Film #41 - V/H/S

Seriously, why VHS?
Let's go B/e/t/a/m/a/x!

Following the high ambition and dramatic failings of Detention, the second hald of my double bill at the Toronto After Dark fest’s summer sessions was the decidedly more modest V/H/S.

If Detention was the surprise hit that people weren’t looking forward to but ended up loving (I’ve already described why I disagree with the crowd here), then I think it’s safe to say that V/H/S was its polar opposite. Which is not to say that V/H/S is a bad film – it’s not. Just after more than two weeks of intense curiosity about the film, I think the crowd may have been a little underwhelmed when it turned out to be pretty much exactly what it said on the tin.

V/H/S is another horror anthology film along the lines of Creepshow or, more recently, Theatre Bizarre, where different horror-oriented filmmakers team up to tell a selection of shorter unconnected horror pieces within a broader loose narrative framework.

The anthology approach works well for the horror genre, which may explain why this type of film is so thick on the ground for horror and not for, say, romantic comedies. Horror is a genre that can start to feel repetitive in long form (think of all those slasher films with basically identical kills before Final Girl and Masked Killer do their last confrontation) so shorter grabs allow the scares to be punchier and more direct. And, with so many things we as a species find inherently creepy, there’s a much smaller chance that individual pieces will have significant thematic overlap (aside from the universal theme that things are scary and want to hurt you).

The fifth installment is classic haunted house style scares

Of course there are good horror anthologies and bad ones (I’m looking at you Creepshow 3), and V/H/S definitely leans towards the former camp but perhaps not as significantly as might have been hoped.

Unlike Theatre Bizarre, which really was just a more or less random collection of horror shorts, V/H/S at least ties its sub-films together with a universal device. Capitalising on the recent found-footage trend in horror that Paranormal Activity perhaps most famously introduced as a trend (Blair Witch being too long ago and Cloverfield sitting slightly more in the sci-fi camp), each of V/H/S’ vignettes works off of footage largely taken by the victims themselves.

The central conceit and framing device of V/H/S is that a group of burglars have been given the task of ransacking a suburban home to retrieve a specific VHS tape. When they arrive they find the supposed owner of the house dead in front of a bank of television screens and more tapes than they know what to do with. Left with the reassurance that they’ll know which tape is the correct one when they see it, they individually start watching the tapes – and hence our sub-films.

It’s a neat trick, as finding an excuse for video cameras to be present during the recording of each vignette puts a limitation on the film makers that they have to find a creative way to work around, which often guides the films storylines and yields more interesting results.  It’s not accidental that the cleverer excuses for the camera’s presence tend to be found in the more interesting of the sub-films.

Among the techniques used are: a trio of jock boys determined to make homemade porn via a spy camera embedded in the most-nebbish one’s glasses going out to pick up strange girls in a new city; a woman alone at home talking to her boyfriend in a series of Skype conversations about the presence she thinks may be hidden within her house; and a man dressing up as a nanny cam for Halloween before heading out to a party at a “haunted house” that they only think they have the right address for.

For the most parts the sub-films are slow burners, taking their time to establish atmosphere and character before ramping up to the big scares. In general it works well as horror tends to function best when you either put yourself in the main character’s shoes or at least sympathise with their plight as things beyond their control start menacing their lives. It wasn’t a universal success – I know that some audience members struggled with the lengthy depiction of a couple on holiday in the second installment (I think Innkeeper director Ti West’s?), but for me it actually helped get drawn into the emotion a lot more. Aside from enjoying the holidaymakers as one of the more realistic depictions in the film, it would have been nearly impossible to feel any sympathy for the date-rapey jocks as they get their comeuppance, if the time spent getting to know them hadn’t revealed them to be just overgrown kids first (for the record, they’re not technically date rapists, they just give off that vibe when you first meet them).

This girl could not die fast enough
for my tastes - what a horrible friend.

Not every film is a success of course, the third (?) installment, set in a forest, is overwhelmingly disappointing (and nonsensical!) and the framing device itself is a little hard to get on board (those guys are potential rapists).

But in general, V/H/S does exactly what it sets out to do without pretension or self-hype, and while it will never appeal to anyone who’s not already a horror fan, it should probably soon pass through the Netflix queue of anyone who is on their next dark night alone.