Found Footage Fun: V/H/S Beyond and WNUF Halloween Special.
Even after all these years, I am a sucker for found footage horror. I think it’s because it accounts for the presence of the camera, so you don’t have to suspend your disbelief quite as much as you do with a regular movie, where you know there’s a crew and a director and everybody right there because it’s a movie, but you make yourself forget it while you’re watching.
Your mileage may vary. I know a lot of people are fed up with found footage, and I have some thoughts on why that might be in my review of
V/H/S Beyond. This is the, I dunno, forty-eleventh entry in this series, I really like horror anthologies as well as found footage, so I always watch them. This is a solid entry in the series, though I was disappointed that there was no satisfying crossovers between the segments as there were in V/H/S 94 and V/H/S 85. They’ve done away with the gimmick that all the segments are shot on VHS, which is a good move because who cares. Here only the frame story features VHS footage. And here, as in most entries, the frame story feels unnecessary and unsatisfying.
Every segment is well done, but here’s the problem. There is a found footage formula, which goes like this: people go investigate a thing. The thing is way worse/scarier than they anticipated. Things get worse until everybody dies. You can deviate from this formula, as many segments in the V/H/S series have, but here we get the same thing in 4 out of the 5 main segments, so that by the end, I was just kind of tired of the whole thing. “Live and Let Dive,” about a birthday skydiving trip gone horribly wrong, is probably the best segment, though “Dream Girl” was pretty good too. Each segment had some good, scary images, but the formula wore very thin for me by the end.
WNUF Halloween Special is another formulaic found footage film, but this one takes the form of a local TV reporter going to a haunted house in 1987. The movie is peppered with a TON of incredibly authentic 80’s-style TV ads, which cuts two ways—on the one hand, the many ads break up any suspense that the main plot is building, but on the other hand, they ad to the immersive feeling. I really felt like I was watching a recording of an 80’s TV broadcast. Paul Fahrenkopf gives a fantastic performance as the cynical, world-weary reporter who is trying to simultaneously sell and mock the proceedings. There are some laugh out loud funny moments in this movie, and I found the end both surprising and satisfying. In terms of both its format and sensibility, this is unlike pretty much any other movie out there. I recommend it!
Both movies are on Shudder.