There are two kinds of people in this world: those who label their VHS tapes like responsible archivists of family memories, and those who scrawl “DO NOT WATCH” on a cassette and shove it behind a stack of tax returns—guaranteeing someone will watch it immediately. V/H/S is made for that second crowd: gremlins of curiosity who believe the phrase “found footage” is less a subgenre than a formal dare. It’s a grab bag of cursed home videos framed by a home invasion gone very, very wrong, and it’s all delivered with the jittery charm of a camcorder that just learned the concept of shame.
The wraparound, “Tape 56,” introduces a pack of budding felons whose personalities range from “should be in jail” to “should be in a different jail.” Hired to steal a tape from a house that looks like it’s been abandoned by both humans and basic hygiene, they discover a living room altar of flickering TVs and a dead old man who’s very committed to the bit. The gang’s plan? Split up and press play on random cassettes. Look, sometimes Darwin awards hand themselves out.
Anthologies live or die on variety and velocity. V/H/S understands this like a coyote understands gravity: you can sprint off the cliff if the momentum is good enough. Each segment brings a new flavor of dread, a fresh moral, and at least one reason to never accept a Craigslist invitation again.
“Amateur Night” is the perfect opener because it’s what you’d get if the phrase “this will be hilarious” manifested as a succubus. A trio of bros—operating at the intersection of entitlement and cheap beer—outfit one of their victims, er, friends with secret-camera glasses, then go hunting for footage and/or venereal infection. They find Lily, a soft-spoken girl whose vocabulary consists of “I like you,” which is romantic until you learn she means “I will aerially abduct you after degloving your buddies.” Hannah Fierman’s performance is both childlike and eldritch; she’s a Valentine’s Day card sketched in talons. It’s an instant short-horror classic: funny, filthy, and escalating with the smooth inevitability of a bar tab you swore you weren’t running.
Ti West’s “Second Honeymoon” follows, and if Amateur Night is a rollercoaster with missing bolts, this one’s the slow, clacking lift hill where you stare at the ground and regret brunch. West has the meanest patience—he weaponizes awkward silences, motel carpeting, and the specific horror of realizing someone’s been touching your stuff while you sleep. The payoff is a razor-clean slice of domestic treachery; it’s like your aunt’s vacation slideshow except it ends with a masked woman stirring a relationship with a switchblade. Romance isn’t dead—it’s just bleeding a little.
“Tuesday the 17th” is the franchise’s gleeful campfire ghoul. Imagine a slasher who is literally incompatible with the camera capturing him, a killer rendered as a tracking error that censors himself. It’s meta without the self-congratulation: Blair Witch meets a corrupted .mp4, complete with booby-traps, bear traps, and bozo traps (the latter being the friends, who have the survival instincts of warm toast). The punchline—final girl as hunter—lands beautifully before the glitchy boogeyman bonks you over the head with the camcorder and rearranges your intestines like streamers. Happy Tuesday!
Then Joe Swanberg’s “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” slides in, proving you can terrify through a laptop webcam without relying on jump scares or buffering. It starts as haunted-apartment jitters and pivots into body horror and interspecies obstetrics with a bedside manner that can best be described as “HIPAA violation.” The reveal that our tender boyfriend is basically a freelance OB for alien clients—ghosting women in every sense—manages to be funny, gross, and quietly devastating. It’s the rare horror short that makes you want to call your ex andyour dermatologist.
Finally, Radio Silence’s “10/31/98” is the sugar-high closer, a Halloween-night broventure that stumbles into a DIY exorcism and decides, like true bros, to wing it. The segment channels the chaotic good of early YouTube pranks, only the haunted house is actually haunted, the walls have hands, and the attic is hosting a cult meeting with a remarkably flimsy safety plan. It plays like The Goonies wandered into Poltergeist and tried to reason with it. The set pieces are imaginative, the energy infectious, and the final gag—train tracks as Chekhov’s punchline—lands with grim slapstick. There’s even an alternate joke ending on the cutting-room floor where the guys just…walk away before the train hits. It would have been hilarious; the official ending is meaner, funnier, and correct.
As with any anthology, mileage varies—but V/H/S maintains a vibe that’s beautifully consistent: DIY, grimy, and weirdly convivial. The whole thing feels like a midnight screening you found in a strip mall theater that shouldn’t legally be open. The aesthetics—scan lines, tracking snow, overexposed flash, and the audio equivalent of a dying smoke alarm—aren’t just decoration; they’re the point. Analog grit becomes narrative texture. The tape format is a character, one who’s judgmental and not above chewing a scene into static when the monster gets shy.
And bless the framing device for refusing to be mere connective tissue. “Tape 56” isn’t just “and then they watched another one.” It advances, mutates, and ultimately bites the hand that pressed play. The old man’s corpse has better comedic timing than half the streaming shows I’ve seen this year, and the burglars’ progressive attrition is a chef’s kiss of karmic bookkeeping. It’s a cautionary tale about respecting the dead and, more importantly, other people’s media cabinets.
If you’re measuring on the “why didn’t they just put the camera down?” scale, V/H/S answers with a shrug and a bloodstain. Of course they keep filming; hubris needs a witness. And the performances sell that arrogance: fratty idiots, bored newlyweds, a too-chill woodland schemer, a gaslighting med student with great Wi-Fi, and four Halloween himbos armed with good intentions and zero plans. You believe these people would not only die on tape but upload it.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. A couple segments wobble, and your inner cinematographer may file a missing persons report on the concept of shot stability. But the mess is part of the charm. V/H/S is punk rock horror—loud, rough, sincere, and held together with duct tape and bad ideas. It trusts its filmmakers to go for broke, and they repay that faith with monsters that don’t overstay, twists that bite, and tones that ricochet from sleazy to sweet without ever feeling like a corporate sampler platter.
Most importantly, it’s fun. Not “theme-park PG-13” fun—mischievous fun. The kind where you laugh right after you yelp and then glance at the window reflection to make sure your eyes look normal. It’s the rare anthology where you can feel the late-night coffee, the borrowed props, the “we have three hours and a basement” audacity. You don’t just watch V/H/S; you catch something from it (hopefully just enthusiasm).
By the end, the film has done something sly: it reminds you why horror and analog belong together. VHS is a medium born to smudge the truth, to hide creatures in the creases, to make the ordinary look a little cursed. In a world of pristine 4K terror, there’s something deliciously rotten about a story that arrives with tracking lines and the faint smell of somebody else’s attic.
Verdict: rewind, rewatch, and resist the urge to label anything “DO NOT WATCH,” because we both know how that ends. V/H/S is a crackling mixtape of nightmares—some bangers, a couple deep cuts, and one or two you’ll pretend you didn’t love because you’re classy. Pop it in. Press play. And if a dead guy’s sitting in front of a wall of TVs, maybe…say hello? He put a lot of work into the ambiance.
