The long-running found-footage anthology series V/H/S treats audiences to another round of trickery, this time set squarely around All Hallows’ Eve. V/H/S/Halloween offers up six tales of gore and fright that are inventive and mostly fun, but also so blood-soaked that the impact wears thin as the film drags on. This is a textbook case of “killing your babies” where less would have been more, and four shorts would have been plenty.
The wraparound film, Diet Phantasma, by Bryan M. Ferguson, follows a group of paid volunteers testing a new diet cola for Halloween, with predictably disastrous results. It’s quirky and strange, but not essential. Anna Zlokovic (Appendage) fares better with Coochie Choochie Coo, in which two graduating seniors dressed as babies get far more than they bargained for when they trick-or-treat at the wrong house. Casper Kelly (writer of Mandy) brings his brand of off-kilter madness to Fun Size, where an innocent bowl of Halloween candy traps a group of twenty-somethings in a sticky house of confectionery horrors. Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman’s Home Haunt takes the old-school vibe of a family’s homemade haunted house and ratchets up the terror after they incorporate a mysterious vinyl record of spooky sounds.
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The standout, though, is Paco Plaza’s (REC) Ut Supra Sic Infra (As Above, So Below”), in which a traumatized young man recounts to police the gruesome deaths of his friends after they broke into a mobster’s abandoned home. Plaza leans into the supernatural with chilling flair, offering the film’s strongest special effects and most haunting imagery.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint, the film’s low point. What begins with promise devolves into gratuitous, over-the-top violence against children. It’s relentlessly bleak and feels unnecessary; the one shot that could have been excised entirely.
As a whole, V/H/S/Halloween is one of the better entries in the franchise, but also the goriest. Impressive as they are, the endless barrage of practical gross-out effects grows numbing and even irritating after a while. The shorts could have benefited from a broader range of horror tones, rather than doubling down on shock and splatter. The relentless bleakness doesn’t help either, though that’s arguably part and parcel with found footage.
Still, there’s fun to be had. Between the candy-coated body horror, the unnerving supernatural touches, and the occasional goofy jolt, the film captures just enough of the holiday spirit to be a grisly seasonal treat. With four pretty terrific shorts, one misfire, and one unnecessary wraparound, it’s a mixed bag, but one worth digging into if you can stomach chopped-off limbs, skin peeling, and creepy mothers with far too many leaking breasts.
If the V/H/S series continues, here’s hoping the next installment takes the lesson that brevity is best. A sharp, swift anthology that doesn’t overstay its welcome could make for an even stronger Halloween tradition.
V/H/S/Halloween hits Shudder on October 3, 2025.
