V/H/S/Halloween (2025)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Tapes of Wrath

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

As most horror franchises go on and on until they wear out, the low-budget V/H/S anthology series keeps returning with fresh faces, creative ideas, and reliable jolts; V/H/S/Halloween is no exception.

A wraparound sequence involves the testing of a new soda, "Diet Phantasma," in hopes of it being market-ready for Halloween. The side effects are less than ideal. In "Coochie Coochie Coo," two young women go for one last night of trick-or-treating before college, and encounter the urban legend known as "The Mommy." In "Ut Supra Sic Infra," the police question a young man, the sole survivor of a party that turned into a massacre; they take him back to the scene to understand what happened.

In "Fun Size," four young people out trick-or-treating come across a bowl of strange candy with the instruction: "one per person." When they break the rules, they find themselves transported to a bizarre candy factory. In "Kidprint," a video shop offers "kidprints," or videos that will help authorities identify children should they go missing on Halloween night. And in "Home Haunt," a teenager has grown up helping his father build their annual Halloween haunted house. He's outgrown it, so this will be the last year. Unfortunately, their newest prop is a haunted LP record.

V/H/S/Halloween is the eighth in the found-footage series, and one wonders what took them so long to get to a Halloween-themed movie? (Although the original V/H/S did include a segment set on October 31st.) It has just the right touch of holiday atmosphere, but it also goes right over the edge into the unexpected and the insane. Unlike many horror anthologies, each story here is solid, and no one story outweighs any other.

They're not unlike the infamous horror comics of old, wherein characters that stepped wrong were taught a gruesome or unholy lesson. The only drawback is that "Coochie Coochie Coo" and "Fun Size" have such a similar setup, i.e. young adults going trick-or-treating and getting into trouble. (In both episodes, adults ask them, "aren't you a little old for trick-or-treating?") But happily, both segments have very different energies, and "Fun Size" has a good enough monster that we might see it again someday...

Directors this time include Spanish-born Paco Plaza, co-creator of the [REC] found footage series (the first movie was remade in English as Quarantine) and director of the spooky Veronica, and writer/director Alex Ross Perry, known for the acclaimed movies Listen Up Philip and Her Smell. If you're getting a little old for trick-or-treating, perhaps it's better to stay home and watch V/H/S/Halloween thank risk the ire of some monster…