V/H/S/Beyond

Everybody loves aliens, right? Not Aliens, though everybody loves that too, but aliens. Funny little guys from space who leave shapes in our fields and stick probes up our bums. They go in and out of fashion, but they’ve been a mainstay of horror (as well as conspiracy theories everywhere) since the ’40s. Who doesn’t love spooky lights in the sky and mysterious burnt patches of grass? People who are NO FUN, that’s who.

Found footage, on the other hand, hasn’t been a mainstay of horror for quite a while. It was already on the way out when the first V/H/S hit the scene in 2012, giving it a new lease of life by combining it with the anthology format of a Creepshow or a Tales From The Crypt, a move that proved commercially and artistically successful by neatly sidestepping the problems that plague a lot of found footage movies.

When your stories are only twenty minutes long, we can dispense with the hour or so of what most of the deluge of early-2000s FF content had instead of character development, which was people just doing boring shit for an hour in the mistaken belief this would make us care about them in the last five minutes. (Turns out that The Blair Witch Project’s naturalistic magic was so successful that an entire generation of film-makers thought it was really easy. It isn’t). Since then there have been six more entries in the V/H/S series, with varying degrees of success.

For the latest instalment, V/H/S/Beyond (Acorn Media International / Shudder) the series crosses over into full science fiction territory. But instead of trying to modernise by aping Black Mirror, they’ve brought aliens back. Well, aliens and one alien who might also be a robot. Oh, and a bizarre take on Frankenstein in the vein of Kevin Smith’s Tusk (ironically a movie which would probably have been great if it had been condensed to twenty minutes but instead decided to suffer from very awkward pacing).

The beauty of the short-form FF format is that there’s little time for exposition, something which can destroy both horror and SF when not done well. These aren’t Cixin Liu short stories, designed to make you think differently about the nature of the universe — they’re V/H/S short stories, designed to be spooky, nasty, scary or some combination of the three.

And it works! My personal favourite is Kate Siegel’s Stowaway. Penned by Mike Flanagan, who’s more usually associated with STEVES KING adaptations and epic miniseries, but proves to be equally competent at a much tighter narrative centring around Halley (played by Alanah Pearce) who sneaks aboard a mysterious craft that has landed in the woods and ends up getting abducted by accident. Of the six (including the framing sequences) stories on offer, it’s the one that best nails the sheer weirdness that all good alien stories need.

The advantage of the anthology format is that if you’re bored, you only have to wait a few minutes for something else to come along. But I was never bored. (The other advantage of the anthology format is that for a home viewer, if you’re planning an early night but started the movie late in the evening, you can always stop and come back tomorrow. I also didn’t do that, because I was having too much fun. I regretted that the next morning, which insisted on happening at its usual time).

All the stories are well worth a watch, and the framing narrative — a documentary about a place called (rather alarmingly) “The Farrington House”, in which strange occurrences have been recorded, and footage from which may provide the proof of alien contact- is super-fun, especially if, like me, you’ve watched A LOT of the real documentaries it’s aping. All in all it’s the best the series has been in ages. It also surprised me by including an excellent Bollywood dance sequence — putting it in the rare category of recent horror movies to include great choreography, along with Luca Guadagnino’s unexpectedly brilliant remake of Suspiria and Gaspar Noé’s Climax.

Released under the Shudder Original Film banner, it’s obviously available on Shudder for streaming, but this blu-ray release also comes with bonus content (Why don’t streaming services have bonus content? As physical media dies there is so much cool stuff out there that’s just vanishing from public access forever), including a mini-documentary on the making of Virat Pal’s Dream Girl with a section on the choreography, and timelapse footage of the construction of Stowaway’s creepy alien craft.

If you like SF and horror, then you’ll love this latest entry in what’s been a pretty patchy franchise. If they can keep up this level of consistency and quality, then it looks like V/H/S is BACK, baby.

-Justin Farrington-