Dude, you gotta go watch V/H/S

What if I told you that there’s a found footage shaky cam horror film with demons, exorcisms, aliens, body horror, zombies, slashers in the woods and half a dozen boobies? And it scared the crap out of me. 

V/H/S, or just VHS (because the other way is too cumbersome to type over and over again), is an anthology horror film with 6 shorts, one of which serves as the overarching story, and sets up the concept of VHS home tapes capturing various horror tales. 

What fascinated me was that the overarching story, Tape 56, opens on a group of men who engage in various forms of sexual assault and battery against women. It’s harrowing and disturbing to watch due to the medium. It really feels intrusive and gritty because the film does not shy away from the fuzz and cuts of classic VHS recorders. The shaky cam forces you to train and focus your attention on finding the action, and the intimate close ups make you feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic. You’re simultaneously straining to catch the details, but also struggling to find space away from the actors. This effect is a strength of the found footage genre. 

There’s a fairly vocal dislike for found footage films. The more well-known films in the genre are The Blair Witch Project and the financially successful Paranormal Activity films. But lately, critics often cite the medium as saturated and cliched. It’s a cheap way to draw the audience’s attention close into the film and then immediately smack them with a jump scare. The difference between a saturated medium and an innovative use of a common trope, then, could come from the effective and logical usage of the technique. Combine that with making a directorial decision to tone down the shakiness and ‘amateur’-ness, and you can allow the idea to sit in the back of the audience’s mind. 

The framing narrative of Tape 56 is the most close up, intimate and claustrophobic segment. It routinely jams the camera into the faces of its victims and characters, and is further set in a dark environment with limited lighting. In contrast, the other stories are all well lit and provide enough visual space for you to breathe and relax your vision. Rather than crushing you in with perspective over and over again, the overall film simply toys with you- teasing your brain. 

A common theme in the films is the sexualization of women and the resulting mindset of knowing that the film could take a nosedive into harassment is a tension inducing commentary. A trope of most- if not all- horror films is the presence of a sexy young woman or two. They often reward the male viewers with gratuitous nudity, or at least some amount of sexual action. The film opens with an inversion of this. Various women are shown in sexual positions, and their breasts are bared to the camera- always against their will. Yes, you get boobies. But what does it say about you if you enjoyed seeing them?

The other shorts as well reinforce and toy with this idea. The first segment features some young men who bring two women back to their hotel room to have sex with them. When one of them passes out, your breath is bated- are we about to watch this woman be sexually assaulted? The men stop, and instead turn to the other woman, pouncing on her because she’s more sober. The men have objectified the women to simply sex objects. If one is unavailable, then let’s turn to the other. The third short film is far more on the nose about this idea of objectification. The woman begins the segment by baring her breasts for her boyfriend, and the segment ends with the revelation that the boyfriend has literally been using her body as a vassal harvesting fetuses. Then, VHS turns the whole perception on our head again. Once we’re nice and conditioned to be sympathetic and protective of the women on screen, the final segment features four men who stumble upon some sort of demonic sacrifice. Their perception- and ours- is to protect the woman from the men. The film then twists our values by revealing that the woman is not being sacrificed, she’s being exorcized.

I’ve talked about how James Wan has weaponized familial agony as a parallel in his horror films. He presents a family isolated in some way, establishes their trauma, and the resolution to their supernatural troubles often comes hand in hand with a resolution of their trauma. VHS shorthands this in a genius way, by truncating the characters and their desires. Boys in a mansion in an isolated part of town. Four people camping in the woods. A young couple on their honeymoon road trip across the backroads of America. Each story is simple and trim, to the point. It’s a minor victory, in my opinion.

My own short film features a young man in an isolated subway station with no exit and no escape. The ending is bleak, and the framing gets tighter and more frantic as the film progresses. There’s space for an expansion of this concept. We can give the man a name. We can introduce another character, caught in the subway. We can give him some sort of personal dilemma or flaw that must be overcome in order to overcome the supernatural subway. We can introduce a personification of the horror in some form of a monster. But… that would also leave the mythos of the film vulnerable to boredom or staleness. Rather, it’s preferable to keep the story tight and focused. 

VHS is technically feature length, but it is actually 6 horror shorts. Each self contained story sets up and resolves its stories while preserving some sort of theme and message. Even if the shorts don’t follow a narrative cannon, their filmmaking techniques and deeper meaning are consistent, and then eventually used against us. 

8/10. 

I didn’t get a chance to talk about this, but the visual effects in this film are surprisingly good. The amateur framing of the film gives you a sense of a lower budget, and a lower amount of spectacle. So when the effects kick in and show us something grotesque or paranormal, that shit hits.