Composed of five found-footage tales, each helmed by a different director, V/H/S/Halloween is a trick or treater’s grab bag of an anthology film. Every segment passes the basic scary-movie smell test of showing you something that you haven’t seen before, and that includes a truly depraved death involving a large quantity of gumballs.
V/H/S/Halloween’s five directors each take a horror movie staple and put their own distinctive spin on it. Anna Zlokovic’s installment, “Coochie Coochie Coo,” sees a pair of bratty kids named Lacie (Samantha Cochran) and Kaleigh (Natalia Montgomery Fernandez) get more than they bargained for in a haunted house with a disturbing maternal theme, while another group of kids are tormented by a literal candy man in Casper Kelly’s “Fun Size.”
In true horror movie fashion, the quality of the acting on display varies quite a bit. Lacie and Kaliegh are so likeable that you’re desperate for them to get away unharmed, while the flatness of the performances in “Fun Size” makes the protagonists feel distinctly more disposable. Not that it matters, as V/H/S/Halloween isn’t interested in doling out happy endings.
Though each segment has a slightly different stylistic flavor, they’re united by a devilish mean-spiritedness. “Fun Size” is played for laughs, with the characters offed in ridiculous ways by a villain who looks like an early-season Buffy The Vampire Slayer baddie. But there’s nothing arch about Alex Ross Perry’s disturbing “Kidprint,” which follows a videographer, Tim (Stephen Gurewtiz), in a small town where someone is abducting and brutally murdering children.
Similar stories have cropped up in plenty of horror films, but they usually leave the grisliest details implied and off-camera. It’s not just that we see the sadistic acts of torture carried out in “Kidprint,” complete with gruesome special effects, but the sheer amount of time that the camera spends trained on the anguished faces of the young victims is deeply upsetting. (Not that Ross’s segment is alone in its willingness to show horrible things happening to kids; that’s one sacred cow that V/H/S/Halloween seems keen to slaughter as graphically as possible.)
Combined with the found-footage framework of V/H/S/Halloween, which calls attention to the act of looking and the choice it entails, there’s a confrontational quality to the whole thing that’s akin to the Terrifier movies. This anthology film serves up all the stuff that it knows horror fans like—blood, guts, teens in peril—and then holds the camera on them a little too close and a little too long, so they can’t help but begin to question why they like those things in the first place.
Each of the filmmakers involved finds some chilling way to use the found-footage aesthetic to their advantage. That’s especially true of Paco Plaza’s “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” in which Enric (Teo Planell), the sole survivor of a Halloween party gone horribly wrong, returns to the scene of the crime years later. The short cuts between the original night, shakily captured by overexcited teenagers on their phones, and Enric’s return in the present day, which takes place in broad daylight, crisply filmed by a professional crew. The same demonic forces are unleashed on both occasions, but they’re frightening in very different ways thanks to this visual shift.
The segment ends with a virtuosic sequence where the camera has been flung to the ground along with a group of characters as the villain preys on them, one after the other. The action is obscured so that we can’t really see what’s happening until the villain arrives at the final victim who’s splayed out right in front of the camera. The sequence, for the way that it compels you to watch what’s about to happen in spite of you knowing that what’s coming is going to be undeniably awful, is emblematic of V/H/S/Halloween’s diabolical power.
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