There’s a comforting unpredictability to the V/H/S movies. No matter how many entries they release (this is now the eighth), you never really know what you’re going to get. The long-running anthology series has always thrived on its grab-bag approach, with each short film bringing a new creative team, new flavor of found footage, and new level of gory thrills. The results are inevitably mixed, but that’s part of the fun. You tune in for the spectacle, the gnarly effects, and the wildly varying levels of craft that give each segment its own personality.
V/H/S/Halloween, the latest seasonal installment now streaming on Shudder, proudly continues that tradition. It’s messy, mean, uneven, and often pretty great.
The film opens with Bryan M. Ferguson's “Diet Phantasma,” a framing narrative that instantly captures the franchise’s sweet spot between DIY grime and slick, studio-grade production value. It follows a series of test subjects being filmed as they sample a new soda flavor, with each experiment ending in some spectacularly grotesque fashion.
The segment’s mix of corporate satire, dark comedy, and practical carnage sets the perfect tone. Every time the movie cuts back to it, you know you’re in for another devilish little treat. By its second and third appearances, it only gets nastier and funnier. By the end, “Diet Phantasma” proves itself one of the most successful wraparounds V/H/S has ever had, fully embracing the series’ twisted sense of humor and gleeful disregard for human life.
The first proper story, Anna Zlokovic's “Coochie Coochie Coo,” starts from a strong conceptual place: two best friends (played by Samantha Cochran and Natalia Montgomery Fernandez) realizing they’ve aged out of Halloween and trying to recapture that magic one last time. The idea alone hits on a universal melancholy, the sadness of growing up past your favorite holiday, and it’s a perfect emotional foundation for a Halloween horror short.
Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t rise much beyond its premise. What begins as a promising exploration of nostalgia and lost youth soon devolves into a haunted-house attraction, complete with predictable jumps and monster makeup around every corner. To its credit, it looks great, and it follows through on its themes within its brief runtime. But it ultimately feels like the streaming equivalent of a local haunted maze - solid enough, but short on surprises.
Thankfully, the next entry, “Ut Supra Sic Infra”, reminds us why these movies are still worth coming back to. Directed by REC co-creator Paco Plaza, it immediately distinguishes itself with a fresh setting and polished aesthetic. Set in a lavish Madrid mansion, the segment begins with grisly crime-scene photos and cuts to the interrogation of Enric (Teo Planell), the sole survivor of a Halloween party turned massacre.
Plaza masterfully weaves between perspectives and camera sources, staying true to the found-footage form while pulling off stylish editing that few others in this series have managed. As Enric reconstructs the night’s horrors, the film layers tension with a slow dread, culminating in a truly disgusting bit of eye-gouging that’ll leave even genre veterans squirming. “Ut Supra Sic Infra” ranks among the most confident and well-constructed V/H/S shorts to date. It’s atmospheric, tragic, and terrifying in equal measure.
Just when the movie seems to be on a hot streak, it hits a wall with “Fun Size”, from none other than filmmaker Casper Kelly. This one centers on another group of too-old trick-or-treaters, and it immediately feels off. The dialogue is stilted, the acting forced, and the whole thing carries the energy of a bad YouTube sketch stretched to its absolute limit. The one redeeming touch is the design of the titular candy mascot - a grinning, cartoonish figure that would be right at home in a Five Nights at Freddy’s spinoff. Beyond that, “Fun Size” is an endurance test, the kind of segment that threatens to sink the whole movie. It’s easily one of the weakest despite some neat flourishes.
Luckily, the series has always known how to pull itself back from the brink. The next chapter, “Kidprint,” comes from indie auteur Alex Ross Perry. It’s a surprising but inspired choice for found footage horror. Set in 1992, the story follows Tim Kaplan (Stephen Gurewitz), a small-town video-store owner who creates VHS tapes meant to help identify missing children. When a local girl disappears, Tim’s search for answers leads him into something truly nightmarish.
Perry’s direction brings a rare, grounded dread to the anthology, grounding the horror in something disturbingly believable. The editing is razor sharp, the performances subdued and authentic, and the implication of child abuse and exploitation hits with chilling force. “Kidprint” isn’t just the best segment here, it’s one of the best in V/H/S history. It’s horrifying because it feels all too real, anchored by that perfect kind of nightmare logic that sticks with you long after it’s over.
The final standalone story, Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman's “Home Haunt,” centers on a strained father-son dynamic, with a teenager (Noah Diamond) fed up with his dad’s (Jeff Harms) obsessive Halloween antics. There’s something tender buried in there about growing up and letting go, but like “Coochie Coochie Coo,” the segment ultimately can’t sustain its ideas. It devolves into more haunted-house chaos and predictable violence, lacking the spark of creativity that the better entries provide.
By the time the credits roll, it’s clear that V/H/S/Halloween embodies everything that’s made this franchise endure for over a decade. It’s a mixed bag, sure, with a handful of duds, a few near-masterpieces, and a lot of inspired weirdness in between. But when it’s firing on all cylinders, it delivers exactly what fans come for: inventive, nasty, handcrafted horror that pushes the boundaries of what can be done in the found-footage form. “Diet Phantasma,” “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” and “Kidprint” are all killer additions to the canon, each for wildly different reasons - the first for its dark humor, the second for its technical craft, and the third for its sheer, unrelenting terror.
The bad may outweigh the good in runtime, but not in impact. V/H/S/Halloween is proof that there’s still plenty of blood left in this series’ veins, and that sometimes, the real treat is just watching ambitious horror filmmakers cut loose and make something wild, no matter how messy it gets.
'V/H/S/Halloween' is now streaming on Shudder.
