The horror genre is marked by waves in popularity of different subgenres, and for a few years, found footage was by far the biggest craze. The huge success of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project led to a decade filled with fuzzy, hand-held, naturalistic shockers, from the grottiest no-budget films to Hollywood productions that jumped on the bandwagon. By the time the found footage anthology film V/H/S rolled around in 2012, the genre was on its last legs, with movies such as The Conjuring and The Witch set to dictate the direction of horror over the next decade.
Nevertheless, V/H/S was a surprisingly successful example of both found footage and anthology horror, with an impressive line-up of filmmakers (including Adam Wingard, Ti West, and David Buckner) delivering a quintet of effective creepy tales, unified by a convincingly rendered videotape aesthetic. Two sequels followed–the mostly-good V/H/S/2 in 2013 and the mostly-terrible V/H/S/Viral in 2014.
Seven years later, the fourth part arrives, which as the title suggests is set in 1994. V/H/S/94 kicks off with Jennifer Reeder’s Holy Hell, the wraparound story in which an abrasive SWAT team raids a warehouse looking for drugs. What they find are numerous bodies and TV screens, playing the following four episodes. The first is Chloe Okuno’s “Storm Drain,” which follows a TV news reporter and cameraman as they venture down a gloomy drain to investigate the local legend of the terrifying “rat man.” The second story, “The Empty Wake” is written and directed by series regular Simon Barrett and focuses on a woman who has recently started working at a funeral home and must corpse-sit a coffin for a weirdly under-attended wake.
The third story, “The Subject,” comes from the twisted mind of Indonesian maverick Timo Tjahjanto, and centers upon a mad scientist performing disturbing biomechanical experiments. The stories wrap up with Ryan Prows’ “Terror,” a snowbound tale of a domestic terror group getting ready to strike civilized society using something very scary and supernatural.
While few horror fans have been demanding the return of found footage, the V/H/S series has historically used the format fairly well and this entry is the best example to date. The previous movies feature stories filmed on a variety of formats–from phones and digital cameras to skype and GoPro–which were then “discovered” in the wraparounds, having been copied to VHS. In V/H/S/94, all of the stories originate on tape, allowing the fuzzed-out, stuttering, low-quality analog visuals to become part of the aesthetic.
This is very much a film aimed at horror fans who grew up in the VHS era, where the quality of the tape could sometimes add to the illicit thrill of the movie contained upon it. In V/H/S/94, the directors frequently use the low quality to create a sense of grim menace, particularly in the claustrophobic settings of “Storm Drain,” and “The Empty Wake.” It also helps provide a sympathetic setting for some of the movie’s more ambitious VFX sequences, creating a sense of ambiguous, half-glimpsed terror by not focusing for too long or in too much detail on some of the more monstrous creations.
But if the visual style of V/H/S/94 is consistently impressive, the quality of the stories themselves is sometimes less so. Unlike many anthology films, which rely on twists, stings, and unexpected revelations, these stories are more concerned with a slow build of horror, ending with either the appearance of some horrifying being or an explosion of gory violence. Or possibly both. None of these stories are particularly clever with their plotting, and it’s not hard to second guess where they might go. Their success–or otherwise–rests on each filmmaker’s ability to generate a sense of dread and tension and deliver the shocks in the final few minutes.
“Storm Drain” is the most successful overall–the dark, dank drain is a suitably oppressive location, and Okuno keeps things tight and fast-paced, ending with a genuinely strange and creepy reveal of who the “rat man” actually is. “The Wake” is the most traditionally spooky story– a woman alone at night, a coffin that keeps making strange noises–but while the gory climax is amusingly gross, it all feels a little flat.
Tjahjanto was jointly responsible for the V/H/S’ series most notorious segment–the second movie’s “Safe Haven,” co-directed with Gareth Evans– as well as the gore-soaked Evil Dead homage May The Devil Take You. So it’s hardly surprising that he delivers this movie’s longest, best directed, and most extravagant section, “The Subject.” This twisted sci-fi tale starts as a mash-up of Tetsuo and Cronenberg, before turning into an ultra-violent mecha video game, as the vengeful cybernetic machine-girl takes her anger out on a group of heavily-armed soldiers. In many ways, it’s an impressive sequence, and–like “Safe Haven”– the story would’ve worked really well as a standalone short film. But in the context of the other much shorter, more modest stories, it feels out of place, delivering humor, gore, and some impressive visual effects but little in the ways of scares or dread.
Prows’ “Terror” struggles to follow Tjahjanto’s dose of madness. It starts well, working as an amusing, well-acted satire of backwoods militias, as well as being the only section to truly evoke the era, with references to Waco and Bill Clinton. But the horror denouement is confused and a little underwhelming. As for the wraparound section which we cut back to between each story, that really doesn’t work, making little sense throughout and ending on a completely bewildering “twist.”
V/H/S/94 will still appeal to fans of the series, and there is just about enough visual invention, gore, and weird visual effects to keep undemanding Shudder subscribers entertained this Halloween. But with the movie’s producers already planning the fifth part, the series is definitely in need of an overhaul if it’s to offer anything else.
Source: GameSpot
