Coming 12 years after the first V/H/S, V/H/S/Beyond continues the well-established formula of the franchise: anthologized, supposedly found footage horror shorts, threaded together with a framing narrative, or at least padded out by a wraparound story. With pretty much each entry having some thrilling, disturbing, and occasionally scary highs and some annoying and forgettable lows, the franchise occupies a shared space where new filmmakers are given a shot and established ones are gifted a playground where they can mess about. This time around, the overarching theme is sci-fi horror, which the filmmakers implement with varying amounts of depth, from sci-fi window-dressing on a mainly horror premise to full-on UFO shenanigans. At this point in the franchise, it feels best to mostly engage segment-by-segment rather than near-annually revisiting why it continues to exist, whether it should, or whether its glitchy analog aesthetics are too fake, too pastiche, etc.
In this edition’s wraparound, Abduction/Adduction by Jay Cheel, an alien encounter program functions as both a doc- and mockumentary. With each break from the anthologized short films, we get a little bit of real-world UFO historical mythology, from author of the weird Mitch Horowitz as himself, and a little bit about a fictional family of immigrants from Hong Kong, who found themselves living in a spooky mansion in Toronto, presented as tapes that Cheel wants Horowitz and others to assess. The story goes that the eldest brother of the family became obsessed with the home, thinking it haunted, and eventually, he set up VHS cameras to attempt to capture whatever was going on. This culminates in a vividly photographed final moment, the detail-loss of the VHS giving the image a painterly quality, but also casting its authenticity into question, with many of the interviewees explicitly wrestling with this idea — the lo-fi quality of paranormal footage in general simultaneously allows us to believe, due to the vernacular nod to realism, but also, due to the characteristics inherent to the image quality, allows for manipulation to be more easily sutured into the crackles and blur.
The first short, Stork by Jordan Downey, sees a group of cops involved in a vigilante task force called W.A.R.D.E.N. As we’ll soon find out, W.A.R.D.E.N. deals with paranormal cases, and here they are raiding a house where they suspect kidnapped babies are being taken. A new recruit comes along to document with an HD camera, and each officer also wears a bodycam. They find the house overrun with people behaving like zombies, and the piece breaks out into first-person-shooter video game chaos, each officer blasting their way through the zombified hordes. This is at times gripping and gross, as they make their way upstairs toward a final boss, but it also becomes familiar and repetitive eventually. One highlight, though, comes when the documentarian sticks his camera into the walls to see what it might find with its electric eye, divorced from its filmmaker’s real one. The segment ends in an encounter with an interestingly designed otherworldly creature, though the encounter itself is a bit anticlimactic. The bodycam conceit too feels squandered, as it ultimately functions merely as justification for coverage and editing, left more or less totally uncomplicated, the film not at all touching on the bodycam’s political valences as an object — one supposedly made for accountability, but which more often than not works as a propagation tool for footage of lynchings.
Dream Girl by Virat Pal begins with a video paparazzi team of two in India chasing down shots of the new It Girl actress, who has been in countless leading roles in just a couple of years, seemingly out of nowhere. The banter between the Sony Handycam-toting aspiring filmmakers, as they try to navigate a Bollywood film set to get closer to the star, offers some of the best character work of the whole movie. And when things start to get at first suspicious, and then out of hand, Pal’s camera keeps a cool and patient distance that makes one really lean in to try to read the faces of the main players. The segment loses a bit of narrative steam once the carnage begins after a twist, becoming kind of a checklist of kills, but the images become richer, with the villain going from crew member to crew member as the lights flicker off and on, giving us near-still traces of the destruction, which then linger on our retinas over black for a moment, until the next. It’s a surprising and vivid way of photographing such a spree, making for a totally different experience from the unblinking eye of Stork.
Live and Let Dive, by V/H/S veteran Justin Martinez (whose crew made 10/31/98 in the original), is Beyond‘s most thrilling segment, starting from the simple idea of “what if an alien invasion happened while you were doing a very specific extreme recreational activity?” A skydiving plane carrying a group of friends for a birthday crashes into an alien ship, with the divers falling into an orange grove, some surviving, some being gruesomely injured, some dying horribly. The main character, with a GoPro on his head, runs around the grove looking for his friends and his wife, as quadrupedal aliens, something between classic grays and praying mantises, about three times the size of humans, do the same, with the aim of what looks like burning off each of their faces. A bit of the panicky fun of the skydive itself wears off in the grove section, but there are some moments of shocking gore and frightening pursuit, and it ends with quite bang — what seems like either a return to the sky and beyond, or a vertiginous blink into another dimension.
The last two films are a bit more in the heavy-hitters vein, featuring very well-established names. The first comes courtesy of by Justin Long and his brother Christian. Fur Babies is a horror-comedy in which a radical animal rights group investigates an at-home doggy daycare run by Becky (Libby Letlow) after they suspect some kind of foul play going on, based on taxidermied dogs they see in the background of a commercial. They quickly discover that Becky has human prisoners in her basement that she’s turning into dog-like creatures, by way of Frankensteinian surgery and psychological torture, which makes for a mad, gruesome climax as more activists investigate the disappearance of prior ones. Letlow seems to have a blast as the hammy dog-mom influencer, and the creature FX makeup is quite disgusting. But the segment is a bit overly wry and condescending to its characters, of course painting the activists as comically “woke.” For instance, a casual “Let’s take this old lady down” is met with “Whoa, ageism.” And its ending kicker is a human-dog hybrid murdering someone for stealing Amazon packages off Becky’s front porch, which feels like a bit of a “Haha, hell yeah” moment for NextDoor, Ring Camera enthusiasts everywhere.
Kate Siegel’s directorial debut in Stowaway, written by her husband Mike Flanagan, follows a solo documentary filmmaker and UFO obsessive in search of strange lights over the Mojave desert. After some on-camera diaristic reportage by Halley (Alanah Pearce) and some interviews with locals to set everything up, she soon tracks down the lights. She confirms that they’re strange by switching her camera to infrared mode, which reveals a beautiful field of energy surrounding them in the sky. At this point, one of the lights bee-lines for the ground in the distance, and she heads toward it to investigate. She finds what must be a small ship, camouflaged with a reflective material, its pilot apparently absent. The ship in fact seems to mistake her for this pilot, and lets her in, so she explores it. Along the way, Siegel constructs the most striking images of the film, with layered, high-contrast black-and-white compositions of odd technology, often irradiated to near-abstract excess by overwhelming lens flares caused by Halley’s own camera light reflecting off the ship’s interior. Siegel also pays the most attention to medium specificity, particularly in montage, as the tape keeps slipping into some home movie footage, apparently of Halley’s daughter, which she says she accidentally records over at times. Stowaway carries the anthology of short films out on a high note, ending with an inventive and sublime set piece, which achieves a remarkably dreadful, crystalline collision of technology, body, and soul — a constellation that undergirds much of the best sci-fi horror.
DIRECTOR: Jay Cheel, Jordan Downey, Virat Pal, Justin Martinez, Justin Long, Christian Long, Kate Siegel; CAST: Alanah Pearce, Libby Letlow, Mitch Horowitz; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder; STREAMING: October 4; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
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