Happy Halloween: V/H/S Halloween (2025)

Directors: Bryan M. Ferguson, Anna Zlokovic, Paco Plaza, Casper Kelly, Alex Ross Perry, Micheline Pitt-Norman, R.H. Norman

Cast: David Haydn, Anna McKelvie, Adam James Johnston, Eddie MacKenzie, Samantha Cochran, Natalia Montgomery Fernandez, Elena Musser, Sarah Nicklin, Jenna Hogan, Jake Ellsworth, Teo Planell, María Romanillos, Ismael Martínez, Almudena Amor, Sonia Almarcha, Lawson Greyson, Riley Nottingham, , Michael J. Sielaff, Stephen Gurewitz, Lily Speiser, Carl Garrison, Jeff Harris, Noah Diamond

no stars (out of ★★★★)

I don’t understand movie critics sometimes. I really, truly don’t. It sounds odd coming from someone who writes movie reviews on an online blog - and who even reads a few on the regular – but it is what it is.

It seems like the majority of film critics, including all of the ones I read, are singing the praises of V/H/S Halloween, the eighth film in a horror anthology series in which every story is filmed as a found footage narrative. The best in this franchise is still the second movie, and while there have been a few others I have enjoyed, some of the films in this series have been downright awful.

Some are saying V/H/S Halloween is the best in the entire series. I would argue that it’s the absolute worst.

And look, I get it. Some are calling it delightfully twisted and demented. I have liked some delightfully twisted and demented movies myself. The Evil Dead movies from the 80s immediately come to mind (heck, even Evil Dead Rise). I had recently rewatched the imperfect 2006 film Silent Hill, which is still enjoyable, in spite of how dark and gruesome it gets. Horror movies tend to get twisted and demented, and if done right, it can be a wickedly entertaining and scary ride.

V/H/S Halloween does not get it right at all, and not just because of the scene where a broom-mounted witch flies past a little girl, picks her up by her neck, and tears her head off. A lot of kids are not just brutally killed in this movie; they are also physically and psychologically tortured. There’s one story segment called “Kidprint” that features a montage of scenes of kids having things done to them that are so unthinkable it makes you question the sanity of the whoever wrote this segment. That this segment ends with a little girl, who looked to be no older than 8, screaming in traumatized terror should tell you everything you need to know about it.

When the stories aren't churning your stomach with graphic scenes of child torture and murder, the movie is boring you to tears with some of the lamest segments in the whole franchise. Things get off to a really bad start with the first story “Coochie Coochie Coo,” in which two insufferably obnoxious teens venture into the house of a being known as The Mommy, a crinkly looking demon with multiple breasts that leak milk.

The next story “Ut Supra Sic Infra” (translated: As Above So Below) holds some promise. A man is being interrogated by the police over a series of murders he just confessed to, even though the evidence shows there was no way he could have done it. There’s some intrigue when we learn that the man and his friends ventured into a dark and abandoned mansion that has a corded phone that does things to whoever answers it, but even this segment ends on a predictably gruesome whimper. What happens is certainly gory, but I doubt there’s anyone who would call a second of it scary.

I’ll give credit to the segment called “Fun Size”: it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a movie where a floating candy bowl attacks and transports people to another dimension if they dare to take more than one piece out of the bowl. What kind of candy is in the bowl? One gets a piece of chocolate in the shape of a penis. Why does the chocolate look like that? Oh, we find out, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Then come the stories with the excessive child murder, and whatever good will the movie earned by that point (and it really wasn’t much) is completely obliterated. Yes, I have liked horror movies where kids died, like Trick ‘r Treat. With the exception of one instance where a child didn’t check his candy (even that segment was wildly over-the-top), most of the kids in that movie died off screen. There was a segment where a handful of bullies were cornered by zombies in a quarry, and while we heard what was happening to them, we never saw it. If the makers of this movie had it their way, they would show us every single agonizingly gruesome detail.

Oh yeah, there’s a wraparound segment involving scientists trying to create a brand of soda that’s…possessed by spirits or some sort of Lovecraftian being…or something. I don’t know what that was about.

I don’t want to talk about this movie anymore. It’s not scary, it's not funny, and it’s not entertaining. It’s repulsive and it’s repugnant, and when it was over, I felt so depressed and so unclean. The other critics can keep this slop. One even said that this is a new holiday classic that he’ll watch every year. The only time I’ll go back to this movie is when I’m making my list of the worst films of the year — where it’ll fit nicely in the #1 spot where it belongs.

Not Rated, but would DEFINITELY be an R (maybe NC-17) for graphic brutal bloody violence, disturbing images, lots of profanity, nudity, some drug use.