V/H/S – Film Review

Four thugs who make money putting their violent antics online are hired to steal a VHS tape from a spooky old house. However, things take a turn for the worse when they find a dead pensioner and dozens of more tapes.

It seems like most people either love or hate found footage movies, there’s simply no middle ground. It’s hard to come across somebody who just thinks they’re okay or decent – mostly everybody has a strong opinion about them. I personally love a lot of them, although some are certainly better than others such as The Blair Witch Project and REC – two excellent films that are not only chilling but feel uncomfortably real.

And that’s one of the greatest – if not the greatest – strengths about found footage horror films. If they are executed extremely well, you may find yourself having a hard time blurring the line between reality and fiction. Almost everybody knows that when Blair Witch Project was released back in the 90s, basically everybody that saw it was convinced that these young adults actually went missing and were never heard from again. Condolence letters were even sent out to the cast members’ families.

Of course, nowadays we know that it was just a work of fiction, and everybody involved in the project was acting and are alive today, but back then, not so much. And although I knew in the back of my brain that the tapes shown to me in V/H/S were all fake, that didn’t make them any less unsettling to watch. Nearly every one of them feels eerily realistic, making it one of the most hard-to-watch found footage films I’ve ever seen.

V/H/S is essentially a collection of various different short films directed by a wide variety of people and presented in the found footage format. You kind of have to throw pacing out of the window here because it’s not what the filmmakers were going for. Their aim was to compile a bunch of shorts together to scare the daylights out of you, and for the most part, it worked.

There’s an incredibly uneasy sense of realism to this whole film that made it a genuinely uncomfortable watch, and it certainly didn’t help that I watched the film at 5 AM with all the lights in my room turned off. Although there are a number of terrifying tapes presented in the film, the one that got me the most was without a doubt, “Amateur Night”, directed by David Bruckner (who recently directed the masterful The Night House).

The concept is simple enough. A group of young rowdy adults go to a bar for a night of fun, and while there, meet a couple of girls who want to go back to a hotel and have some fun. Upon arriving at the hotel, the guys think they are about to get lucky, but in a few minutes, they are going to learn that this will be the worst night of their whole lives. The instant this tape began playing, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach even though I had no clue the direction it would take.

And of course, whenever I saw the whole thing, I felt completely freaked out and had to take a breather for a minute. Another excellent tape here is “Second Honeymoon”, directed by Ti West, which follows a young couple who check into a hotel while traveling through Arizona. What starts off as a normal and simple trip quickly turns into the night from hell.

The vast majority of the short films compiled in V/H/S are wonderfully made, although it was definitely extremely annoying to have to watch tape after tape following a group of annoying, rowdy young adults who only care about drinking, girls, and sex. But once you get past the incredibly annoying characters, you’re definitely in for quite the creepy treat. Some of the tapes could’ve been better (especially the disappointingly bad “Tuesday the 17th” directed by Glenn McQuaid) but as a whole, this is a found footage film I won’t soon forget.