The” V/H/S” franchise’s waning” V/H/S” series is obvious to the point of redundancy: Both have grown from annual celebrations of horror-related kitsch and are increasingly safe- even comforting in execution. Both companies offer a variety of disposable treats with the promise of a night to remember, but only one of them has ever provided me with a good excuse to dress my three-year-old son as the wood-chipper from” Fargo” ( my then-pregnant wife went as Marge Gunderson, it was a whole thing ).
The” V/H/S” omnibuses became a staple because the first two were sinister enough to sell the winking faux-cursedness of its found footage concept, and desi hairy pussy porn the decision to center the eighth volume of the series around eccentric candy and demonized decorations makes it difficult for” V/H/S/Halloween” to recapture the menace, ambition, or formal dexterity of its best segments. Relevant Essays
Indie Film Has a Design Issue
Michaela Coel to compose and lead the novel variant of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s” Bloodsport” for A24.

The only episode that maintains a flat face and taps into some of the true fears that accompany trick-or-treating manages to become the franchise’s most unequivocally troubling little in years. Most of the shorts these attempt to use holiday goofiness as a gateway to severe terror, but predictably struggle to make it across that hell-mouth intact. Even the weakest of the parts, which feature famed makeup artist and critter architect Rick Baker in a small role in the final sector, which offers a respectable gift to his function, are entertaining enough, but only one uses Halloween as everything grosser than clear calories.
The wraparound story serves as the setting for an anthology in which craft takes precedence over content. It was directed and written by Scottish filmmaker Bryan M. Ferguson ( known for his music video work with artists like Flying Lotus and a wide variety of horror-infused shorts like the self-amputation-obsessed” Flamingo ). Some individuals prefer the flavor over people, but all of them end up with their encounters dripping in a charcoal gunk after Thing-like tentacles emerge from the sweet drink and tear open their mouths; it’s generally a less risky variation of Four Loko. Every may of Diet Phantasma, which the CEO of a drink organization purports to have a monster from hell, appears to contain a demon from hell, is being tested by the company’s CEO.
Ferguson shoots this diabolical shtick with a romantic vagueness that not only looks great, but also grounds” V/H/S/Halloween” in an charmingly passé form of Satanic Panic, when tainted ingredients and talking to strangers were the worst things parents had to worry about, and their anti-consumerist joke of a payoff isn’t worth the time it takes to get there.
The first half of Anna Zlokovic’s short but impressively staged” Coochie Coochie Coo” starts off strong, featuring a little local Halloween folklore that makes the difference between the silly and the scary. Who is waiting for them inside a house that no one else’s younger children on the block can see? Two teenage girls, too old to trick-or-treat but determined to have one last Halloween together before going on their separate ways for college ( the more prudent one has already been accepted at Yale, even though it’s only the end of October ), laugh off reports of a malevolent spirit known as” The Mommy” even as they tempt fate by wearing silicone baby masks.
What if a wronged woman returned from the dead to raise the children she was denied in life?” The Mommy” isn’t much of a concept. In order to further the fun, Zlokovic focuses her attention on the sordid details- viscous trails of curdled breast milk, haunting prosthetics, tragically repulsive creature design, and gruesomely well-realized this. By the time Paco Plaza’s” Ut Supra Sic Infra” ends, where the co-creator of the” REC” franchise cheats the omnibus concept for a disposable possession story that feels resembling it was based on its gravity-defying final shots, the Mommy’s clearly motivated motivation becomes even more important.
At least Casper Kelly, the director of” Too Many Cooks,” has the chutzpah to evade expectation in” Fun Size.” The short is a cautionary tale about some twentysomethings who defy a candy bowl’s printed request to take only one per person, moving in the direction of the deranged comedy Kelly is known for ( though never quite as gidily transgressive as his best work ). Spoiler alert: That turns out to be incorrect. Kelly’s exaggerated caricatures are sucked into an industrial pocket world where they are pursued by a humanoid gumball machine who wants to package their dismembered body parts as pieces of candy. Two of them are engaged, and one of them desperately wishes they weren’t.
The execution cleaves a lot closer to gross-out absurdity ( Kelly pays special attention to the process of mulching a hairy pussy big tits ballsack into a chocolate treat ) as he teases the horror of choosing just ”one per person” for the rest of our lives. The premise may seem like it’s geared toward torture porn. The spirit of the season is embodied in Norman’s” Home Haunt,” and it will strike a similar, if less stomach-churning, tone in its giddy father-son tale of a DIY Halloween house where the decorations come to life. It also serves as a testament to the communal love that underpins so much of the horror genre, and continues to make the” V/H/S” series such a salve in these ghoulish times. Later, R. H. and Michelin Pitt-Norman.
However, the only real fright in this film is found between” Fun Size” and” Home Haunt.” The premise of Alex Ross Perry’s” Kidprint” is more rooted and spooky than anything the” V/H/S” franchise has seen in a while. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children established the Kidprint program in the early 1990s as a taped ID for parents who brought their children to a neighborhood Blockbuster Video store to record little interviews with the kids holding a clapboard that ominously displayed their vital statistics. Although I’m not sure if the program ever helped to rescue an abducted child, it seems more like a reflection of suburban fear-mongering than a meaningful response to it.

The idea of my kids being kidnapped by a neighbor on Halloween night is much more spooky to me, or at least much more palpable, and Perry makes the most of it without completely debalancing the rest of this otherwise enjoyable omnibus. The story of the film is straightforward: An independent video store employee finds a Kidprint tape after a neighborhood kid disappears, only to discover that one of his coworkers is a serial kidnapper whose interests don’t just include kidnapping people. Its effect is more complicated.
” Kidprint” returns the” V/H/S” series to some of its formative moments by avoiding the supernatural in order to make use of the inherent wrongness of low-grade video formats ( which tend to seem all the more sinister in the context of banal home video footage ). It is winking enough to get away with playing things unnervingly straight. ” Kidprint” taps into the history of this series by looking back into the reason why the found footage franchise has an apprehensive future: Everything is scarier when a camera is rolling.
Starting on Friday, October 3,” V/H/S/Halloween” will be streamable on Shudder.
Want to stay informed about IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe to our newest newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, which features the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings that are only accessible to subscribers.
No listing found.