‘V/H/S/Halloween’ Movie Review: Despite A Few Treats, This Series Needs A Year Off
Photo from Shudder
From Jeremy Kibler
Once upon a time, the V/H/S movies were really fun. They were scary and almost felt dangerous, like watching a video tape we knew we weren’t supposed to be watching. Thanks to Shudder’s relaunch in 2021 with V/H/S/94, the seventh-film-and-counting series has become an annual October tradition, so it’s about time that the eighth installment is called V/H/S/Halloween. Of course, it’s all about personal taste, but usually with any anthology film (especially a found-footage horror anthology film where glitches and shaky camerawork are all part of the aesthetic), there are going to be both hits and misses. V/H/S/Halloween continues its search in being a return to form, even with a new crop of filmmakers, but those hopes are dashed for disappointment. Fatally uneven in the extreme, here is another mixed bag, albeit one that’s bookended by the two best segments of the bunch.
Positioned as a grab-bag of phantasmagoric and spooktacular scares through tapes, V/H/S/Halloween presents five short stories, along with a framing device, but getting to the worthwhile standouts can be a tiresome experience. That wraparound, “Diet Phantasm” (written and directed by Bryan M. Ferguson), is an amusing idea, as scientists behind a glass partition perform taste test trials on a new diet soda with bad-to-worse results. Like most connective tissue in the V/H/S world, it has the thankless job of clotheslining everything else and leaves something to be desired.
“Coochie Coochie Coo,” written and directed by Anna Zlokovic (Appendage), does kick things off with promise. Like a first-person trip through a haunted house dedicated to a specific fetish, two girlfriends celebrate their last Halloween before going off to college. Even though they’re too old to be trick-or-treating, they stumble upon a mysterious house. Goosebumps, surprises, and gross what-the-fuckery ensue. Comparisons to Barbarian could be made, but “Coochie Coochie Coo” still does what a dark and twisted V/H/S movie does best: create fear when you aren’t nervously giggling.
Next up, Paco Plaza’s “Ut Supra Sic Infra” is a little more diverse when it comes to reinventing a story about a haunted object (this time, a haunted telephone). Plaza, who directed the nerve-rattling and purely visceral first two [REC] films, and co-writer Alberto Marini keep us on our toes, cutting back and forth between the leading up to a party massacre and the lone survivor accompanied by the police at the scene of the crime. There’s a bit of a waiting time, but the final shots of the mayhem are freakily devised.
Adult Swim creator Casper Kelly writes and directs “Fun Size,” which answers the question, “What would happen if you found out your candy bars were made of something else?” It all starts with more teenagers who are too old to be trick-or-treating, this time it being two couples (the one couple is dressed as “camera operators in a found-footage horror movie”). Next thing they know, a candy bowl full of candy bear brands they’ve never heard of sucks them all into a factory of horrors. Aside from a dementedly funny premise and a few gory money shots, it all leads to annoying teenagers getting pulled apart and a lame punchline about kids never listening to the “one per person” sign on a doorstep.
Aside from taking place around Halloween, “Kidprint” (written and directed by expectedly cynical filmmaker Alex Ross Perry) is the most upsetting and disturbing, and it’s hard to determine if that’s even a compliment. In this particular tape, the adult male employees at an electronics store are seemingly harmless, recording children about what they’re going to dress up as for Halloween, and then this “stranger danger” snuff tale turns mighty icky without any actual justice or point. Watching it is like finding a razor blade in your Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.
At least we get more of a tonally fun palette cleanser with the closer, Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman’s “Home Haunt,” in which a family man wants his house to be the scariest haunt on the block. When he steals a vinyl record from a Halloween shop and plays it as his neighbors enter, the homemade decorations spring to life and wreak havoc. Practical make-up and effects go a long way here in making this R-rated version of Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween evoke the kind of late-night chills and thrills you want.
If one hasn’t seen any of the V/H/S movies, V/H/S/Halloween is not a great place to start. It’s for a very specific genre audience, but perhaps that audience will need more of a success rate than “two out of five.” As previous installments delivered free-standing video nasties that were actually chillingly creepy and awe-inspiring in their ingenuity, there are no genuine all-timers here that you’ll be excited to tell your friends about. Each past installment has at least eked out one memorable tape, whether it was simply creepy, wild, weird, goretastic, or all of the above. This time, there isn’t an “Amateur Night,” or a “Safe Haven,” or a “Slumber Party Alien Invasion,” or a “Storm Drain.” Gnarly and blood-soaked, yes, but most of them lack that macabre magic.
After 13 years and now 8 movies, it’s been a rocky relationship between this avid horror fan and this series (last year’s extraterrestrial-forward V/H/S/Beyond seemed to be getting things back on track). Maybe it’s time to pause the tapes and make us miss this novelty for a few years until a hopeful V/H/S/Christmas arrives.
Rating: 2/5
V/H/S/Halloween is available to stream on Shudder on October 3, 2025.
