V/H/S/Halloween (2025) – Anything Can Happen On Halloween

Released: 3rd October
Seen: 5th October

The V/H/S franchise now sits as an astonishing 8-film series of anthology films. Those films have consisted of over 40 shorts made by nearly a dozen directors, some of whom have gone on to make some of the most important Horror films of the last 15 years. It’s an undeniable powerhouse in the horror genre that’s had its highs and lows, but the general rule is as long as the majority of the shorts are good, then that’s all that matters. So this year’s entry, V/H/S/Halloween takes the central concept of films shot with VHS cameras and makes every one of the shorts revolve around Halloween, which is a nice, simple way to link everything up. Do they work? Well, as I do every time, we’re going to go short by short.

The wraparound segment that holds everything together is pretty straightforward. Titled Diet Phantasma, it really just repeats the same gag every time that we cut back to it: a test subject is in a room with a can of soda while a team of scientists look on and every single time the test subject opens the can, something horrifying happens. It’s a simple and effective idea that works as a great way to give the audience a little bit of a break between each of the main shorts. It’s probably for the best that it’s broken up the way that it is because the joke would stop working if we just saw it all in one segment. It helps cleanse the palate between each short and puts us back in the fun silly mood needed to enjoy V/H/S/Halloween.

The first real segment is called Coochie Coochie Coo and follows a couple of teenage girls going trick or treating, even though they know they’re too old. They end up going to a particular house and, upon going inside, they discover a bunch of people who have been kidnapped and turned into nightmare babies while a demented Momma with 8 breasts chases them around. It’s probably the weirdest set of ideas for a short and a bold choice to start with but the image of the strangely cherubic-faced adult babies will stick with the viewer for a pretty long time. It’s also got one of the smarter reasons for the main characters to keep filming when shit gets weird by establishing that the camera’s light is the only flashlight they have. It’s a small thing but it helps make it believable that they would pick up the camera and use it to find their way around the house. 

Next up is a segment called Ut Supra Sic Infra which alternates between police footage and phone footage from a party that is exploring a massacre that took place at the party. A mix of supernatural horror and crime drama, this short admittedly feels like it waffles on a little bit before getting to the actual horrific punchline that everything builds up to. It’s the kind of short where everything is pretty normal for the most part until the ending, meaning the final moments of the short really need to hit hard in order to have an impact and while the effect that they use is impressive and the visuals that accompany the ending are quite something, it’s not good enough to make up for the long trip it takes to get to that ending.

Then there’s Fun Size, which might be my least favourite of the shorts. A group of annoying characters, including two who are dressed as “Camera operators in a found footage horror movie” so you know it’s going to get annoyingly meta up in here, go to a house and take more candy from a bowl than they’re supposed to and end up getting sucked into Willy Wonka’s dungeon basement where they will be chased by a demented mascot and possibly turned into candy. Fun Size’s big problem is that it’s just not well written. You can tell it’s trying to be a little more comedic than other segments of this franchise tend to be and some of those jokes do work, but then you have a character who exclusively calls another one “Fiancé” as though that’s cute in some way, or another one who just gives up and climbs on a deadly conveyor belt. It’s hard to actually take the threat of any of this seriously when we’re basically watching a demented Scooby Doo cartoon in the middle of this otherwise fairly serious movie.

Speaking of serious, probably the darkest and best short of the entire film is Kidprint which sets up its hero as a guy who offers a service that gets a bunch of film footage of local kids that can be used to help if they go missing. Well, turns out those kids not only keep going missing but are brutally tortured and killed by someone and the film explores who did it and what our heroes’ relationship to them is. This one absolutely goes to some dark places, playing hard on the idea of stranger danger and just what people can get away with on Halloween without being caught. The moment where the main character finds tapes of the kids being tortured is brutal and so well performed by everyone involved that it will have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. It’s also got probably the darkest possible ending for this kind of short, easily the best of the bunch.

Last up is Home Haunt, which is a pretty standard Haunted House story. VHS has done a few of those in the past, but this one throws in an interesting familial relationship where a father is trying his best to connect with his son via the haunted house, but the son has outgrown it. It’s an interesting little touch to add on, though it does seem kind of superfluous when the house starts coming alive and the creatures in it begin doing a bunch of murder. It’s a little all over the place but it does have some quite spectacular visuals, including a final moment with a witch and a kid dressed as a mummy that’s just a delightfully demented image to end the movie on.

On the whole, V/H/S/Halloween continues the tradition of the Shudder entries in the V/H/S franchise being pretty damn good. There really is only one segment that I wanted to skip but most of them had either a fascinating concept, creative use of the visual conceit or enough intense scares to make for a fun time. There’s a reason that V/H/S is getting yearly releases lately and it’s just because they’re generally so good that it’s always going to land well with an audience. It’s a perfect found footage film for spooky season, couldn’t have timed its release any better.