The long-running and ever-interesting V/H/S series should rightfully be seen as an institution of modern horror; longer-running than other anthologies such as The ABCs of Death and more consistent in quality than, say, Paranormal Activity or The Conjuring, while admirably giving a leg-up in the industry to aspiring filmmakers, placing their shorts right alongside those of respected horror names like Ti West, Mike Flanagan, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett. The series also, impressively, sticks to a consistent release schedule, having put out one film per year between 2012-14, lying dormant for a while, then returning to that schedule following their 2021 acquisition by Shudder. Two spin-off films, feature-length remakes of segments from past V/H/Ses, have also appeared.
And this one, V/H/S/Beyond, is the best yet. Its science-fiction elements are not, technically, anything new to the franchise – the very first film ended on a segment about alien visitations, and 94 included a sort of Indonesian version of Frankenstein – but the series has, for so long, shown a pronounced interest in supernatural stories of demons and folkloric monsters that the way this entry leans into SF in most of its segments certainly gives it a feeling of freshness; it retains the traditional feel of a V/H/S while also taking the series Beyond.
So let’s get into discussing the individual shorts. The framing device is traditionally the weakest part of these films, but that’s the case no more; in a clever piece of cross-promotion, Jay Cheel – writer, director and editor of Shudder’s Cursed Films series – gives us a pastiche of his own style and featuring some of his own regular guests, playing themselves in a documentary that explores the possibility of alien life, interspersing clips that allegedly provide evidence of the kind of phenomena under discussion.
The first of these clips is “Stork” by Jordan Downey of ThanksKilling; Downey is obscure enough that he has no Wikipedia page, though on the evidence of “Stork” this will surely be changing soon. Presented through the body-cam footage of the members of a police SWAT team, the short sees a raid on a house go horribly wrong as what are essentially zombies begin to attack and mostly kill the members of the team. It’s a better Resident Evil film than any of the official Resident Evil films, its basic set-up mirroring the live-action opening of the very first game and its first-person shooter-evoking style hewing closer to that series’ more recent entries.
It’s the best of the shorts here, but that’s no poor reflection on any of the others. Virat Pal takes us to India for “Dream Girl”, in which Bollywood sensation Tara, on the set of her latest film, proves to be not all she seems as, in a break between takes of a big song-and-dance number – the highlight of this short – our questionable “hero” sneaks into her dressing room and records her.
Next is “Live and Let Dive” from Radio Silence’s Justin Martinez, in which – after an almost interminable sequence of banter and argument from some characters who are as traditionally obnoxious as any other character in any other found-footage – a skydive goes spectacularly wrong, most dying gruesomely and the few survivors finding themselves in an orange grove and trying to survive the attacks of some quite bizarre extraterrestrials. For a short, this one feels overlong but its effective moments are very effective and, as mentioned, the skydiving is quite spectacular.
Actor and scream king Justin Long, along with his younger brother Christian, give us the most truly bizarre of the shorts here, “Fur Babies”. A group of campaigners decide to go undercover at a local animal shelter, incensed by the owner’s hobby of taxidermy-ing her deceased former pets, which seems like a harmless if creepy pursuit to me and really not worth the attention of animal rights groups, even if it is “mutilating a corpse” as their members put it. Still, as it turns out they’re almost right to investigate her. It is of course entirely unsurprising that, in a horror film, her shelter holds a dark secret, but what that secret actually is, is deeply surprising, not to mention unnerving.
Finally, “Stowaway” rounds things off (except for the conclusion to the wraparound segments). Written by Mike Flanagan and directed by his wife Kate Siegel, we’re given a young woman’s amateur documentary, which sees her heading into the Mojave Desert to chase the truth about UFOs. Because the truth is out there, man. I want to believe. The documentary’s director, Halley, has her faith rewarded – after a fashion – for she finds herself actually aboard an extraterrestrial spaceship, and what follows is as surreal and as terrifying as one should rightfully expect from a craft which is alien in every sense of the word.
With the eighth entry – which is thankfully to be entitled V/H/S/8, for it’s becoming difficult to keep it straight which order these films actually released – already announced and set to continue the series’ one-a-year streak, things show no sign of slowing down and, on the evidence here, nor should they.
★★★★☆