Ever since that fateful day back in 2012 when, on a cold and lonely evening, I randomly decided to see a horror movie that was playing for one weekend only at my local arthouse theater, I’ve been a fan of the V/H/S series. I went in blind and was sufficiently blown away. I wanted more, but I figured that this oddball found footage anthology was a fun little throwaway movie that I’d tell my friends about and then never hear of again.
Fast forward a decade or so and we’ve reached a point where we can count on seeing a new V/H/S movie every spooky season, and each entry will be reliably scary, fun, and overflowing with imagination. Some entries have been better than others, but not a single one could be considered bad (I will go hard in the paint defending V/H/S: Viral, idgaf that movie rules).
The latest entry, V/H/S/Beyond, breaks free from the time period settings of the previous three films (94/99/85) and instead focuses on going as extreme as possible. Aliens, robots, taxidermy, otherworldly body modifications, and more brilliantly designed creatures than you can shake a stick or machine gun at, Beyond features some of the most insane and fucked up imagery of the series to date, and as is standard, it calls upon the talents of a diverse group of filmmakers to do the job.
Much like 85, Beyond eschews the wraparound story, instead splitting one of the shorts into segments to play between the others. It takes the form of a documentary about a duo of video tapes that were found in the wake of a young man’s disappearance. This allows for the film to have an intro and outro of sorts, without the difficulty of tying the individual segments together. Classically, anthologies lose their edge when they force connective tissue to manifest inorganically, and the V/H/S team is smart to avoid this and just let the segments rip.
There are some small foibles in two of the early shorts, mainly in the way they really stretch the found footage conceit to its breaking point. The first segment, an action packed “cops on camera” story has an aggressive score that breaks the reality. It could be explained that whoever “found” and edited the footage saw fit to add music, but it’s a lot of mental leg work for a score that doesn’t add anything to the film itself. The next film, shot by paparazzi looking to get close to a Bollywood superstar, kicks a serious amount of ass, but features so many additional cameras that the urgency typical to found footage is somewhat lost in how well it’s produced. There’s a fully edited music video for chrissakes! Again, it’s a small complaint that I lodge only as a found footage fanatic. At the end of the day, the short is scary and intense, and the excess of in-world cameras is used to such strong effect that my nitpicks are exactly that: nitpicks.
This strong duo of openers make way for a back half that is so nightmarish I had trouble sleeping. A skydiving event gone wrong, a secret in the basement of a dogsitter, and a UFO enthusiast being taken on the ride of her life. All three adhere tightly to the found footage concept while also pushing the boundaries of what can be done within the form. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Live and Let Dive, the aforementioned skydiving tale, is one of the most white-knuckle terrifying pieces of cinema I have ever seen. It might be the outright scariest single entry in the V/H/S canon since the original film’s Amateur Night — the short that started my never ending love affair with the franchise.
Beyond, in a lot of ways, is just more of exactly what we’ve come to expect from the series at large. At the same time, there’s an ambition on display that makes good on the promise of the title. It’s clear that the creatives behind V/H/S wish to push the subgenre further and experiment freely within the limitations of found footage. Yes, this results in a few of the growing pains I mentioned at the top, but it also breeds an excitement for future entries. And Shudder-willing, this could continue being the annual anthology franchise that Halloween III: Season of the Witch failed to spawn so many harvest moons ago.
V/H/S/Beyond is absolutely fucking awesome and I cannot wait to watch it again.
Directed by Jay Cheel, Jordan Downey, Christian Long, Justin Long, Justin Martinez, Virat Pal, Kate Siegel
Written by Evan Dickson, Jordan Downey, Mike Flanagan, Christian Long, Justin Long, Justin Martinez, Virat Pal, Kevin Stewart, Benjamin A. Turner
Starring like a hundred people and it would be pointless to list even a few
Not rated, 114 minutes
