Stream It Or Skip It?

Every Halloween season for the past few years, Shudder has gifted us a fresh horror anthology in the V/H/S found-footage horror franchise, but this is the first time it’s specifically themed for the holiday: V/H/S/Halloween dishes out five short films rooted firmly in Scary Season. It’s the most consistent entry in the series in terms of subject matter, with gory stories focused on candy, costumes and the shit you put in your yard to make it look like a haunted house, and all that. And it’s as inconsistent as ever in terms of quality, although it racks up more hits than misses.

The Gist: Oh, and there’s always a series of wraparound “framing” segments in between the shorts, in this case, director Bryan M. Ferguson’s Diet Phantasma, where scientists lure in dopes to taste-test the titular soda and shrug when the liquid does horrible stuff to them: Back to the drawing board! 

The first true short is Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo, in which a couple of high-school girls who should’ve given up trick-or-treating years ago dress up like ugly babies to hoard candy. They end up being lured into a house that anyone with an IQ higher than the number of eggs in a carton would avoid – but hey, they deserve what happens to them maybe, because they’re kinda assholes. This one leaves you with something I find all too true: milk is gross!

Next is Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra, which translates to “as above, so below.” Something horrible happened in a spooky old mansion (or maybe it’s a rental space for parties and banquets?) and only one guy survived, so the cops totally retraumatize him by showing him crime-scene pictures of his friends with their eyeballs gouged out, then taking him back there to show them around. Perhaps it goes without saying that this was not a great idea.

Fun Size is notable for being directed by Casper Kelly, a name you probably don’t know, but you likely do know something he directed: Too Many Cooks, the utterly insane viral video from about a decade back that originally aired on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block. This little slab of insanity finds more too-old-to-be-trick-or-treaters (they all frankly look like they’re in their 30s, playing teenagers, I believe) deciding they’ll ignore the sign on an unoccupied bowl of candy and take more than one piece each. That’s a no-no. And after one dope opens a chocolate-covered penis, you’d think they’d GTFO, but they don’t, and get fully rewarded for their stupidity.

I highly anticipated Kidprint since it was helmed by Alex Ross Perry, whose drama Her Smell is seared into my mind. This short set in the 1990s focuses on a storefront service called Kidprint,  where one guy shoots video of children for families to save in case the kid goes missing. That’s not a terrible idea, since so many kids have vanished in this town recently. Capitalism! Also, hmm! I wonder if the Kidprint shop might have something to do with it?

Finally, Michelle Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman dish out Home Haunt, which finds one overexuberant dad going all-out with the Halloween yard decor again (“He thinks he’s Mr. Halloween,” sneers one snobby neighbor). Much to the embarrassment of his children, he constructs a massive haunted house and graveyard that kids line up to experience. His latest prize acquisition is a funky old Halloween record that, after he drops it on the turntable, brings all his ghosts and goblins and witches to murderous life. I have three words for this one: Witch broom cam!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Coochie Coochie Coo shows some Barbarian and Blair Witch inspiration, and now that I think about it, Fun Size is ABSOLUTELY by the Too Many Cooks guy.

Performance Worth Watching: Take your pick of which Coochie character will disturb you more: The Mommy (played by Elena Musser beneath some disturbing prosthetics), or Diaper Man (Adam Carr). 

Memorable Dialogue: One of the girls from Coochie Coochie Coo steps in something gross: “This is a health hazard! You’re going to get another fungal infection!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Only Perry’s Kidprint deviates from the horror-comedy norm, and its grim depiction of skin-filleting and violence against children struck me as uninspired and distasteful – a disappointment considering Perry’s other memorable work (which also includes Listen Up Philip and the recent quasi-doc Pavements). That’s your V/H/S/Halloween loser. The winner is Coochie Coochie Coo, a glorious slab of disturbing-funny hagsploitation that’ll have you cackling to break the tension. The runner-up is Ut Supra Sic Infra, which loiters a bit at the beginning and takes a minute to rev up, but finds Plaza delivering the goods righteously with a couple of highly creative final shots.

As for the rest, Home Haunt is the most lively, and takes home the True Carnage award, but like Diet Phantasma, exists only to indulge in fun, pointless splatter FX – key word being fun. Slightly less fun was Fun Size, a tryhard effort that’s a shade or two too goofy for its own good. As ever, we have to look beyond the found footage/handheld camera contrivance in order to enjoy this stuff – shouting drop the camera and run you dolt is just so very 2002, and it’s time to get over it.

Our Call:  It’s not time to be over the V/H/S franchise, though – V/H/S/Halloween is one of the stronger efforts in the franchise. STREAM IT.

How To Watch V/H/S/Halloween

V/H/S/Halloween is now available to stream on Shudder, which is also available to subscribers of the AMC+ streaming service.

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John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.