31 Days of Horror: Day 20 - V/H/S (2012)

I’m not really a fan of the “found footage” technique for horror movies.  Although it’s meant to create hyper-realism, it often has the opposite effect because for  narrative coherence scenes have to be filmed that wouldn’t have been filmed if the footage were really authentic.  This makes the movies seem more artificial and contrived than they would be if they had eschewed the found footage technique and taken a more traditional approach.  Another problem is that they too often feature an annoying character who won’t turn off the damn camera even when his friends are being brutally murdered.

The technique works well in “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) because it makes sense for the camera to be rolling throughout the production of a documentary.  It works even better, however, in “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980), an Italian horror movie about an expedition of anthropologists who are eaten by cannibals while studying a tribe somewhere in the Amazon rainforest.  Their colleagues learn about their fate from the reels of film that they find when they go looking for the missing group.  Only about 30 minutes of “Cannibal Holocaust” consists of found footage, giving it an authenticity that’s often lacking in movies that rely entirely on this technique.

“V/H/S” is both a found footage movie and a horror anthology, and the combination of these two techniques results in five very effective segments, a few of which I found truly horrifying, even though I’m rarely frightened by horror movies anymore.  The found footage technique works because the segments are so short that it’s entirely believable that the events would have been captured on film spontaneously. Each segment was made by a different horror director, and three of them explore unique ways of capturing the footage, avoiding the necessity of having a character holding a video camera at all times.

In “Amateur Night,” the first and best segment, a character wears glasses containing a miniature video camera, so everything he sees is recorded.  He and his friends go out to a bar to pick-up girls and capture the experience on video, but one girl is not what she seems.  “The Sick Thing that Happened to Emily When She was Younger” is the most promising segment but also the most disappointing, for reasons I can’t describe without revealing the ending.  It consists entirely of recorded Skype conversations between a couple who are living apart while the boyfriend attends medical school.  His girlfriend, Emily, keeps hearing strange sounds in her apartment and begins to believe that it’s haunted.  When she hears the sounds at night, she calls her boyfriend, so he can observe via Skype as she investigates.  In one of the most terrifying moments of “V/H/S,” he can only watch in horror as Emily begins to discover what is going on.  Another innovative way of capturing the footage is a nanny-cam imbedded in the mask of a bear costume worn by a character in the last segment, “10/31/98.”  He and his friends enter a house thinking they are going to a Halloween party, but they actually stumble upon what appears to be a ritual sacrifice.  They rescue the victim with surprising results.

The other segments rely on characters with handheld video cameras to record the action.  “Second Honeymoon” is a road trip story in which we quickly learn that someone else is following the couple and attempting to enter their hotel rooms at night.  It features some of the creepiest moments of “V/H/S.”  As its title suggests, “Tuesday the 17^th” is a killer-in-the-woods style slasher, but its villain is very different from Jason Voorhees.

 

My only complaint is with the framing story that tries unsuccessfully to make the five segments fit into a larger narrative.  But the problem with this frame isn’t so much that it fails to unify the narrative—each segment works perfectly well on its own—as it’s just a bad segment.  It, too, relies on found footage, but it lacks the authenticity of the others and feels contrived.  A group of hooligans who like to film themselves committing crimes is hired to break into a guy’s house to steal a video tape.  He turns out to have a large video collection, which includes the five segments of found footage that “V/H/S” comprises.  The character with the camera is the one who finds the segments and seems to be filming them while he watches.  The result is found-footage overkill.  I wish “V/H/S” had either followed the example of “Cannibal Holocaust” or left out the frame altogether.

But aside from this one flaw, I really enjoyed “V/H/S,” and it’s not hard to imagine it becoming a new horror franchise.