PLOT: A collection of Halloween-themed videotapes unleashes a series of twisted, blood-soaked tales, turning trick-or-treat into a struggle for survival.
REVIEW: I’ll be the first to admit that found footage isn’t exactly for me. I often find the gimmick to be a bit stale, and it’s hard to make it last convincingly for an entire film. But I’ve certainly found some charm with the anthology element of the V/H/S series. I’ve liked that it has essentially become a yearly anthology series, because I always like some yearly familiarity in my horror. Unlike some of the recent ones, V/H/S/Halloween isn’t confined to a particular year. Instead, we’re getting multiple stories that are simply set on Halloween. Sign me up!
If this is your first time with the franchise, V/H/S tends to have a wraparound segment that appears sporadically throughout the film, and many different short stories in between. None of the segments connect here, and it’s all just about Halloween vibes. As a massive fan of the holiday (who in horror isn’t?), I really just wanted a good Halloween atmosphere and, for the most part, this film delivers. In fact, I had a hard time picking between “Home Haunt” and “Kidprint” as my favorite segment, as they both understood the assignment. Even still, none of the segments really have that high of ceilings, and there are still plenty of flaws present. And don’t go into this expecting much horror, as the comedy is ramped up here, and there’s not much in the way of terror.
“Home Haunt” almost feels like a classic Goosebumps story, with a man bringing home a mysterious vinyl to play during his Haunted House. But it ends up making his homemade haunted house into one of absolute terror as real-life monsters take over and start killing the patrons. It’s shot well, and with purpose, and provides the best Halloween vibes of the film. I also really enjoyed the variety of supernatural beings we get. “Kidprint” was disturbing and almost had a Saw feel to it in parts. I also really enjoyed the wacky killer at the center of it all, but the low budget really creeps in here.
“Fun Size” and “Coochie Coochie Coo” are mostly hampered by some pretty rough acting. They both took me out of it a bit. But I enjoyed how both films were able to manage that “trapped in a supernatural building” without feeling too independent. There’s nothing worse than seeing an actor clearly have an easy escape, only to ignore it because of the script. Both these segments do a good job of making the characters feel trapped. Sadly, they also require very stupid characters to even be able to advance the plot, which is something I’ll always find frustrating in a horror movie.
The wraparound story, if you can even call it that, “Diet Phantasma” is really just the same thing over and over, with various people drinking a mystery soda and dying in horrible ways. I kept waiting for it to break the mold and do something different, but it’s the same scenario damn near every time. And the payoff really isn’t worth it. This could have just been a contained segment, with the repeated deaths trimmed, and it probably would have worked out a lot better.
The worst of the segments is easily “Ut Supra Sic Infra.” It just doesn’t have much in the way of scares and feels far too simple. It also doesn’t help that it feels very detached from Halloween. Just putting some characters in Halloween costumes doesn’t really feel like it’s enough. But I feel like this always happens with the V/H/S franchise, where there’s always one segment that feels very disconnected from the rest, almost like the filmmakers didn’t quite understand the assignment.
Ultimately, I think V/H/S/Halloween would have been much stronger had it just focused on the stronger segments. But I suppose that could be true of any of the V/H/S films at this point. But with a nearly 2-hour runtime, they easily could have trimmed out one of the weak links, and the film would have been better off for it. I also found it very odd that there were no recognizable filmmakers involved. I love Indie film and discovering new talent, but wasn’t the point of this series to allow bigger names within the genre to make their own little short films? I’m not sure if this is just indicative of where they’re taking the franchise or if it’s merely a one-off, but I’d really like them to go back to what worked before. As is, this has some fun segments, but it’s very rough around the edges and feels more like watching growing filmmakers who haven’t quite figured it out versus those who are experts in the genre, wanting to toil in found footage.
V/H/S/Halloween is Streaming on Shudder on October 3rd, 2025.
