For a while, it seemed like the V/H/S series was onto something with its approach to theming. Making all the segments set in the same year was clever, with cultural considerations and the limits of technology helping guide the individual segments. The franchise is still trying to top 2023’s V/H/S/85 and very nearly got there with 2024’s V/H/S/Beyond, which signaled a shift from “years” to “horror subgenres.”
In that case, it was sci-fi; last year’s entry, V/H/S/Halloween, focused on the perils of backyard haunted houses and fun-sized candy bars. This spooky season we have V/H/S/Mixtape. From the title you can tell it embraces music, maybe not the most obvious of choices, but horror revolving around cursed records and devil-worshipping bands is definitely nothing new.
But there’s not much that would stir up a new wave of Satanic Panic in V/H/S/Mixtape, unless you have an irrational fear of Gwar, since members of the shock-metal band pop up between shorts to crack jokes and fling bodily fluids around. There are also a couple of music videos, including Flying Lotus’ eye-popping animation “Another Cabin” and the Tobias Forge-directed video for “Premature Burial” by Repugnant, a band he was in before finding mainstream metal stardom with Ghost.
Neither music video is styled as found footage, so it’s a little unclear why they were included other than to bolster the theme, but the rest of the shorts do follow the expected format. Renee Zhan’s “Dance Dance Dance Dance” gets most of its juice from its collaboration with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, though horror icon Barbara Crampton is always a welcome sight.
The Re-Animator star plays a studio exec hellbent on “reimagining” The Curious Chorus, a puppet TV show that’s got a cult following despite only running for a single season. But when she and a small camera crew barge into the warehouse where the puppets are kept—clearly, the short was filmed in a real location used for a similar purpose—they find a welcome that won’t surprise anyone who actually listened to the show’s macabre sing-alongs. The puppets are awesome, but the story’s a bit predictable, though its dig at Hollywood executives who view nostalgia as just another cash grab is perfectly platformed.
“Heartbeat,” from director David Moreau (he made 2024 one-take zombie movie Mads), is probably the standout entry. Its setup is familiar, introducing a pair of cocky influencers who specialize in exploring risky, off-limits locations. As they eagerly approach their next target—a long-forgotten, Cold War-era facility hidden deep in the Bulgarian forest—you know whatever they find there isn’t going to be good. While “Heartbeat” isn’t quite about music, it is very much about sound, and it reaches a conclusion as startling as it is skin-crawling.
There’s also “The Music of Mr. Sze,” directed by veteran filmmaker Ernest Dickerson (Juice, Bones). It follows a student whose eagerness to make his first documentary means he’s willing to record people without their knowledge using glasses equipped with a tiny camera. That’s intriguing, not to mention timely, but since he never seems to leave his dilapidated apartment building, the story becomes more about his eccentric neighbor who obsessively plays his violin at all hours of the night. The inevitable Mr. Sze reveal is wild, and of all the segments, this feels like the one with more story left to tell.
Less inspiring but pleasingly gory—in a Herschell Gordon Lewis meets American Psycho kind of way—is RZA’s “Death Tone,” about a young woman honoring her recently deceased father, a famous producer, by crafting a memorial track using some highly unconventional methods. There is a “Protect Ya Neck” joke tucked into this one, along with many gallons of stage blood, but to make the obvious pun, the narrative is fairly one-note.
Are the fine but not fantastic contents of V/H/S/Mixtape the result of a less-than-inspiring theme, or is the series, which has cranked out a film a year since 2021, experiencing a creative rut? The recent announcement of V/H/S/SCP as 2027’s entry isn’t as exciting as it might have seemed at first, given the controversy over the source material and the fact that Neon announced it’s also making an SCP-inspired film due out next year.
Maybe it’s time to get back to chronology? V/H/S/87, set at the peak of Reagan unease and the same year the Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera was released, has an awfully nice ring to it.
V/H/S/Mixtape hits Shudder starting October 9.
Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.
Source: Gizmodo