V/H/S/Halloween (Various, 2025) Review

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“Enjoy the spooktacular taste.” In what has now become an annual October outing for the portmanteau horror franchise, V/H/S takes on the subject of Halloween through six tales filled with gruesome gore and frenzied bursts of terror-fuelled chaos. But as a franchise with a reputation for inconsistent quality, can V/H/S/Halloween stand proud like a jumbo-sized chocolate bar or will it fumble the sugar-coated candy ball?...

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“Have you read any feminist texts?” After the first portion of the wrap-around story, titled Diet Phantasma (written and directed by Bryan M. Ferguson), which consists of segments 'for internal use only' from The Octagon Organisation's taste test trials for a new brand of inconveniently deadly soda pop, the first short story – Coochie Coochie Coo (written and directed by Anna Zlokovic) – introduces us to BFFs Lacie and Kayleigh, who are about to head off to college and want to experience one last hurrah of trick or treating.

Straight off the bat, they come across as obnoxious, grating individuals – literally stealing candy from children, at one point – before they stumble across a mysterious house. Despite creepy vibes, they make the dim choice to enter and find themselves trapped in a hellishly disturbing suburban abode, the unkempt floors and surfaces spattered with some kind of milky substance. Probing further, they discover a fully-grown adult man-child with a puffy, baby-like face stumbling around in a filthy diaper. WTF, indeed.

Unfortunately, V/H/S/Halloween's opening gambit stumbles with a not particularly interesting story that is riddled with franchise clichés and two increasingly unlikeable characters who continually spout dialogue that whiplashes between expository bluntness and empty blather. The sheer relentlessness of each character having to talk talk talk becomes extraordinarily frustrating and you just can't wait for it to be over as a result. While there are some suitably creepy visuals, the climax to the somewhat vague story feels undercooked, despite there being some potential in the basic thematic idea: young adults' fears of growing up.

“We deserved to visit a very special place where someone very peculiar used to live.” The second story – Ut Supra Sic Infra (directed by Paco Plaza, who co-writes with Alberto Marini) – is this entry's now obligatory non-English language portion, which cuts back and forth between the events of October 31^st, when a visit to a haunted house goes off-the-rails, and the police walk-through of the scene several days later with sole survivor Enric.

The house belonged to a famous spiritual Medium, who used a cursed telephone to communicate with the dead. With a dash of Candyman-like repetition for a dare – saying “Ut Supra Sic Infra” three times (it translates to As Above, So Below) causes the telephone to suddenly ring. Whoever answers hears something terrible and all Hell breaks loose.

This short does exhibit style and flair, especially come the climax, but it similarly suffers from a stampede of canon fodder characters and – for the second short in a row – an extraordinary amount of incessant yammering, much of the dialogue being wasteful filler as numerous people talk over each other saying little of any real meaning for much of the time. However, it is still a solid effort and is riddled with Fulci-esque ocular trauma, but at this point the movie felt like it was satisfied with just going through the expected motions.

“Of course it's filled with white cream.” Mercifully, the third story – Fun Size (written and directed by Casper Kelly) – injects a much-needed jolt of vim and vigour, but not without introducing the audience to yet another slew of cookie-cutter characters of a forgettable nature. Aside from the guy who, rather irritatingly, keeps referring to his girlfriend as “Fiancé” and seems to be solely-obsessed with getting married to his secretly unwilling partner, there's little to differentiate them from any number of young adults out for a good time (only to come to a grisly end) from any of the entries in the franchise's history.

However, once the group comes across a house with an unattended bowl of curious off-brand sweeties, things kick into high gear as they are literally dragged into the bowl when they disrespect the 'one per person' sign. Transported to a candy-making factory, they find themselves chased by a creepy individual – an actual Candy Man, if you will – who seeks vengeance. One of the group is churned through a sweetie-making machine with blood-gushing results, his body parts turned into chocolate and caramel treats, while another finds out what happens when you get a reverse enema from a pressurised hose stuffed with hard-coated sugar-balls!

It's not scary but it is gleefully gory and gruesome in a fun way, and this silly but inventive segment ultimately becomes the second-best of the selection, leaving the viewer wanting to know a bit more about the man-sized giggling, goggle-eyed, artificially coloured beastie.

“What the fuck is happening?!” Story number four – Kid Print (written and directed by Alex Ross Perry) – isn't quite able to capitalise on the successes of the previous segment, such is the confusing nature of what exactly is going on in the story. It's 1992 and a company is providing some kind of 'Kid Printing' service while a town grapples with the rampant and unsolved disappearances of local youths. It's a 'service to parents' which isn't really explained properly in the movie, so unless you happen to look at IMDb's Trivia page for the movie – to discover it was a service that Blockbuster provided so parents would have an 'ID tape' in case their child went missing (!!!) – you could very easily wind up thinking: 'are they making cloned copies of children or something?'

The story is plenty gory, particularly during the discovery of torture-filled videotapes, as flesh is flayed from screaming teenage victims, but all of its solid constituent parts never quite manage to add-up to more than a whole lot of horror stuff shoved together.

It's fine overall, creepy enough, but the audience can easily be left baffled by what on Earth is going on and why. That said, there was potential scattered throughout that could have been explored had certain alternative directions been taken, or if some blink-and-you'll-miss-them supporting players had been further developed and more closely involved in the story, such as Miles, played by the memorably strange Miles Emanuel, who had a key supporting role in 2022's disturbing off-beat dramedy Funny Pages.

“We're not cute, Mom – we're scary!” The final story – Home Haunt (written and directed by R.H. Norman and Micheline Pitt-Norman) – is another inevitability for portmanteau movies. One of the segments is bound to be the worst, and one is bound to be the best, and this final segment is a strong case of the latter and by a considerable margin compared to the preceding stories.

Beginning in the late 1970s, we follow Halloween-obsessed father Keith as he prepares for the upcoming event that he is hosting on his front lawn: Dr Mortis' House of Horrors, a home-made Halloween attraction filled with ghoulish delights. Keith has his son Zack dress up every year as sidekick assistant Igor to his Zacherley-like 'ghost host', and the pairing shows a delightful father/son bond. Fast forward a few years and Zack is now a moody teenager, decidedly unimpressed by his Dad's continued relish for the annual tradition. Zack begrudgingly goes along with it for another year at the behest of his mother, despite the teasing and social ostracising he has endured at school, and dear old Dad is determined to make this year's House of Horrors the best yet.

When he nabs-up a Halloween-themed vinyl record at a thrift store and plays it as background mood music at the opening of his front yard attraction, Keith unwittingly summons demons from the bowels of Hell, turning his fictional House of Horrors into a very real maze of death. Featuring a surprise cameo from the famous movie monster maker Rick Baker (he of the much celebrated transformation sequence in An American Werewolf in London) as a grumpy man who continually complains about the realism of Keith's home-made attraction, Home Haunt comes splattered with gore, shot-through with fun and creativity, and it's perfectly paced as well. The efficiently told story elicits real emotions, while the well-drawn characters sit head and shoulders above the forgettable onslaught of quickly-dispatched meat bags that populate much of the rest of the film.

“We are camera operators in a found footage horror movie.” 2024's V/H/S/Beyond played with an overarching sci-fi theme, but multiple entries either played the angle quite softly or even out-right ignored it. The theme of V/H/S/Halloween is obvious from the title, but it's disappointing that too many of the shorts do little to really utilise the iconography and shared experiences of the spooky event. They may take place on October 31^st, but their broader stories have nothing to do with Halloween beyond the incidental, which feels like a missed opportunity.

However, 'Fun Size' and 'Home Haunt' very much seize upon certain shared notions. 'Fun Size' offers a horror movie punishment to ignoring the “one per person” sign on a bowl of candy, while 'Home Haunt' takes the idea of a Halloween-obsessed father and son dynamic that crumbles as the boy enters his awkward teenage years and turns his back on their traditions – something that will resonate deeply with fathers to growing boys, or grown men looking back on their own teen years spent distancing themselves from their Dads. Beyond that, the other three tales (and the wrap-around) really have very little to do with Halloween at all – so why make a themed entry in the franchise if you're not going to grab the opportunities on offer? It would be like making a Christmas-themed entry (which was considered a few years ago) and not seeking to do horrific takes on Santa, Elfs, Reindeers, gift-giving, inviting strange family members into your home (and the ensuing chaos), the commercial hijacking of a Christian holiday, or any number of other common threads that are specific to the theme.

“Is this over?” One of the film's most prominent issues, and this seems to be a recurring problem for most of the entries in the franchise, is that it is entirely too long. An hour and fifty minutes (excluding end credits) feels much longer, exacerbated by the very nature of a portmanteau film: the continual cycle of beginning/middle/end to each story, which – when put on rinse/repeat several times – wears down the audience's patience and even their perception of the space-time continuum. The constant churning-through of a cast of multiple multiple dozens of blurry faces takes its toll on the viewer and worsens the overall sense of pace, and having to cram so much into such a relatively short amount of time per segment pours salt on the wound. The John Carpenter-hosted movie Body Bags clocked in at 94 minutes with three stories and a superb wrap-around, and so each tale had just enough time to let their stories and characters breathe. The same cannot be said of the V/H/S franchise and the insistence on five stories across 115 minutes.

'Coochie Coochie Coo' feels like a ploddingly slow way to get the ball rolling (after the initial dose of the wrap-around story), while the better pacing of 'Ut Supra Sic Infra' feels a smidge insufficient after the underwhelming first story. By the time we have reached the third story 'Fun Size' the audience has endured three similarly unenlightening and repetitive segments of 'Diet Phantasma', which boasts little narrative progression to speak of with each failed test (inevitably resulting in loud noises, flashing lights, wobbly cameras, and a geyser of icky fluid). Thankfully, 'Fun Size' injects a sense of fun that has been lacking from what has thus far been plastered across the screen, however the introduction of yet another set of canon fodder characters with minimal personality further frazzles the audience's untethering resolve. Mercifully, the increasing sense of gruesome chaos (and the presence of the killer candy man with the dead-eyed creepy smile) provides a much-needed jolt of invigoration – for there is still more than forty minutes remaining!

'Kid Print' (story four) does okay, but the general sense of confusion allows the gains of the previous story to fizzle away, before yet another frustrating portion of the wrap-around rears its head to do little to really explain why anyone is testing this soda and what is specifically wrong with it other than 'something generally spooky and deadly'. However, the best the film has to offer has been saved for last in the form of story number five 'Home Haunt', which checks all the boxes in terms of pacing, creativity, thematic suitability, tone, and gore quotient. It's success is all the more impressive considering that it has to overcome the viewer's cumulative sense of fatigue. The slapdash conclusion to 'Diet Phantasma', wedged into the relief-inducing credits roll, leaps out at you to provide one last drip of general disappointment.

The V/H/S franchise continually keeps making this same mistake over and over again, with rare exceptions – the best of the bunch was the lean and slick V/H/S/2, which consisted of three stories and a wrap-around – and has never once managed to pull-off the difficult feat of five stories plus a wrap-around. Such a feat has only worked on extremely rare occasions in the annals of the portmanteau horror feature and, it could be argued, possibly only once: George A. Romero's collaboration with Stephen King, 1982's Creepshow. That film benefited from the consistency of the same writer and director across all five stories, both of whom were already established titans of the horror genre. Even the less-successful Creepshow 2 (trimmed down to three stories and a wrap-around) maintained a level of consistency (and memorability) across its ghoulish comic tales that the V/H/S franchise dreams of.

“Don't worry about the smell – it tastes delicious!” Considering that the franchise has now reached its eighth outing, it's not surprising that V/H/S/Halloween suffers at the hands of its own assortment of clichés and tropes. There are few genuinely scary moments, if any at all (the palpable terrors of 'Suicide Bid' from V/H/S/99 are nowhere to be found), and so this latest entry in the series primarily resorts to lots of quiet/loud jumps combined with chaotic shaky-cam imagery, the latter often combined with the inevitable assortment of tape/digital recording glitches to try and punch-up the sense of horror. It's a cheap trick and it is one that has worn quite thin by this point.

Indeed, further to this, the V/H/S franchise has always had an inconsistent relationship with preserving the verisimilitude of the 'found footage' format. Hidden edits, snuck-in alternative angles, and suspiciously precognitive camera positioning all pop-out for the keen-eyed viewer, but the most egregious moment comes during the first story when the characters rewind the tape to check something – and we the audience get to see that act, despite it not being in the slightest bit logical, and all the while the revelation it provides isn't necessary as we already understand why the room they're standing in has changed.

“I remember when I had the magic.” The quality of the V/H/S films in recent years has been up-and-down to put it mildly. Some entries – such as V/H/S/94 and V/H/S/85 – have been mostly successful ventures, while others (V/H/S/99 and V/H/S/Beyond) have broadly missed the mark and struggled to live-up to their potential or fully utilise their concepts. Unfortunately, V/H/S/Halloween comes more as a disappointment, but at least it wasn't anywhere near as bad as V/H/S/Viral … so there is that. It should also be noted that it is admirable that the V/H/S films have achieved what 1993's Body Bags failed to do: create an annual portmanteau horror experience with brand recognition.

Of course, it is also inherent to the portmanteau horror film that each viewer's opinions on the individual segments will vary, but October 2025's offering too often feels like it's going through the motions, repeating itself, or trying to stay afloat on undercooked ideas. But it would also be unfair to characterise the film as a total bust, because of the strengths of Home Haunt, Fun Size, and Ut Supra Sic Infra (the latter from the director of the [Rec] movies) which at least do enough to balance-out the film's weaknesses and provide genuinely good entertainment. A mixed bag, it most certainly is.