Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: V/H/S HALLOWEEN [Fantastic Fest 2025 - Austin, Texas]
The context of V/H/S as a franchise is built out of certain concepts. Tricks, treating, scares and ghosts is the new basis it takes on with the context of Halloween. As always this series is bathed in an anthology aspect but mostly it plays into exactly what one would think. Found footage has obviously turned into its own genre over the years but one that needs to ups its ante while still staying rue to its roots. The key now is to make it believable enough but to hide the cuts even as the gore goes to full throttle. There are a platitude of stories here, each told in their own way with a couple standing out. The first one does well in showing reflexive cliche of two girls causing havoc by going trick or treating before they come upon an old house. The jump scares work but, like "Dolly" (also at the festival), it is based in a certain perception of the character at the center of the vignette. The second one is based within the context of a Spanish director and has a more European sensibility but also carries a mysterious bent. The key with a lot of these segments is that the filmmakers are shooting them in only a few days. That said the results on this one are pretty entertaining and impressive considering the restrictions.
Granted a lot of the films Shudder releases sometimes do not make it to theaters since the level of gore is into unrated territory. That is the case here but it is also done with such a tongue-in-cheek quality that the kills sometimes become the joke in and of itself...but it is still very brutal. Another segment has people being made into candy after a candy bowl gobbles them up. This structure is supposed to be the aspect of nightmares without losing sight of its audience's sense of humor. The intent of some of the segments of course is downright macabre (one specifically stands out) but that is sort of the point. Even the bridge segment which involves a testing of a satanic soda, dials and releases the pressure before the ending segments hurls the audience into a frenzy of blood-soaked heads flying. One of the final shots has almost a headless horseman type quality. "V/H/S" has tried different things but Halloween seems tailor made for it because the key with this series is funneling an exact (but not too exact representation) of what we thinks scares us but letting the new minds of horror push it a bit farther. B
By Tim Wassberg
