If anthology horror is a party, V/H/S/2 is the moment someone kills the lights, cranks the speakers, and screams, “Who invited the cult?” It’s faster, meaner, and way more confident than its predecessor—like the franchise went to boot camp, learned a foreign language, and returned with a demon for a plus-one. This is the rare sequel that understands the assignment: do everything the first film did… only harder, stranger, and with an aftertaste of battery acid. Positieve review? Absoluut.
The conceit is still deliciously trashy: a cursed library of tapes that demand to be watched—a mixtape compiled by Satan’s AV club. The frame story, Simon Barrett’s “Tape 49,” is pure catnip: two PIs break into a missing student’s home and find towers of hissing CRTs, a laptop still recording, and a décor scheme best described as “paranormal hoarder.” It’s the camp counselor with a flashlight ushering you from cabin to cabin; you know the counselor is doomed, but hey, field trip.
Phase I Clinical Trials: Ghosts, But Make It Medical Device
Adam Wingard and Barrett open with a nasty little tech-parable: a cybernetic eye that sees the dead—and they are as clingy as a pop-up ad. Herman (Wingard) is a walking beta test: every blink is a jump scare, every shadow a subscription to trauma. The ghosts are less “boo!” and more “why is that bleeding gentleman in my kitchen like he pays rent?” The premise is simple and sadistic: if you can’t turn it off, it will turn you inside out. Bonus points for pushing found footage into body horror; the “camera” isn’t handheld, it’s surgically installed. When Herman finally digs the implant out with a razor, you can practically hear your warranty screaming.
There’s even a pitch-black romantic gag: Clarissa arrives to “redirect attention” the old-fashioned way, as if sex can interrupt spectral Wi-Fi. It’s grotesque, it’s bleakly funny, and it ends with a throat-shove that feels like the film reaching out of the screen to adjust your collar. Five minutes later, you’re checking your phone camera like it’s plotting.
A Ride in the Park: Helmet-Cam Romero With Feelings
Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale (yes, the Blair Witch boys) deliver the anthology’s stealth MVP: a bike-helmet POV zombie outbreak that starts like a weekend ride and ends at a child’s birthday party—because V/H/S/2 believes in equal-opportunity ruination. The gag is genius: the protagonist dies early, then keeps filming because the protagonist is now the camera-wearing zombie. Voilà—found footage becomes found predator.
It’s splattery, mischievous, and uncomfortably sincere. Amid the carnage, the film sneaks in a gut-punch of pathos when the undead biker butt-dials his girlfriend and remembers, for a flicker, the human he used to be. Then he does the only noble thing left in a Romero universe. Call it a mercy kill, call it a reset button; I call it proof you can wring tears from a GoPro covered in barbecue sauce.
Safe Haven: “What If Vice Shot Apocalypse Now In a Megachurch?”
Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans drop the mic, the mixer, and the entire stage with “Safe Haven,” a cult exposé that escalates like a fire alarm in a fireworks factory. A doc crew infiltrates an Indonesian doomsday sect led by a man whose charisma smells like chloroform. The early minutes are a procedural tease: laminated badges, hidden cameras, a polite tour through hell’s waiting room. Then the bell tolls, Father declares “time of reckoning,” and the segment detonates with the glee of filmmakers who brought twelve finales and decided to use all of them.
What follows is madness with choreography: mass poisonings, a throat opened mid-broadcast, corridors full of chanting zealots, a basement surprise that makes “nursery” the scariest word in the English language, and an infernal birth scene that feels like The Omen got into MMA. It’s operatic gore with a wicked grin, capped by a punchline so wrong it loops back to right: the demon calls our cameraman “Papa,” and he laughs—big, broken, hysterical. Of course he does. Parenthood changes you.
“Safe Haven” isn’t just the best segment; it’s one of the decade’s great horror shorts. It proves found footage can be kinetic without losing plausibility, shocking without losing its sense of play. If you watch only one tape—don’t—but if you did, make it this one, and then maybe make peace with your gods.
Slumber Party Alien Abduction: E.T. Brings a Crowbar
Jason Eisener closes the night like a DJ who only plays bangers about abduction trauma. Strap a camera to the family dog (Tank, certified good boy), drop a pack of greys into a lakeside home, and stage it like a prank war that grows extra limbs. The alien design is delightfully retro—tall, slick, and inexplicably damp—while the action is an anxiety sprint: bagged kids flung into a lake, strobe-lit hallways, and a barn ladder ascent that will renew your gym membership out of sheer survival instinct.
The masterstroke is Tank. The canine POV adds accidental grace notes—panting, tilting, sudden sprints toward doom—and culminates in a finale so mean and so effective you’ll whisper “who’s a brave boy” through clenched teeth. Eisener has always had an arcade sensibility; here, he loads the cabinet with fear and skewers and lets it eat quarters.
Tape 49: Chekhov’s CRT
Between the mayhem, Barrett’s frame story keeps tightening the noose. Ayesha goes from investigator to tape sommelier to catatonic sacrifice; the house hums, the laptop counts down, and Kyle’s DIY death tape becomes the world’s worst welcome video. The epilogue ties the knot with a necromancer’s bow: undead ambushes, closets with too many occupants, and a thumbs-up to camera that lands like a cursed emoji. It’s a sly reminder that the anthology’s true villain isn’t any ghost, ghoul, demon, or alien. It’s compulsion. Watch the tape. The tape watches back.
Analog Trash, Digital Precision
What elevates V/H/S/2 above its peers is how tactile it feels. You can smell the dust in the decks, feel the static bite. Yet each filmmaker brings a modern precision to the chaos: Wingard’s domestic dread, Sánchez/Hale’s tragic slapstick, Tjahjanto/Evans’ maximalist apocalypse, Eisener’s neon panic. The cinematographers (from Tarin Anderson to Abdul Dermawan Habir and beyond) keep the images legible without sanding off the grime. It’s expertly “bad”—the kind of controlled ugliness that makes the reality bite harder.
The editing is athletic—no segment overstays its welcome, every interlude resets your pulse before the next sprint. And the sound design deserves hazard pay: from the ocular implant’s hiss to Safe Haven’s bell to a dog’s frantic breathing, this is a movie you feel in your molars.
Dark Laughs, Darker Lessons
For all the arterial spray, V/H/S/2 is wickedly funny. Not joke-joke funny—situation funny. A rider-eating a birthday party spread like it’s a buffet. A cult leader turning a press junket into the Last Supper. A cam-dog out-acting half of Hollywood. Even “Phase I” drops a deadpan sex-as-countermeasure bit that doubles as the world’s bleakest self-care tip: if you can’t unsee the ghosts, at least distract them.
Underneath the mayhem, the film keeps prodding modern anxieties: surveillance you volunteer for, belief systems that eat their young, families built and broken by catastrophe, and screens that refuse to let you look away. The joke is on us, and the punchline is a tracking dot dead center.
Final Rewind
Anthologies are temperamental machines; one dud and the gears grind. V/H/S/2 hums like a stolen muscle car. Every story lands, at least two are instant classics, and the whole is stitched together with gleeful malice. It’s proof that found footage isn’t dead; it just needed fresh blood and worse decisions.
So yes—this is a love letter written in block caps with a Sharpie that smells suspiciously like ozone. Queue it up, kill the lights, and let the tapes do their dirty work. If the screen starts to hiss, lean closer. The party’s just getting started, and somewhere in the static, something is smiling for the camera.
