Rewinding V/H/S

Originally written October 19, 2025.

Once upon a time I thought of V/H/S as one of my favorite movies, having seen it as a nineteen year old discovering a burgeoning love of film and coming off the high of watching The Blair Witch Project for the first time just a few days prior. Things look a little different eleven years later. While I still love the whole DIY indie horror thing going on here and the effectiveness of the found footage genre, V/H/S is way more uneven and juvenile than I remember—it’s not even remotely difficult to arrange these shorts into a best-to-worst order (which I have not done here—just jotting some notes down about each short in chronological order).

“Amateur Night”
The best short of the package by quite a distance, with three fratty boys taking a fake Google Glass for a night out to try to score some women, inadvertently bringing a succubus into their company that lavishly eviscerates them. More than anything else in V/H/S, “Amateur Night” has the most effective ramp up, the highest shock value, and the most satisfying conclusion.

The characterization of the three bros and the girl who brings about their demise is distinct and a lot of fun: the camera operator, as it were, has a dorky anxious look about him, clearly a bit out of his depth here; the ringleader of the trio is your typical alpha male wannabe loudmouth who is drunkenly horny; and then there’s that third guy who just loses himself to a laughing fit. The succubus, played by Hannah Fierman, is sufficiently unsettling and vicious, at one point posing backlit in some sort of off-kilter twisted way while Laughing Guy, fully nude, squares up against her with a shower rod—the best shot in the entire package.

“Second Honeymoon”
Ti West’s entry about a couple being stalked in their hotel room before a surprise homicide takes place feels underdeveloped, dragging along for a bit before suddenly ending in maybe the most gross-out death of the anthology. This one would’ve benefitted from another 10-15 minutes of footage to create some stronger stakes or at least some kind of buildup.

“Tuesday the 17th”
A girl brings three of her friends to a lake in the forest. Unknown to them is that she is using them as bait to draw out a monster that can seemingly only be seen as a digital distortion glitch through a video camera. “Tuesday the 17th” tries to use the format in a unique way which perhaps sets it above “Second Honeymoon” for me, but it was also the only short of the package that I completely forgot about, which maybe says something.

“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger”
Before Ice Cube redefined the world of cinema with the screenlife barn burner War of the Worlds (2025), we had earlier entries in the Skype horror genre like this one from Joe Swanberg. Say what you will about screenlife, but I can’t imagine a more apt evolution of the scuzzy VHS found footage of the late 90s and 00s than something that takes advantage of the modern video call we’ve all become familiar with through our laptops and smartphones. The alien twist at the end isn’t my favorite, but some of the scares and tension leading up to it are quite good.

“10/31/98”
A pretty decent ending short, with one of my favorite scenes of the collection: four guys, having ended up at the wrong house for a Halloween party, encounter some kind of exorcism happening in the attic and join in on the chants believing they are participating in a haunted house attraction. It’s a great bit of horror comedy that leads to them scrambling out of the house as arms come out of the walls and objects are thrown at them poltergeist-style, scrambling to rescue the woman who was the target of the exorcism. The effects aren’t the best here but the performances are effective enough.

“Tape 56”
The less said about the frame narrative the better to be honest. It’s got the most nauseating shaky cam footage of the package and a cast of dudes who couldn’t have met their ends soon enough. And when it does come… eh, it’s fine I guess. Not a lot going on here for a wrapper that’s supposed to tie the whole thing together.

I held off on rewatching this for so long because I had a sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t hold up to that first viewing when I thought it was a wickedly fun and varied showcase of ideas and frights. To be sure, I still feel generally positive about V/H/S for the same reasons I might appreciate any independent film project that tries to carve out its own identity, and the varied quality is a bit easy to forgive since you don’t really need to commit to any particular short for more than 10-15 minutes. But all-time favorite movie material this is not!