V/H/S: What’s Old is New (and Terrifying) Again

 Found-footage horror anthology. That's what we're talking about today. Hey! Where'd everyone go? Seriously, guys. Come back! Don't make me follow you… Guys? Where'd you…. OHMIGOD. Did you see that? Who am I talking to? Why am I videotaping this? Why am I narrating it for—**stabbed in throat** If you liked what I did there, but would like to see it repeated six times over a runtime of two hours, then may I recommend V/H/S. Also, if you didn't like what I did there, I'm still going to recommend V/H/S, because it is both exactly as reductive as I described it but also blissfully more intelligent.

The main story arc concerns a group of hooligans hired to rob a house and procure a special video tape. They find the homeowner dead and are unsure which tape is their target, so they begin watching strange footage from the deceased's macabre collection. This thin narrative device serves as the framework for a collection of short horror films from some of the hungriest young names in the horror genre, and it is that hunger which makes V/H/S so appealing. Unless you're a loyal fanboy/fangirl, you're probably unfamiliar with most of the directors who contributed, save for Joe Swanberg who made Hannah Takes The Stairs. Hence the power of the anthology: young creators pooling their collective creative capitol and cleverly competing to make the strongest first impression on a national audience. Think a genre-specific Four Rooms and you get the idea.

Perhaps the greatest victory of V/H/S is revitalizing the long flat-lined sub-genre of found-footage. While I've always gone out of my way to be open minded, it's difficult to claim recent offerings like Apollo 18 are doing anything to forward storytelling. An inherent issue of the found-footage film has always been that the footage must be… found. And thusly, deaths must be spread thin across a feature film's runtime or bunched up entirely at the end, making large stretches of the film simply about filling time. By restricting its creators to fifteen-minute segments, V/H/S forces these stories to become "all killer, no filler," and what a difference it makes. This isn't to say that the dead time isn't used to enhance the atmosphere, it merely forces the filmmakers to be more discerning in its use.

Of course, V/H/S doesn’t solve all the issues of found-footage. If you can't stand motion blur, you needn't purchase a ticket. The film does get a little too excited about its grindhouse roots and errors in video playback become annoyingly consistent. For me, the best segments found motivation in these restrictions of format, either through inventive approaches to purpose or by subverting the footage entirely, as in the segment where the monster is invisible, but can only be glimpsed as a tape error. One of the stories is told entirely as Skype conversation. I… can't explain that one. Someone misread the instructions.

I won't get into specifics on the five tapes included, because so many are based on one-line pitches that might ruin all the fun. Ti West's segment contained some of the best "filmmaking" but failed to make the strong impression left by the others, and the final sequence from video collective Radio Silence was hilarious and awe-inspiring, to say the least. The film as a whole carries dread and anticipation in buckets, and the scares are genuinely innovative and fun. It's not only an excellent Halloween film, but a chance to experience smaller chunks from directors that you'll want to seek out further; an excellent sampling of the next graduating class of horror. If anything, I'm proud to support V/H/S in hopes it will become a franchise. I think we'd all rather see a yearly anthology of fresh voices than another Saw film.