A Holiday Tradition Gets Its Sharpest Entry in Years

Read Time:6 Minute, 35 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
V/H/S/Halloween
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Genre: Horror, Anthology
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 55m
Director(s): Bryan M. Ferguson, Casper Kelly, Micheline Pitt-Norman, R.H. Norman, Alex Ross Perry, Paco Plaza, Anna Zlokovic
Writer(s): Various
Cast: Lawson Greyson, Sarah Nicklin, Jenna Hogan, Riley Nottingham, Isabella Feliciana, Stephen Gurewitz, plus ensemble casts across segments
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 Fantastic Fest, starting on Shudder on October 3, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: V/H/S/HALLOWEEN understands the job. Eight films in, this series knows that the most valuable thing it can offer isn’t lore, world-building, or IP maintenance; it’s a grab bag with teeth. The seasonal angle finally gives the franchise a backbone it has flirted with in previous installments but never fully embraced: jack-o’-lanterns, neighborhood rituals, home hauntings, gritty camcorders, and urban legends traded over sugar and fear. What’s different here is focus. Instead of a scattershot mix where one great short has to drag three middling ones up the hill, this entry aims for a baseline of “good” with multiple spikes into “nasty, memorable, and maybe great.”

Diet Phantasma (Bryan M. Ferguson) plays like a garage-punk séance that weaponizes bad decisions and worse timing. It’s scrappy, stylish, and fast, the kind of opener that promises mischief and makes good on it. Coochie Coochie Coo (Anna Zlokovic) carries the franchise’s traditional interest in body anxiety into a space that’s both funny and purposefully uncomfortable; the humor is queasy, the escalation precise. Ut Supra Sic Infra (Paco Plaza) leans occult, borrowing the confidence of the best ritual horror; even when you see its shape coming, the short trusts atmosphere and structure over cheap punctuation and lands cleaner because of it.

Casper Kelly’s Fun Size is the ringer—clever in construction, mean in punchline, and calibrated for that midnight pop where laughter collides with groans. The segment knows how to use found-footage style as part of the joke and the scare, a trick not enough entries in this series have mastered. Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint is the slap that will divide audiences the hardest. It treats the holiday like a civic vulnerability—masks, anonymity, surveillance that doesn’t work until it’s too late. It’s upsetting on purpose, formally chilly, and it lingers for reasons that go beyond gore. Home Haunt (Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman) is the closer that cements the theme: the do-it-yourself spirit of October turned into a death machine. It’s tactile, crafty, and funny in its pitilessness, the rare finale that feels like a capstone rather than an afterthought.

Across all six, the Halloween setting isn’t just décor. It alters how people behave. Costumes enable secrets and deception; doorbells become little summons to chaos; camcorders and phones are there because everyone is already filming everything. The franchise’s found-footage conceit clicks into place with the holiday logic, so you’re not asking why the camera keeps rolling—you’re asking what the camera will miss until it’s too late. That small shift makes a big difference. Instead of fighting the format, V/H/S/HALLOWEEN uses it as its native language.

The wraparound does what it should: it stitches the films together without wasting time. It keeps the VHS grimy and alive and recurs just enough to make the feature feel like one experience rather than a playlist. It doesn’t strain for mythology, which is a relief. This series works best when the connective tissue is defined by texture and tone, rather than all connected entries.

Performance quality is always a swing and miss variable in V/H/S entries, and across this lineup, it’s steady to strong. No one is chasing awards in a format built on voyeurism and panic, but several roles cut through the noise: kids and teens who feel like kids and teens, not monologues in wigs; adults whose obliviousness reads as social truth rather than plot necessity. The direction across segments demonstrates confidence in blocking and negative space—doorways and the few inches of shadow beyond the porch light. The best scares arrive from what the camera stumbles into, not what it insists on showing.

Found footage lives and dies by rules, whether filmmakers admit it or not. This anthology mostly respects its own constraints. Cameras remain plausible—security systems, parents filming, party tapes, and DIY Halloween documentation. Edits are aggressive, but in-universe, the sound is messy when it should be, and the image breaks in ways that enhance dread rather than conceal weakness.

Thematically, the shorts share a mean streak, but it’s not cruelty for its own sake. Halloween is a sanctioned flirtation with danger; these stories ask what happens when communities outsource safety to tradition and superstition, only to overlook the gap until someone falls through it. That’s why the segments that involve kids hit hardest—because the social contract says they’re protected on this night most of all. When that contract fails, the anthology finds its sharpest edge. Kidprint, especially, turns the idea of documentation into a trap: the more you record, the more blind spots you reveal.

Pacing is a quiet triumph. There’s no dead zone in the middle where momentum craters. The order alternates flavors—shock to dread to laugh-scream to slow ritual—so fatigue never sets in. Even the longer pieces keep their elbows in, trusting visuals and in-camera effects before reaching for digital effects.

Where does it all land? As a whole, V/H/S/HALLOWEEN is the most unified, purpose-built entry since the first installment. It’s fun in the way these films should be, but it’s also mean and genuinely inventive where it counts. No segment is a dud; several are bangers; at least one is the sort of button-pusher people will be arguing about after midnight screenings. More importantly, the film finally justifies the franchise’s existence as an annual ritual. In October, you want something that feels like the season, not just another content drop wearing a costume. This is that thing. In short: a rare anthology with no throwaway candy. If you’ve ever been V/H/S-curious or V/H/S-weary, this is the one to spin on the holiday weekend—the one that remembers why we press play on shaky tapes in the first place.

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[photo courtesy of SHUDDER, CINEPOCALYPSE PRODUCTIONS, IMAGENATION ABU DHABI FZ, SPOOKY PICTURES]

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