V/H/S/Halloween

The now well-established V/H/S/ found footage series returns for the spooky season with a Halloween-themed anthology. This means three things. There are a lot of sweets, so eat before you go. There’s violence against children, which is a hard no for some viewers even when it’s this cartoonish. And there is a lot – I mean, a lot - of shrieking, so you really might want to take some ear protection. Seriously, this has its place in horror, but so many of the contributions to this one opt for the same trick that it become exhausting. There’s little opportunity to find moments of calm that will allow tension to start building again.

With a wrap-around story by Scotland’s own short film maestro Bryan M Ferguson, we are guaranteed at least some high quality entertainment. here it takes the form of a series to taste test trials being run by a soft drinks company on its new product, diet phantasma. Overseen by the steely Dr Rothschild (David Haydn), the sort of man who will put his cigarette out in an underling’s cup of coffee and have her too thoroughly pre-intimidated to protest, these featured numbered subjects in orange uniforms whom one might initially assume are prisoners, but who keep on getting younger. We come and go, watching a new test in each break between films. unlike in other entries in the franchise, no effort is made to link this story to the sort films we see, but the point may be simply that chaos is being unleashed into the world.

The first of the standard-format short films, Coochie Coochie Coo, involves two teenage girls planning a final trick-or-treat outing together before one of them goes off to college. Three young children bang on the window of their car telling them that 'the mommy' is going to get them because they’re too old for it, and sure enough, there is mommy horror, which has been a growing trend of late – but this lacks the wit and insight of the likes of Dolly, and quickly devolves into a lot of running between rooms looking at objects which we’re supposed to interpret as spooky largely because they’re out of place or badly lit. It gets old pretty fast.

Next up is the best structured entry – though it does take a few liberties with the format – that is, Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic infra, which sets up a creepy scenario and then takes viewers back through it as police officers coerce the sole survivor (Teo Planell, who is pretty good, as is his co-star Sandra Escacena) into taking them back to the scene to show them what happened. The set-up works well despite its dependence on genre clichés (a forgivable means of introducing tension in a format often dependent on shorthand), but an ending that might have worked well enough in different surroundings sadly blurs into the noise here.

The third standard short, Fun Size, has stylistic and location elements so similar to those in Coochies Coochie Coo that at first you might think it’s a reprise, but it soon finds its own direction, telling a story based on any number of urban legends which is thin in places but nicely designed in others. Particularly appealing is its selection of sweets with packaging and names which look really familiar but are freshly invented – the sort of thing an early AI might have come up with, back when those things were little and cute. This is the sort of element one might expect to encounter in a dream, and indeed the whole thing has a nightmarish quality, in terms of its internal logic as much as its scares. Beyond this, though, it doesn’t have much of a story. if it had ended after its first scare it would have made a much stronger impression.

Fourth in line is Kidprint, an offering by Alex Ross Perry which has even less of an arc but does start out with a nicely staged sequence in which a series of children are professionally photographed against a board which measures their height. The concept behind this, that parents will pay for such a service out of fear that their children could be snatched by predators on Halloween and they wouldn’t have suitable images to share with the police, is darker than anything that happens in the following 15 minutes. That is, there’s some pretty brutal horror, but it doesn’t seems to have much to say.

Finally, there is Home Haunt, which develops as a well told tale about a boy who gradually grows apart from his father and loses interest in their once-shared hobby of building Halloween haunted house attractions, having come to recognise how much other kids mock him for it. The acting is good and this continues to benefit the film in its later stages, but it’s rather a shame when the interpersonal drama is abandoned in favour of cheesy rule-breaking, trouble-invoking horror stuff, and still more so when that is replaced by running about and screaming – again.

Is it worth sitting through all this to hear the ad fordiet phantasma at the end? Maybe so – but if you’re watching on a small screen, there are sections where you’ll be seriously tempted to scroll. This V/H/S/ entry is fun in places but lacks anything for the more intellectually-inclined horror fan and is ultimately pretty forgettable.

Reviewed on: 03 Oct 2025