V/H/S/MIXTAPE Turns the Volume Up as the Found-Footage Franchise Gets Musical
After sending its battered collection of videotapes into different decades, outer space and, most recently, Halloween night, V/H/S has found another excuse to keep the camera rolling. This time, somebody has apparently plugged the camcorder into a very large amplifier.
The trailer has arrived for V/H/S/MIXTAPE, the ninth instalment in the long-running found-footage horror anthology series, and the franchise is building its latest collection of nightmares around music and sound. Shudder will premiere the film on October 9, 2026, with an unusually eclectic group of filmmakers and musicians contributing segments, music videos and the wraparound material that ties the whole deranged compilation together.
Shudder describes the central idea as an exploration of the ability of music, rhythm and audio to “haunt, possess, and destroy”, but the trailer makes it clear that MIXTAPE isn’t restricting itself to one particular flavour of horror. Puppets, military experiments, tortured musicians, recording equipment, animation, extreme violence and GWAR are all fighting for space on the same imaginary cassette. There are considerably worse indications that you’re about to have a strange evening.
The filmmaking line-up is just as peculiar, in the best possible way. Demon Knight director Ernest Dickerson, French filmmaker David Moreau, RZA and animator-filmmaker Renee Zhan are responsible for the principal narrative segments, while Flying Lotus and Ghost frontman Tobias Forge have directed music-video interludes. Forge is making his filmmaking debut with his contribution, while Flying Lotus previously moved between music and filmmaking with projects including the 2017 anthology Kuso and 2025 science-fiction horror film Ash.
Then there’s GWAR.
Rather than simply appearing somewhere in the anthology, the legendary shock-metal band provides the connective material between the stories. The wraparound is presented as a hellish version of an MTV-style music programme, with GWAR hosting skits and music videos as the film moves from one nightmare to another. Considering a band famous for elaborate monster costumes, theatrical violence and deliberately excessive stage shows has been invited to host a V/H/S movie, this may be one of those rare occasions when restraint was never discussed at the production meeting.
Meet the Tapes
The first of the four main stories is “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance”, directed by Renee Zhan, whose previous work includes the animated short Soft Animals and feature Shé (Snake). The segment concerns an attempt to revive a long-cancelled puppet television programme with a mysterious history, and it comes with one particularly intriguing practical-effects connection: Jim Henson’s Creature Shop created original puppets for the story. Shudder specifically highlighted the Creature Shop’s involvement when announcing the film, making this considerably more than a case of filmmakers simply attempting to imitate the look of an old children’s programme.
It’s also the sort of premise that feels almost purpose-built for V/H/S. Old children’s television already carries a peculiar visual texture when rediscovered decades later, particularly when worn tape, dated studio sets and puppetry are involved. Put a fictional cancelled programme through the franchise’s grubby analogue filter and there’s plenty of opportunity to make something supposedly harmless feel deeply wrong. The new trailer suggests the puppets aren’t going to remain harmless for particularly long.
David Moreau, co-director of the brutal 2006 French home-invasion film Them (Ils) and director of the single-take 2024 horror film MadS, handles “Heartbeat”. Its victims are a pair of YouTube urban-exploration influencers who enter a decommissioned military installation and discover that the facility was once used for experiments involving sound. What initially sounds like familiar abandoned-building horror therefore has a very different weapon at its disposal: the thing threatening them doesn’t necessarily need to be something they can see.
The premise also demonstrates why music is only part of the new film’s theme. MIXTAPE is interested more broadly in sound itself, which gives the filmmakers considerable freedom. A horror anthology based purely around bands and songs could become restrictive fairly quickly, whereas audio opens the door to frequencies, recordings, voices, sonic experiments and the unnerving possibility of hearing something that really shouldn’t be there.
Next comes “The Music of Mr. Sze”, directed by Ernest Dickerson. The story follows a college film student making a documentary about a reclusive and tormented musician, a premise that brings the anthology particularly close to traditional found footage. A student documentary provides a perfectly natural reason for somebody to keep filming long after every sensible person watching would have put the camera down and run.
Dickerson is an especially interesting addition to the franchise. Before becoming a director, he established himself as a cinematographer through his collaborations with Spike Lee, shooting films including Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and Jungle Fever. Horror audiences also know him as the director of 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, as well as Bones with Snoop Dogg. A filmmaker whose career has been so closely connected with both visual storytelling and music-driven cinema being handed a music-themed V/H/S segment feels particularly appropriate.
Finally, RZA directs “Death Tone”, centred on a young sound engineer attempting to complete the ultimate recording by following instructions left behind by her dead father. RZA obviously arrives with an entirely different relationship to the film’s central theme. As a founding member of Wu-Tang Clan, producer, composer, actor and filmmaker, his career has repeatedly crossed between music and cinema, including directing The Man with the Iron Fists and Cut Throat City.
Put those four stories together and MIXTAPE already covers children’s television, urban exploration, documentary filmmaking and studio recording before GWAR, Flying Lotus and Tobias Forge have even been allowed near the controls.
V/H/S Has Become Horror’s Annual Experiment
What makes V/H/S/MIXTAPE particularly interesting is how far the franchise has travelled from the relatively straightforward concept introduced in 2012. The original V/H/S presented a collection of supposedly discovered recordings through a wraparound story involving criminals searching a house for a particular videotape. The anthology format allowed filmmakers including Adam Wingard, Ti West, David Bruckner, Joe Swanberg, Glenn McQuaid and the filmmaking collective Radio Silence to tell entirely separate stories while sharing the same grimy found-footage playground.
V/H/S/2 followed in 2013 and included what remains one of the franchise’s most celebrated segments, Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans’ “Safe Haven”. V/H/S: Viral arrived in 2014, but the series then disappeared for seven years. What looked increasingly like a finished trilogy was unexpectedly revived with V/H/S/94 in 2021, beginning an uninterrupted annual run that has continued ever since.
V/H/S/99 followed in 2022, V/H/S/85 in 2023 and V/H/S/Beyond in 2024. The latter demonstrated how flexible the basic concept had become by pushing the anthology towards science fiction, aliens and other forms of extraterrestrial horror. Then came V/H/S/Halloween in 2025, finally devoting an entire instalment to the season in which these films had increasingly become annual fixtures.
That Halloween experiment was hardly ignored. Shudder says V/H/S/Halloween became its most-watched exclusive film premiere of 2025 across Shudder and AMC+, while also producing the service’s biggest acquisition weekend of that year. That gives some useful context for why this strange little anthology franchise, which appeared to have run out of tape after Viral, is now confidently experimenting with increasingly specific themes.
MIXTAPE is arguably an even stranger proposition. Found footage has always depended heavily upon sound, from distorted recordings and unexplained noises to the horrible knowledge that the microphone has picked up something the person holding the camera hasn’t noticed. Building an entire anthology around that relationship gives the filmmakers an opportunity to play with one of the format’s most effective weapons rather than simply dressing the next batch of stories in a musical theme.
It also explains the delightfully chaotic combination of contributors. Ernest Dickerson and RZA don’t make the same kind of films. Renee Zhan and David Moreau don’t approach horror in the same way. Flying Lotus, Tobias Forge, GWAR and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop certainly don’t sound like ingredients anyone would naturally throw into the same production. But V/H/S has survived precisely because inconsistency is built into the format. If one tape doesn’t work for you, another completely different nightmare is only a few minutes away.
And the Tapes Aren’t Running Out
Remarkably, MIXTAPE isn’t even the end of the line. The series has already spent more than a decade demonstrating that there is seemingly no limit to the number of horrible things people can accidentally record, and another instalment is being prepared for 2027.
That project is V/H/S: SCP, which takes the anthology into the world of the internet-born SCP Foundation, the enormous collaborative-fiction project built around fictional anomalous objects, creatures and phenomena being documented and contained by a secret organisation. A24 is involved with the project, which is expected in 2027, although its relationship with the SCP community and the Creative Commons licence governing SCP material has already generated debate.
For now, however, it’s time to rewind, press play and destroy the speakers.
V/H/S/MIXTAPE arrives exclusively on Shudder on October 9, 2026. The ninth film is produced by Josh Goldbloom, Steven Schneider, Roy Lee, Michael Schreiber and Brad Miska, with Ben Ross and Rami Yasin serving as executive producers.
After 94, 99, 85, outer space and Halloween, a music-themed V/H/S almost feels inevitable. Just remember that if GWAR appears on your television and tells you to turn the volume up, experience suggests that following instructions may not necessarily improve your chances of survival.
