The V/H/S/ franchise may not have produced a single across-the-board masterpiece, but across its eight installments, it’s delivered more than its fair share of memorably monstrous sights, be it a winged seductress tearing through a hotel room full of creeps, a man visiting a nightmarish alternate-universe version of his home, or a journey through Hell guided by a malevolent demon.
As far as horror anthologies go, it’s crafted enough hits to make the misses forgivable, and that continues to be the case with its latest, whose vignettes are uneven and occasionally repetitive and yet, at their best, deliver the sort of macabre mood and mayhem that make the series an enduring spooky-season pleasure.
Like its predecessors, V/H/S/ Halloween, which premieres Oct. 3 on Shudder, has a framing narrative, although it’s unconnected to, and thus doesn’t explain the origins of, the rest of its on-videotape shorts. In it, Blaine Rothschild (David Hayon), COO of The Octagon Company, oversees trials of the conglomerate’s newest soda, Diet Phantasma, from a secure room behind a two-way mirror.
Diet Phantasma is touted as having a “spooktacular taste,” and that turns out to be quite a euphemism for its effect on the first subject, who upon taking a sip begins violently convulsing and spewing blood from his facial orifices. The tendrils that emerge from the soda can, forcing him to keep drinking, are another unfortunate downside, and Blaine watches all this with an exasperated look that speaks less to his worry about the carnage than to his team’s failure to correct the product’s formula.
The terrors of Diet Phantasma (“made with real ghosts!”) prove a running gag throughout V/H/S/ Halloween, whose action is otherwise divided into five separate tales of supernatural pandemonium.
The finest of those is the first, director Anna Zlokovic’s “Coochie Coochie Coo,” whose title comes from the phrase uttered by its villain, “The Mommy” (Elena Musser), who preys upon teenagers Lacie (Samantha Cochran) and Kaleigh (Natalia Montgomery Fernandez) on Halloween. Too old to be trick-or-treating, much less acting like obnoxious greedy pranksters, Lacie and Kaleigh—wearing what turn out to be fitting baby costumes—stumble upon a house that everyone else is ignoring.
Beckoned to come inside by a creepy hand holding a candy basket that emerges from the dark front doorway, the two wind up in a whirlwind of maternal madness courtesy of the Mommy, whose Kubrick-stare smile is almost as unnerving as the multiple milk-spouting breasts lurking beneath her dress.
“Coochie Coochie Coo” isn’t surprising but it features multiple unholy visions that linger, and that’s similarly true of “Fun Size.” By punishing a quartet of trick-or-treaters for taking two candies from a bowl of bizarre confections, Casper Kelly’s chapter too closely mimics Zlokovic’s tale; the film didn’t need two critiques of Halloween gluttony.
Nonetheless, it makes up for that redundancy with ghoulish nastiness once its four characters are sucked into the candy bowl and transported to a warehouse where a fiend—who has a giant round chocolate-candy head (complete with big eyes and smile) and wears a crown and suit—aims to turn them into bite-size sweets. With two of the victims dressed as “found footage” camerapeople, the short adds a bit of cheeky meta flavor to its Grand Guignol gruesomeness.
Writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s “Kidprint” serves up more grisliness via the saga of a town plagued at Halloween by a string of disappearances that have driven parents to a video store producing “kidprint” recordings designed to ID children in the event of a kidnapping. As with the rest of V/H/S/ Halloween’s offerings, it affects a suitably grainy VHS aesthetic, complete with occasionally muffled sound and shaky camerawork. Otherwise, though, it hinges on a deflating twist and resorts to peeling-flesh gore that strains to repulse, resulting in a contribution whose most compelling aspect is that its protagonist, Tim (Stephen Gurewitz), vaguely resembles comedian Tim Robinson.
Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman’s “Home Haunt” concludes things on a stronger note, with a family’s homemade haunted-house attraction transformed by a mysterious LP into a torture chamber for both its makers and their guests. Imagining a cheesy haunt—complete with skeletons that pop up from behind bushes, and ghosts that fly about on strings—as a lethal slaughterhouse, the directors put a clever spin on a familiar Halloween venue, all while rooting their story in the fed-up disgust of a teen boy who no longer adores his father’s annual tradition.
V/H/S/ Halloween is primarily about out-of-this-world craziness, but beneath its splattery exterior, it exhibits a recurring interest in the push-pull between childhood and adulthood, especially on Halloween, when some don’t know to leave juvenile things behind—and, for their stunted adolescence, beget brutal catastrophes.
Paco Plaza’s “Ut Supra Sic Infra” also concerns protagonists who are probably too old for costumed hijinks. Yet the [Rec] director’s primary fixation is parallel narratives, as Enric (Teo Planell) walks police through a massacre that he alone survived, and which Plaza depicts in fragmentary flashbacks. There’s no rhyme or reason to the insanity that befalls Enric and his pals—their saga is merely a cautionary tale about chanting biblical phrases in rooms that were once inhabited by infamous mediums—and that irrationality is a welcome ingredient in V/H/S/ Halloween’s mix. Additionally, a great upside-down POV ceiling shot is a winner, lending the material an eerie inventiveness.
While its “Diet Phantasma” segments faintly recall Halloween III’s marriage of corporate and paranormal evil, V/H/S/ Halloween plays with the holiday’s familiar conventions and signature imagery without overtly shouting out to, or duplicating, its legions of big-screen horror predecessors.
None of its chapters are destined for legendary status, but its originality is reasonably consistent and its carnivalesque atmosphere is well-suited for a film that’s seemingly been designed for sleepovers and midnight-movie screenings. Thirteen years after its debut, the franchise continues to be an exciting platform for some of the genre’s most established and up-and-coming talents. Here’s hoping that, unlike its beloved physical-media format, it avoids extinction for the foreseeable future.
The post This Is the Movie You Should Watch at Halloween Sleepovers appeared first on The Daily Beast.
