V/H/S Halloween Review
The V/H/S franchise finally finds a frame that fits. Ditching the year-stamped gimmick for a night-of-the-dead playground, V/H/S/Halloween taps straight into the prank energy, cheap masks, doorbell cams, and midnight dares that already define found footage. The result is the most natural-feeling entry in years and, more importantly, the most cohesive.
Sure, it still swings unevenly, but the highs are sticky, the lows clear fast, and the whole thing plays like a rowdy anthology made by people who actually like Halloween night.
V/H/S Halloween (2025) | Photo Credit: Shudder
Why Halloween Suits Found Footage
Found footage works best when the camera has a believable reason to be rolling. Halloween gives you dozens. Party videos. Security systems. Haunted-house walkthroughs. Neighborhood livestreams. This setup frees the segments from bending to a specific year and lets them share a common visual language.
It also creates a steady drumbeat of textures by incorporating porch lights that strobe on motion sensors, plastic decorations that look wrong at 2 a.m., and yards full of witnesses who are too entertained to notice danger. Because of that setting, the anthology gains a consistent pulse without sanding off each director’s voice.
The Standouts: Three Segments That Carry the Night
“Coochie Coochie Coo” leads the pack for pure creep factor, turning a Blair Witch-style haunted house into something newly unsettling through clever staging, eerie sound design, and meticulous, understated visuals.
“Ut Supra Sic Infra” plays like a dare you know will go sideways. It builds with a low hum, tightening ritual beats and coded symbols until the floor drops out. The payoff is chaotic in the right way, and the story feels like the most unique of the bunch due to its crime angle.
“Fun Size” goes for speed. It sprints from setup to delirium, leans into candy-coated gore gags, and commits to a campy tone that still has bite. The segment is outrageous, but the escalation is controlled, and the jokes sharpen the menace rather than softening it. Together, these three chapters give the feature a sense of creeping unease, ritual dread, and even a little sugar-rush mayhem.
Seasonal Stumbles That Fall Short of the Film's Highs
Not every story fits the costume. “Kidprint” pushes into territory that feels more bleak than the film needs. Horror can get dark (obviously), but a party-night anthology works better with contrast, and this one lingers in a register that slightly dulls the buzz.
“Diet Phantasma,” the wraparound, has a fun idea and a few clever beats, yet it occasionally drags when it should be the engine. The connective tissue begins to feel like a holding pattern between the stronger shorts, and the final stitching doesn’t add much weight to what we’ve seen.
Cohesion, Craft, and the State of the Series
Even with a couple of misfires, this is the most unified V/H/S has felt in a while. The holiday theme creates a shared toolkit, and the filmmakers use that toolkit well. You get cleaner geography than usual, sound design that carries tension from cut to cut, and transitions that feel motivated by the night rather than by the outline.
As a course correction, it works. The franchise has often chased novelty in its framing devices. Here, the novelty is obvious and sensible. It opens space for different kinds of scares and lowers the barrier for new viewers. It does not reinvent the lore or create a mythology that binds the series across films, which some fans will miss, but the trade-off is sharper moment-to-moment filmmaking. Still, if the mandate was to deliver a decent Halloween watch that feels like V/H/S, consider it met.
Score: 6/10
A spirited Halloween pivot that fits the franchise like a mask. The best shorts are creepy, chaotic, and clever enough to push V/H/S back into the win column, even if the wraparound and one overly grim detour hold it short of a full return to form.
