V/H/S Halloween: Have a little fun. It won't kill you.

Let’s get one thing straight at the outset: whether or not this review ends positively, if you’re the kind of person seeking it out, you should watch V/H/S Halloween. Full stop. A series this deeply entrenched in its own mechanics isn’t going to draw many new faces, and this installment isn’t making a case for itself to newcomers, but for fans of the series and Shudder subscribers, it does exactly what it promises. And this time, maybe a bit more.

Found footage has been the little darling of horror since The Blair Witch Project (or Cannibal Holocaust, if you want to be technical) for a simple reason: it’s cheaper to produce. That’s not a take that’ll blow anyone’s head off, but it’s worth pointing out that found footage carries a scrappiness latent in its production model. It made natural sense, then, that a franchise like V/H/S would eventually come into existence. We get a nice wine flight of up and coming horror creators, and they get a demo reel for their next production meeting. Everybody wins.

At this point in the series’ life, though, the gloves need to come off. The audience is built in. We know what to expect. So the fun lies in how the creators can subvert or go beyond those expectations. Thankfully, this happens in spades across V/H/S Halloween.

There’s a naughty sense of humor running through the whole thing. While previous iterations have attempted a through line of continuity, usually through their wraparound setups (someone has to find these tapes, right?), Halloween makes no such attempt, and it’s better for it. At some point, the question of “why are they filming this?” becomes a leash. And despite that conceit still being very much a part of this collection, its importance is lessened. Let us have some fun, yes?

The wraparound (or frame narrative), “Diet Phantasma,” suggests just that. Gone is the need to connect the dots of the collected shorts through some rationality-inspired, tired “check out these tapes!” trope. Instead, we get a humorous palate cleanser after each short. Told over five entries, human lab rats take turns consuming a new soda, Diet Phantasma, to increasingly ill effects. Fans of The Stuff know where this goes: black projectile vomit, exploding bodies, melting flesh. It’s all in good fun. Funny, even!

The shorts themselves aren’t perfect, but they’re varied enough in tone that, despite many of them leveraging the same Halloween-inspired themes (teens too old to trick-or-treat, haunted houses gone wrong, “take-one-candy” rules broken), there’s always a reason to wait for the next. “Ut Supra Sic Infra” extends the tonal whiplash to its furthest reaches with its hyper-seriousness, but [REC] director Paco Plaza knows how to stage a genius final shot. It’s the most visually arresting moment in the collection, so despite playing the tone straight, his story of a haunted house tour inside a dead medium’s attic has staying power.

Where the collection really stands out, though, is when it decides to test the boundaries of the palatable. Both “Fun Size” and “Kidprint” find the limits and rush past them. “Fun Size,” by Casper Kelly, who fans might recognize as the creator of Adult Swim’s inexplicable Too Many Cooks, plays out like a modern Hansel and Gretel, one in which a group of young adults finds out what happens when you don’t obey the “take one” sign. It’s gruesome, gross (maybe a few too many phallic references), but it keeps its tongue firmly in cheek for its entire duration. It knows it’s a joke.

On the other hand, “Kidprint,” by Alex Ross Perry, is the most disturbing of the bunch. Hell, I might use the word repugnant. It eschews the supernatural entirely, focusing instead on a small town’s continuing child disappearances. Protagonist Tim runs a local video store dedicated to documenting the town’s children in case they go missing, which is already an insane proposition never really explored, and those tapes quickly turn violent. The nausea-inducing moments contrast the cries of terror with the killer’s calm, light-hearted demeanor. It’s maybe the most unsettled I’ve felt during anything in the franchise. That it came from a filmmaker generally outside the world of horror is its own sort of magic. 

The remaining shorts, “Coochie Coochie Coo” (Anna Zlokovic) and “Home Haunt” (Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman), each play their own version of a haunted house to mostly fun effect. CCC gets a bit long in the tooth once the haunt devolves into running and screaming, but it starts strong enough, and the Mommy character herself is well designed. Home Haunt features some of the best gore effects across the segments, despite having the depth of a puddle.

Truly, what can a filmmaker do in 15–20 minutes? Shorts like these don’t have time for character development and can’t rely on traditional setup-payoff structures, so they need to make a mark in some other way. In the franchise’s past, that mark is usually set by severe escalation (“Safe Haven” in V/H/S 2 is the standout here), by being utterly bizarre (“Ozzy’s Dungeon” from V/H/S 99 comes to mind), or by sheer filmmaking strength (“The Empty Wake” is probably the scariest the series has ever been). But here, during Halloween, it’s all about playing up the theme. It’s about fun, and for the most part, it delivers.

More so than most horror franchises, V/H/S seems to continue exclusively for the fans. Given the lack of theatrical release, there’s no box office metrics associated with its continuation; the only thing that matters is whether Shudder subs tune in, and for the most part, they do. It’s simple enough: For those of us who’ve outgrown trick-or-treating, this is about as close to the excitement of emptying a pillowcase of candy as we can hope for. Maybe we’ll delight in a king-size Snickers, or maybe there’s sugar-free Werther’s in the bag.

So, is it scary? Not really, but it’s also not trying to be. It’s trying to put on a show for those who already want to watch. Thankfully, it’s strong enough to warrant doing this all again next year, and it’s nice to see the franchise continuing after V/H/S Viral nearly killed it.

Look: if you're reading this, you've either already seen it and are shaking your head in disagreement (sorry), or you’re not sure if it’s worth two hours of your life. It is. It’s not perfect, but thanks to its insistence on keeping things varied and, for the most part, unserious, it stands as one of the stronger entries in the franchise. Have a little fun. It won’t kill you.

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