Spooky season is officially here, and so is “V/H/S Halloween,” the eighth entry in the popular anthology horror series. This installment sticks to the format with six different short films that feature grainy footage, unpredictable scares, and a gleeful willingness to push horror past its comfort zone.
The shorts are all centered around Halloween traditions, from trick-or-treating, haunted houses, costumes, candy, and urban legends. Every single one has its own weird little flavor, tapping into the darker side of the holiday and twisting the familiar. Some are funny, some are disturbing, some are straight-up nightmare fuel, but together they create one of the strongest and most cohesive installments in the series.
The movie never leans too hard into being purely artsy, grotesque, or comedic. Instead, it offers a bit of everything: clever flourishes, silly jokes, brutal gore, genuine scares, and enough variety to ensure there’s something for every kind of horror fan.
There’s Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo (bizarre storytelling with a strong feminist message), Paco Plaza’s “Ut Supra Sic Infra” (a deceptively simple yet chilling supernatural tale), Casper Kelly’s “Fun Size” (a very funny short that turns a trick-or-treat setup into deadly chaos), Alex Ross Perry’s “Kidprint” (the most disturbing and gory of the set, a nightmare vision of stranger danger and sadistic media that feels uncomfortably plausible), “Home Haunt” from Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman (takes the idea of amateur haunted houses and pushes it into sinister, fun territory), and “Diet Phantasma” from Bryan M. Ferguson, which holds them all together with a soda test experiment gone horribly wrong. Some are stronger than others, but they all are greatly entertaining.
By serving up bloody, twisted fun, “V/H/S Halloween” transforms holiday traditions into violent struggles for survival. It’s unpredictable, unapologetically messy, and endlessly entertaining. If you love Halloween horror that mixes gore, laughs, and genuine scares, this one fits the bill.
