“IT’S Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare,” the line goes in the classic John Carpenter horror movie of the same name.
In V/H/S Halloween, however, an anthology of six short horror films, we get as many scares and more to wince through. Now streaming exclusively on Shudder, this collection of Halloween-themed videotapes unleashes a series of twisted, blood-soaked tales, turning trick-or-treat into a struggle for survival.
Part found-footage, part snuff movie, these terrifying vignettes, all from different directors, are the stuff of your worst nightmares. And, well, if they’re not, they certainly will be after viewing this disturbing spooktacular.
With Halloween themes of haunted houses, trick or treating, psychotic serial killers and ghostly tales of olde, as well as adjoining scenes of experimental trials around a new phantasmic diet soda, all the supernatural holiday boxes are ticked with screwball chicanery aplenty.
The horror nuts will find much to love, but V/H/S Halloween is not for the faint of heart. Actually, even some of the horror nuts might struggle to get through some of the more distressing and perverse elements, which were far too realistic for my liking.
The whole sub-genre of ‘torture porn’ horror — films like Saw, Terrifier, and Hostel — are not my bag. I have way too much of a squeamish disposition, for the amount of pig intestines flung endlessly at the screen in the latest V/H/S film. My stomach wasn’t able for it. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is left to the imagination, and I am probably going to need counselling after it.
One segment about missing kids was a bridge too far for this delicate hack — it’s brutality and violence went beyond gratuitous. I like my horror with a sprinkle of hope and laughter, and this in places, despite the overall zany raucousness of proceedings, was more misery than I could handle.
(3/5)