For V/H/S/85, Familiarity Is Both Blessing and Curse

After years of dormancy, horror fans enthusiastically welcomed back the V/H/S series of found footage anthologies with the release of V/H/S/94 in 2021. That film, the first since V/H/S: Viral seemingly killed off the concept for good way back in 2014, was a refreshing return to the format with a handful of solid entries, although it mostly served as a platform for director Timo Tjahjanto’s absolutely ludicrous (and crazy impressive) “The Subject,” a single entry that dominated the film’s center. The success of V/H/S/94, though, was more than enough for Shudder to seemingly designate the franchise as a new core, annual property, and each subsequent Halloween season has given us a new entry: V/H/S/99 in 2022, and V/H/S/85 this year.

This new status quo shows no sign of ending, but as I observed last year: Just how many entries can you cram a number after before they become indistinguishable to the audience? With the 1999 entry positioned at the very end of the VHS video format’s reign over American home video, one would have thought it would symbolically have been reserved as a finale for the V/H/S series itself. And yet now we find ourselves right back in the mid-1980s once again, seemingly destined to ride this temporal merry-go-round forever. Will every single year between 1980 and 1999 get its own installment?

As for V/H/S/85 itself, we’re presented with a mixed bag that feels emblematic of the series itself: Peaks and valleys have always been the norm. It thankfully doesn’t crib from past entries quite as much as the creatively bereft V/H/S/99, but it also has less to recommend than the most creative bits of V/H/S/94. This is a true middling installment, floating in the ether between the others from the last few years. Neither its highs nor its lows are particularly extreme.

It should perhaps not come as a surprise that the most consistently engrossing of these short films is from director David Bruckner (The Night House, The Ritual), who gave the V/H/S series its most enduring segment, “Amateur Night,” way back in the first entry in 2012. In lieu of the more traditional narrative wraparound segments that typified the earlier V/H/S movies, Bruckner’s “Total Copy” is implied to be the background material of this overall tape itself, with the other entries occasionally interrupting it. Shot in the style of a TV science documentary, it follows a crew of scientists or researchers who have discovered some kind of inhuman life form, and have confined it to a lab where it is fed a steady diet of American TV programming as a form of education or “enrichment.” The aesthetic calls to mind the dystopian laboratories attempting to harness psychic powers from children in the likes of Stranger Things, and it’s easy to see where things are headed with a lead scientist who has arrogantly convinced himself that he has some kind of special, emotional connection with what of course turns out to be an incubating monster. It’s a classic example of someone believing themselves to be a “main character,” only to find out just how wrong they are … with a wonderfully macabre, darkly humorous stinger in its final moments. “Total Copy” can also boast some of the strongest acting performances of any V/H/S entry, which isn’t something one can often point to in the series. Bruckner clearly knows exactly what he’s doing in this medium.

The other highlight is Mike P. Nelson’s “No Wake,” which is actually separated into two different segments in the film, with the second not being clearly related to the first until about halfway through. The first segment, shot from the perspective of a group of Friday the 13th-esque young people being massacred at a campsite, stands out for its unflinchingly brutal depiction of what it would be like to actually be in the center of a mass shooting event. This is disturbingly realistic in the extreme, and one wonders about the tastefulness of such a concept–it’s one thing to watch teens being killed by a monster in such a short film, but another entirely to have a sequence of deaths that so accurately captures our nation’s very real crisis of gun violence. The viewer may very well find this distasteful, though those feelings may ebb when a supernatural twist upends what we think has been happening, sending the story hurtling in the direction of revenge. The follow-up later in V/H/S/85, meanwhile, sees an entire family of spree killers getting a taste of their own medicine in a hail of police bullets, with action that is fun but a little incomplete. If this segment had brought more of the over-the-top, explosive gunplay it seems to promise, it could potentially have earned “No Wake” more comparisons to Tjahjanto’s “The Subject,” but it sadly cuts itself off right when it begins delivering the grisly goods in earnest.