A Halloween-themed installment of the flagging “V/H/S” franchise is obvious to the point of redundancy: Both have become annual celebrations of horror-related kitsch, “scary” as a means of self-classification but increasingly safe — even comforting — in execution. Likewise, both offer a selection of disposable treats wrapped in the promise of a night to remember, but only one of them has ever given me 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 an institution because the first two were sinister enough to sell the winking faux-cursedness of its found footage concept, and the decision to build the series’ eighth volume around weird candy and cursed decorations makes it difficult for “V/H/S/Halloween” to recapture the menace, ambition, or formal dexterity of its best segments.
Most of the shorts here try to use holiday goofiness as a gateway to serious terror, but unsurprisingly struggle to make it across that hell-mouth intact; meanwhile, the sole episode that keeps a straight face and taps into some of the real fears that accompany trick-or-treating manages to become the franchise’s most genuinely upsetting short in years. All of the bits are diverting enough, and even the weakest among them boast spooktacular effects (legendary makeup artist and creature designer Rick Baker even plays a small role in the final segment, which offers a worthy tribute to his work), but only one of them leverages Halloween into something creepier than empty calories.
Written and directed by Scottish filmmaker Bryan M. Ferguson (known for his music video work with artists like Flying Lotus, as well as a wide variety of horror-infused shorts like the self-amputation-obsessed “Flamingo”), the wraparound story sets the tone for an anthology in which craft takes precedence over content. The CEO of a beverage company is product-testing their new cola, Diet Phantasma, every can of which seems to contain a demon from hell. Some of the participants enjoy the taste more than others, but all of them end up with their faces melting into a black sludge after Thing-like tentacles launch out from the soft drink and pry open their mouths — it’s basically a less dangerous version of Four Loko.
While the trials grow repetitive, and their anti-consumerist punchline of a payoff isn’t worth the time it takes to get there, Ferguson shoots this devilish schtick with a nostalgic fuzziness that not only looks great, but also grounds “V/H/S/Halloween” in an endearingly passé kind of Satanic Panic, when tainted foodstuff and talking to strangers were the worst that parents had to worry about.
Anna Zlokovic’s slight but impressively staged “Coochie Coochie Coo” starts the full segments on a strong note by offering a bit of local Halloween folklore that splits the difference between silly and scary. Two teenage girls, too old to trick-or-treat but determined to enjoy one last Halloween together before they go 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. Guess who’s waiting for them inside a house that none of the other, younger kids on the block can seem to see?
“The Mommy” isn’t much of a concept (what if a wronged woman came back from the dead in order to raise the kids she was denied in life?), but it’s gruesomely well-realized here, as Zlokovic focuses her attention on the sordid details — viscous trails of curdled breast milk, haunting prosthetics, tragically repulsive creature design — in order to flesh out the fun. And that the Mommy herself has such clear motivation becomes that much easier to appreciate by the end of Paco Plaza’s “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” in which the co-creator of the “REC” franchise cheats the omnibus’ concept for a disposable possession story that feels reverse-engineered from its gravity-defying final shots.
At least “Fun Size,” directed by “Too Many Cooks” auteur Casper Kelly, has the chutzpah to mess with expectations. Bent towards the deranged comedy that Kelly is known for (if never quite as giddily transgressive as his best work), the short offers a cautionary tale about some twentysomethings who defy a candy bowl’s printed request to take only one per person. Spoiler alert: That turns out to be a mistake. Kelly’s exaggerated caricatures — two of whom are engaged, and one of whom desperately wishes they weren’t — are sucked into an industrial pocket realm where they’re pursued by a humanoid gumball machine who wants to package their dismembered body parts as pieces of candy.
The premise might sound geared towards torture porn, but the execution cleaves a lot closer to gross-out absurdity (Kelly lavishes special attention on the process of mulching a hairy ballsack into a chocolate treat) as he teases the horror of picking just “one per person” for the rest of our lives. Later, Michelin Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman’s “Home Haunt” 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 doesn’t add up to more than a few knowing laughs, but the spirit of the season courses through its severed arteries, as does the communal love that underpins so much of the horror genre — and continues to make the “V/H/S” series, and by extension the Shudder platform that hosts it, such a salve in these ghoulish times.
This movie’s only real fright, however, is sandwiched between “Fun Size” and “Home Haunt.” Rooted in reality, the mere premise of Alex Ross Perry’s “Kidprint” is scarier and more grounded than anything the “V/H/S” franchise has seen in a long time. In the early ’90s, when this segment takes place, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children established the Kidprint program, a free service that allowed parents to bring their children to a local Blockbuster Video store and record little interviews — with the kids holding a clapboard that ominously displayed their vital statistics — as a taped ID they could give to the police if the kids went missing. I don’t know if the program ever facilitated the rescue of an abducted child, but it sure feels like more of a reflection of suburban fear-mongering than it does a meaningful response to it.
The prospect of shooting those tapes is a lot more chilling to me — or at least a lot more palpable — than the idea of my kids getting snatched by a neighbor on Halloween night, and Perry makes the most of it without completely unbalancing the rest of this otherwise fun-loving omnibus. Its plot is simple: An indie video store employee goes to retrieve a Kidprint tape after a local child goes missing, only to find that one of his co-workers is a serial kidnapper whose interests aren’t limited to killing people. Its effect is more complicated.
Just winking enough to get away with playing things unnervingly straight, “Kidprint” returns the “V/H/S” series back to some of its formative segments by eschewing the supernatural in order to exploit the inherent wrongness of low-grade video formats (which tend to seem all the more sinister in the context of banal home video footage). By virtue of looking back into this series’ past, “Kidprint” taps into the reason why the found footage franchise has a seemingly infinite future: Everything is scarier when a camera is rolling.
Grade: C+
“V/H/S/Halloween” will be available to stream on Shudder starting Friday, October 3.
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