Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (V/H/S)

(TW: sexual assault)

ooooOOOOoooo!!!! Welcome, one and all, to Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween! It is October now, except it's not. I have to write this a few days before because I'm not going to be at home on October 1st. For you, then, uncovering this post is rather like finding a cursed VHS tape that displays a spooky short story filmed with someone's handheld camera. But I may be getting ahead of myself. Yes, kicking off the marathon is this film, V/H/S. The concept of this excited me, and it seemed to do well enough that there are five more of them. You get the horror subgenre of found footage, and you mix it with the lo-fi aesthetic of the VHS tape? As someone who watched all of Symphogear on tape, I was extremely interested in marinating in this mix of aesthetics.

A pity, then, that the movie isn't actually all that good. It just barely managed to avoid falling on the side of "a piece of shit" for me by virtue of some of those structural tricks made possible by the found footage format. There are a handful of standout moments that I will mention in a moment, but what you have to endure to get there isn't great. For some reason this movie has a framing device of criminals who film their crimes on videotape who break into a house to steal another videotape and thus have to watch evil cursed videotapes that serve as the segments and kill the person watching them at the end of each one. Oh, and they're sexual assaulting douchebags. Oh, and the first tape also has attempted assault on a passed-out drunk woman. There's unpleasantness mixed with suspense, and then there's just showing lurid displays of toxic dudebro pieces of shit. I don't like seeing that shit, and I didn't like it here.

Now, granted, the toxic fuckers get what's coming to them: the framing device bastards get killed by watching cursed tapes, as mentioned, but that first segment has the partying dudebros pick up a succubus by mistake who basically rips all their throats out and cocks off. One could say something about the rule of not having sex in a horror movie, and the gender swap of men getting ripped to pieces for transgression, but this fucking thing doesn't deserve that much love and attention. Its final shot was the first time I was impressed by this, half an hour in: the filming medium of choice here is a hidden camera in a guy's glasses, and the camera does a disorienting thing before making clear that the succubus picked him up and is flying away with him before his glasses fall to the ground. Cool shot. Bad story.

And so it goes for the rest of the film. Cool shots, disappointing stories. The second has no supernatural elements, but one great shot: a couple is filming their vacation on camera, and we cut to that night when the wife is filming her husband sleeping... and then the camera pans to show the wife sleeping. A fucking intruder is filming, and the sheer unsettling realization of "WAIT WHO IN THE FUCK IS FILMING?" is one of the movie's best scares. The third has the most stock setup imaginable: college kids going into the woods for the weekend and getting stabbed in the throat by a scary killer man. There is a really good idea buried in this rote formula, though. One of the girls is actually the Final Girl who survived a previous massacre, and she willingly lured her new friends up here to get slaughtered to draw out the killer so she could get revenge. There's something delightfully fucked up about that! Oh, and the killer entity thing is unfilmable, only able to be seen as a glitchy humanoid shape. It's quite a neat effect for a horror.

Segment 4 is where I lose it. It is a story told as a series of video chat calls between partners in a long distance relationship. It's a serviceable story with a real fucked-up twist, but... Why in the fuck are you using a video chat story as one of your five in a movie about the VHS aesthetic??? It's still found footage, yes, but aesthetically it does not belong whatsoever! It breaks the structure for no structural reason beyond "they could" or "they didn't care not to". Anyway the last segment is dudebros in a haunted house. Not the worst dudebros, to be fair, and not the worst segment... but Christ. This movie was a major letdown, and I can't actually recommend you sit down with it. There's just too much gross shit frontloaded at the start, and I don't mean people being stabbed in the throat. It has glimmers of brilliance, but those are undercut by the film breaking its own rules for no greater purpose. 

Off to a great start, huh? Well, that's okay. We have 15 more chances for something that's actually, y'know, good.