This is essentially a collection of Halloween-themed shorts, and while they’re billed as “found footage” in keeping with the conceit of the original, the idea that you’re watching found footage has been more or less worn away to a nub at this point. The series would in all honesty be better off ditching that element, and simply leaning into the broader idea of a regular horror anthology of unsettling short films.
Among the highlights is a riotous and disgusting chapter called Fun Size, made with grisly flair by Casper Kelly, whose viral masterpiece Too Many Cooks took the internet by storm in 2014 and whose feature film Buddy just premiered at Sundance. Fun Size sees a group of young adults stumble into what might best be described as a wrongness zone where they’re pitted against a villain who comes on like the vicious kid brother of the Ghostbusters Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Less silly and more shocking is Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint, whose everyday villain hides in plain sight at the opposite end of the spectrum from the flamboyant Pennywise or Freddy Krueger-type child-killers. It’s fair to say that even the less effective chapters all have something going for them, but with the overall run time hitting nearly two hours, a little bit of judicious editing could have kept things zipping along with losing anything.
In franchise tradition, there’s also a wrap-around section, Diet Phantasma, to which we return after each section, and which closes out the film; it’s probably the funniest material here, playing out like The Fast Show meets Re-Animator. Conceived by director Bryan M Ferguson, it sees a bunch of amoral scientists attempt to finesse the recipe for a haunted soda, and it is completely absurd, in the most charming way possible.
