By the time V/H/S franchise rolled around, the found footage well should have been bone dry. The format had already been milked by hacks, stretched thin by franchises with endless sequels, and it was clear that having the camera shake like it’s being held by Michael J Fox the entire time would not alone make your horror film good or scary.
But as we explored previously, the first V/H/S film was actually better than it had any right to be. Not great, not a masterpiece or any kind of high art, but good nonetheless. And the main reason for this is because it actually did the one thing most found footage films are terrified of doing: it stopped pretending any of this was real.
That’s the key distinction. Where most found footage aspires to verisimilitude – that exhausting insistence that, no this could really happen – just so they can stick “based on a true story” on the trailer, the V/H/S films couldn’t care less. The people who make them understand that the format works best not as a slavish adherence to realism, but as a unique delivery system for some good fucking horror.
Which brings us neatly to V/H/S/2, a film that understands the format is not a limitation but an excuse to get weird. Like the first film, it takes familiar genre shapes and lets the found footage angle twist them into something nastier and less predictable. Where the original V/H/S felt like a proof of concept (“look what we can do with this format”), V/H/S/2 is where the franchise really starts to pushing its boundaries.
Structurally, V/H/S/2 sticks to what the original did – which is the fairly universal four shorts tied together by a wraparound. As always with these things, the danger is that it’ll feel like a grab bag of ideas with a loose justification rather than a coherent film. And whilst that is certainly the case here (the wraparounds of these things never make sense), there is more effort put into the overarching story this time.
The wraparound – ‘Tape 49‘ by Simon Barrett – begins with private investigators Larry and Ayesha (Lawrence Michael Levine and Kelsy Abbott) working on a missing person’s case. Upon breaking into the subject’s dorm, they discover a strange configuration of TVs and stacks of videotapes, as well as a laptop continually set to record. You know what that means: they’ve just discovered someone’s Only Fans set up.
The more astute among you will have already figured that the videotapes are plot devices; serving in the same way as the comic from Creepshow, or the flesh of Simon McNeal in Clive Barker‘s Books of Blood. And how sporting of the dark forces to always ensure there’s an entire franchise’s worth of evidence of their shenanigans.
I quite liked the set-up, despite being functionally identical to the previous film’s framing narrative. V/H/S/2 introduces its technology in a way that feels strange and hostile. These aren’t merely amateur recordings; they’re artefacts; infected media; bad objects. The film treats cameras the way The Ring treats videotapes or Videodrome treats television and James Woods‘ bare arse: as things that aren’t merely passively involved in horror, but enable it, amplify it, and occasionally summon it for a laugh.
Each return to the wraparound – between every story segment – builds on the oppressive tone in subtle, discomforting ways; Ayesha’s increasing vacuity, the noses bleeds, and creeping shapes and shadows. It’s obvious that we’re building up to a macabre climax, but this is a rare example of the establishing narrative in an anthology film being genuinely gripping.
As for the segments themselves, well…it’s just like the produce of a joint butcher/pet store business: an upsetting but easily digestible mixed bag.
The first one, ‘Phase I Clinical Trials‘, is The Eye as written by E. M. Forster. Directed by and starring series veteran Adam Wingard, Phase I sees a man named Herman receive an ocular implant to repair his damaged eye. Unfortunately, this causes him to witness strange glitches and eventually the spirits of the dead.
As set up goes I quite liked it, the eye cam made for an interesting perspective. Conceptually, it feels like something that Black Mirror would do. Except that series would approach it as a morality tale, in which some unlikable middle class people has their life ruined for willingly using tech created by a mad person. Here, it leans more into that Cronenbergian sense that everything’s already fucked and terrifying, and all the tech does is to really boost what’s already there.
I don’t think that the segment really takes advantage of it’s interesting premise. I appreciate this is a short film but the build up from Herman receiving the eye to the arrival of the ghosts was minimal, so it missed a lot of chances for psychological ambiguity and opportunities to comment on the failings of technology.
It does get a bit bonkers towards the end when Herman learns from a girl he met at the hospital that the ghosts grow stronger the more you pay attention to them. So he has to just ignore them. Something that’s easier said than done. To help Herman with this, they bang – in front of the ghost of a fat man in his underwear, who turns out to be the girl’s uncle. And she knows he’s standing there watching. Fucking what?
The next segment, ‘A Ride in the Park‘ by The Blair Witch Project director Eduardo Sánchez is where the film really starts to heat up. The premise is gloriously simple: it’s the zombie apocalypse. Wait, wait, don’t go. I promise this one’s not boring.
Mike (Jay Saunders) is biking through the park when he stumbles upon a distressed and injured woman. He stops to help her, only to be attacked by zombies and bitten for his trouble. Though Mike manages to escape, he quickly succumbs to his wounds…only to rise back up as a zombie. From there, we get to watch as Mike shuffles around chomping on everyone from fellow cyclists to families at a child’s birthday party – adding to the undead ranks as he does.
But what makes this segment so great is that we’re seeing everything from the perspective of the GoPro camera on Mike’s helmet. From a premise as simple as sticking a camera on a zombie, the director is able to draw a lot of mileage from uncomfortably up-close and personal animalistic violence.
It’s intimate, ugly, and strangely melancholic, with a genuinely moving ending. This is one of the franchise’s best segments. Sánchez does great work here. Hardly surprising – he’s a master of working on things that shuffle along at a painfully slow pace only to fall apart at the end. Thankfully there’s far less snot involved.
Ok, so that last segment was great, surely it’s downhill from there? Wrong. Oh boy, this next one is a treat. It is perhaps the best segment of any V/H/S film. In fact, it’s one of the best short films, period.
Safe Haven (co-directed by Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto) sees a film crew infiltrate an Indonesian cult with the intentions of recording their activities for a documentary. At first it seems as though this is your everyday run-of-the-mill cult, you know like Scientology, but as Safe Haven progresses it becomes clear this is definitely not the case. This cult doesn’t possess anything nearly as dangerous as Tom Cruise.
As it transpires, the crew have the misfortune to carry out their plan on the very day that the cult has its inevitable Heaven’s Gate moment. Suddenly everything is plunged into chaos, with the cultists beginning to kill themselves, each other, and the film crew in a variety of grisly and visceral ways. Evans really gets to show off his The Raid credentials with nonstop set pieces of intense and fluid violence.
Once this one gets going, it just continues to escalate, and you’re never sure what’s coming next. We start off in Jonestown territory with people poisoning themselves or being stabbed, beaten, and shit to death. But by the end the thing’s turned into Lucio Fulci‘s The Beyond as the dead begin to rise. There’s even a massive baphomet esque demon that tears its way out of the pregnant member of the film crew – in a sequence that reminds me of when I foolishly looked at the business end during my wife’s C-section.
What’s most surprising is that, for all its blood and gore, this segment is easily the most nuanced. It’s largely in Indonesian so you get very little context during most scenes. But the segment is excellent at non-verbal storytelling as it builds an unspoken atmosphere of abuse and repression. The cult’s leader (played by Epy Kusnandar) is able to convey so much malice and madness with just his eyes. The eyes, Chico. They never lie.
Rounding out V/H/S/2 is ‘Slumber Party Alien Abduction‘ a short by Jason Eisener that sounds ridiculous on paper and mostly embraces that fact. Aliens descend on a group of kids during a sleepover, filmed through toy cameras and – bafflingly – a camera-wearing dog. Said dog is our POV character and it is a neat trick that throws our outlook and sense of scale off balance.
Visually, Slumber Party is the most appealing short of the bunch, which is like saying of all the despotic rulers Pol Pot was the most humanitarian. It’s chaotic, loud, and aggressively disorienting, but that’s its strength. Eisener uses colour, light, and movement to constantly misdirect both the characters and the audience, making the alien intrusion feel abrupt and unknowable.
And the aliens come across as right petty arseholes in this. They spend the entire sequence tormenting the kids, even trying to drown them at one point by throwing them in the lake whilst they’re in their sleeping bags. I assume that they’re just being dicks and aren’t actually incompetent. I mean it can’t be that hard for a species with interstellar travel to abduct some children: all you need is a white van and a “free puppies” sign.
I’d say that this is something of a step down after the last segment, but that’s hardly a bad thing. You can only go so hard for so long. And though this segment is lighter tonally, it’s hardly a slouch. You might be expecting something like to Stranger Things but what you’re getting is closer to Fire in the Sky. The dog dies at the end and that kid’s definitely getting probed.
Overall, while V/H/S/2 isn’t flawless, it’s confident in a way most found-footage films never are. It doesn’t hide behind realism or apologise for its nastiness. Some parts are definitely weaker than others. But as a piece of genre filmmaking, it does exactly what horror should do: it makes you feel complicit, slightly filthy, and very aware that hitting play was entirely your fault.
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