No one wants this, no one would eat that
dirs.: Bryan M. Ferguson Diet Phantasma, Casper Kelly Fun Size, Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman Home Haunt, Alex Ross Perry Kidprint, Paco Plaza Ut Supra Sic Infra, Anna Zlokovic Coochie Coochie Coo
2025
Well, this year’s installment of this found footage horror sub-genre franchise is probably one of its best outings so far, which is extraordinary considering how these things usually go. This time out might not have an overarching thematic link (as opposed to a shared setting, being obviously Halloween except for the Spanish segment Ut Supra Sic Infra, I think), with the interstitial bits between segments having nothing to do with any of them or Halloween, but it hardly matters.
What most of these segments benefit from is brevity, which I believe is the soul of both wit and lingerie, according to Dorothy Parker. Most of them don’t have enough of a premise to sustain a feature length horror flick, except perhaps Kidprint, but the fact that they’re only generally ten or fifteen minutes long means they’re around for long enough to shock, horrify, provoke discomfort, and then they’re gone. Short, punchy, lethal, to the point.
I like that, or at least I appreciate that, to not have my time wasted.
The opening scene, telling a quite pointless story about how far soft drink companies are prepared to go in order to add bizarre components to their best selling products, doesn’t really do much other than deliver spasmodic gore in even shorter bursts than the segments themselves (in the interstitials). Test subjects file into a recently cleaned room, in order to take a few sips of the new product being tested, being Diet Phantasma, and then horrible things happen to them. For whatever reason, as in, not for any explicable purpose, they’ve added some kind of poltergeist juice or demonic essence to the drink. Not as a mistake, not even to cut costs, but just to kill their own customers, I guess, because they can?
Take that, late stage capitalism!
That’s trenchant satire, that is. The first real segment is Coochie Coochie Coo, which is deeply discomfiting and an appalling / great start to the proceedings. Two obnoxious girls, one of whom is meant to leave town for college soon, go trick or treating, knowing full well that they’re probably actors in their mid twenties masquerading as even teens too old to trick or treat.
As they’re quite rude to people and irritating even when they’re on their own, when they get to a particular house and face a supernaturally horrific mother organism that turns people into milk-saturated babies, it’s hard to know what to hope for. I didn’t exactly want anything bad to happen to them, but I didn’t particularly want them to have a narrow escape and happy lives afterwards either.
It’s not so much a haunted house that they face versus a labyrinthine-mother dungeon they’re seemingly not going to escape from, and the imagery, profoundly icky and sticky, made my skin crawl. And yet as awful as everything that happens was, it’s not a gory segment where people lose life or limb, in fact no-one even dies in that segment, which would have been a mercy considering their final fate.
Horrible. The next one, in Spanish, by the legend that birthed the Rec franchise upon the world, is really, really straight forward. Straightforward horror, mostly set in broad daylight. The survivor of a massacre of other young people is questioned by the cops. Survivor, Enric, can’t remember nothing. Genius cops decide to take him to the scene of the massacre. Another massacre ensues.
That segment did not fuck around. There’s not a wasted second of screen time. Perfectly concise and deeply disturbing in its imagery. Even though it follows the same conceit that they all do, that it’s all found footage and such, this segment almost more than any other looked the cleanest and the most professionally shot, as in, it barely needed the conceit to exist.
For those who don’t speak Latin, the segment’s title translates to As Above, So Below. Why would someone tell the cops what happened, when they could just show them? Oh, yeah, but none of them have eyes now, so there’s that. Also has one of the most disturbing vomiting scenes in cinematic history.
More fizzy demonics stuff with kid test subjects exploding, and then it’s Fun Size which despite feeling quite clichéd actually made me laugh. Again, there’s young people way too old to be trick or treating, in this instance the crew of four includes a recently engaged couple, so you KNOW they’re in their early 30s. But one of them doesn’t respect the “One Per Person” sign at a particular house, and chaos and dismemberment ensue. I did not care one bit about any of these characters and their demises brought me small joy, but the callbacks to how the girl who got engaged doesn’t really want to go through with it made me laugh, because of course the way that she got her wish: Congratulations, you’re not going to be marrying Brad, but then none of you is going to be marrying anyone.
Kidprint was without doubt the most disturbing segment out of all of them. It’s not just that kids and teenagers are going missing and are in peril (with this segment not adhering to the ‘rules’ of the American horror genre regarding not killing kids unless they’re really, really annoying), but it points to something that actually happened back in the day, as in, a service that fearful and paranoid parents put their kids through with the understanding that if their kids were ever kidnapped, the parents would have a VHS tape to show the pigs, sorry, the police, to help them with their enquiries.
If anything, this flick is arguing that fearful, anxious parents aren’t fearful or anxious enough. What if some serial killer broke into the place where this business was being run and used the tapes in order to select their next victims. What if, even worse, the person butchering the children works at this place?
And what if the cops ultimately get the wrong guy?
Horrible, horrible stuff, deeply disturbing, and made by a director who makes some of the most annoying flicks around (although I fully admit I haven’t seen Alex Ross Perry’s recent documentary about the band Pavement, which I've heard is pretty solid). This segment had such a grimy, nasty feel to it, like I was watching Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer all over again for the first (and last) time.
The last segment, Home Haunt, shouldn’t work. It’s the most familiar, the most cliché ridden, and the one that you feel the most like you’ve seen before, like it was lifted from a Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror annual Halloween special.
A suburban (white) dad goes all out every year turning the family home into a House of Horrors type thing for Halloween. He says he does it for the kids, for their son, but you know it’s really for himself. Nowhere else in his life can he feel like he’s really expressing himself honestly and creatively except in this one endeavour.
And as with all kids, they reach the stage where the son is old enough to see this strained effort on mom and dad’s part as cringe, with deep embarrassment. He no longer sees all this stuff through his own eyes, but through what he imagines are the eyes of someone who would mock him.
There is some genuine pathos there, before everything in the house comes alive and starts killing everyone. I know it sounds unlikely, but it came across in these clear ways. This segment reminded me of the sterling micro budget horror work the Adams Family put together. No, not the creepy ookie ones with Morticia and Gomez and Wednesday: the Adams family who made Hellbender, Where the Devil Roams and the upcoming Mother of Flies. Husband and wife team Toby Poser and John Adams, and generally their daughters Zelda and Lulu. Love their work, and now I will look out for stuff from the Pitt-Normans, too
Uniquely for this series, this instalment gets stronger as it goes on, instead of the reverse as per usual, and I applaud all of the people involved, the individual directors and the way it’s all stitched together. It’s another reason why Shudder, the horror streaming service, is one of the streaming services that feels like the best in terms of value for money: I never struggle with choosing what to watch on Shudder, and the ones they produce or co-produce, like this series of found footage classics, tend to be more enjoyable that the made-for-streaming stuff I watch on the other streamers.
8 times there were scenes that will be hard to forget, but then that’s why alcohol was invented out of 10
--
“It’s a human, it’s a human!” – sadly, that’s not going to save anyone - V/H/S Halloween
- 762 reads