V/H/S Halloween Review – Trick or Treat Gets Utterly Demonic (and Absolutely Delicious)
In a season when pumpkins glow and costumes lurk in every window, V/H/S Halloween barges into the party wearing a leather mask, wielding a chainsaw, and unzipping your frontal lobe for fun. The eighth entry in the V/H/S series finally embraces its namesake night, and the result is a gloriously deranged anthology that mashes scares, satire, candy horror, and soda possession into one chaotic midnight snack of terror.
For years, the V/H/S brand has trafficked in lo-fi dread, the crackle of old videotape, and the unsettling sense that you are watching something not quite meant to be seen. V/H/S Halloween levels up that aesthetic with pumpkin guts, haunted fizzy drinks, and a lineup of stories that treat trick or treat as a gateway to grotesque mayhem. It is not perfect (when is any anthology?) but it is one of the boldest, most fun entries yet. It is spooky, silly, and sometimes deeply disturbing.
The wraparound story of V/H/S Halloween, titled Diet Phantasma, is a clever jab at consumer culture. Set inside a British laboratory, test subjects are given a supposedly revolutionary soda. Spoiler: it turns them into exploding, demonically possessed wrecks. It all feels very Halloween III, with a fizzy drink instead of a killer mask. As a framing device, it is slightly underwhelming in terms of narrative weight, but the nostalgic style and gradually increasing chaos keep it entertaining enough.
The first proper segment, Coochie Coochie Coo, kicks things off with style and sleaze. Two girls, far too old for trick or treating, are snatching sweets from kids and talking trash. They eventually stumble upon a house that should absolutely have been skipped. Inside, the aesthetic is pure nightmare fuel. There is a mother figure who is either a witch, a demon, or both, a woman with an unholy number of mammary glands, and something that might be a baby, but possibly a creature made entirely of teeth. It is the stuff of fever dreams, or at least Halloween gone violently off the rails.
Ut Supra Sic Infra brings in a dose of multilingual mystery. A man who survived a massacre is dragged back to the scene by police. The segment flips back and forth between the chaotic night in question and the present day investigation. Old rotary phones that should not be ringing do, and the atmosphere thickens with each scene. Plaza knows how to build tension, and the final moments deliver in a big, bloody way.
Fun Size is the unhinged sugar rush of the lot. A group of adults behaving like children raid an unattended bowl of sweets, only to be punished by a living, breathing candy nightmare. They are yanked into a factory where bodily fluids become nougat and body parts become truffles. It is demented, bright, and hilarious. This is the sort of segment that earns a standing ovation from horror fans who prefer their gore served with a wink.
Kidprint, from Alex Ross Perry, is something else entirely. Set in a child identification centre, it plays like an unearthed public service tape from the early nineties. It is bleak, quiet, and utterly horrible in the most effective way. It deals with missing children and parental paranoia, tapping into a primal kind of fear that the Halloween season often ignores in favour of rubber masks and rubber knives. It is not for everyone, but it lingers.
Home Haunt closes us out with a tale of tradition, resentment, and demonic vinyl. A father and son duo run their annual haunted house, but the son is over it and the dad will not let go. They end up in a vintage Halloween shop, where dad steals a cursed LP. What follows is a nostalgic descent into literal Hell, featuring animatronic devils, exploding jack-o-lanterns, and a soundscape that sounds like the devil himself wrote a synthwave album.
V/H/S Halloween might not be the strongest overall entry in the franchise, but it absolutely makes the case for an annual return to the pumpkin patch. There is something refreshing about how gross, goofy, and unapologetically weird it all is. No elevated horror, no metaphors wrapped in metaphors, just buckets of blood and bad decisions.
As Halloween anthologies go, this one is full of tricks, treats, and traumatising sweets. Let us just hope the next one gets even stranger.
