Youâre in a Blockbuster. Itâs summer, youâve got no responsibilities and your parents threw you some extra cash so you could rent a movie and buy some popcorn. Youâre gonna go home, open that plastic shell case (remember the way the cheap ones would crinkle?) and plug the tape into your VCR for 120 minutes of fun. Or, better yetâ youâre not in a Blockbuster. Youâre at home, digging through your movie shelf for the one tape you want to watch. Your mom recorded it off the TV, so youâll have to fast-forward through commercial breaks (and little do you know, itâs probably edited) but you love it all the same. Itâs not as high a quality as what you could get from the local rental shop, but thereâs something magical about it. The four and a half minutes of the end of whatever TV show was on before your movie started. Ads, captured from a specific time period in a specific regionâ ads you probably wonât ever see again. VHS artifactsâ fuzz, lines. The colors are a little off, the images a little hazy. Youâve got popcorn in your lap and a remote in hand so you can always get to the good stuff fast when the commercials do start. You donât realize it, but that tape, with the hand-written label already starting to wear away, is a time capsule of your youth.
Youth youâll never get back. Youth you may not even miss, but which so many people will play up as the best time of our lives. Was it really, though? Teenagers are assholes. Times were different. People are hateful now, yeah, but people were hateful back then too. I miss grunge and Y2K fashion and idogs and inflatable furniture and the freedom of being able to go outside as a kid but I wouldnât exactly want to live in the fucking 90s or early 2000s. I wouldnât go back, even if I am nostalgic. And I think thereâs some very potent horror in that nostalgia.
Iâve been hyping this up for a while and itâs finally time I tackle WNUF Halloween Special, V/H/S 94, and V/H/S 99 all togetherâ splatterfests, sure, but all poignant time capsules of a specific genre of media: the home recording. Not family movies, though a variety of those certainly plays a major role in both of the V/H/S titles Iâve selected. No, instead I mean tapes copied from local TV channels, ads and all. Thereâs something very unique about the experience of watching a film on TV. I think few of us would actively choose that route these days, when films are available seamlessly at our fingertips (unedited and uninterrupted). Yet, there is something so universally nostalgic about both local TV channels and VHS tapes for a certain generation of us that all three of these movies capture perfectly (albeit some aspects are captured better than others in each of the films).
The first film chronologically for both release and setting is WNUF Halloween Special. A gem of a film set in 1987, it pretends to be a home recording of a local news channelâs Halloween broadcast. Segments about dentists buying back candy, about Christians protesting the holiday, and the grand finale: a longer special about a news reporter and a team of paranormal investigators exploring a supposedly-haunted house. Things go, unsurprisingly, haywire. The plot of the film is paper-thin and predictable, the acting is sublimely cheesy (exactly what you want and expect from smalltown news personalities), and the effects are alright. A little blood here and there, a dead catâ nothing beyond that.
Where the film shines is its dedication to capturing the experience. The sound of the tape being pushed into the VCR, the blue screenâ local commercials, and fast-forwarding through ones youâve already seen or segments you find boring. âKids, ask your parents permission before calling!â âPlaying with drugs... is playing with DEATH.â âAll the rock you could want, on the QUARRY!â â Itâs truly a masterpiece. I feel like a little kid sitting too close to the TV screen with my bucket of Halloween candy next to me every time I watch this movie. It has its flaws, sure, but there is something so tangibly charming about a window into my childhood now preserved only on old Between The Lions tapes, captured here in a film released in 2013. I remember that broadcast on my TV. I remember my old Halloween costume, and my orange plastic pumpkin. I was that kid, watching in awe and horror was my local TV anchor hosts a call-in seance live. We all have, I think, if you grew up in that wonderful window from the late 80s to the early 2000s. Itâs delightful, and WNUF Halloween Special has cemented itself as one of my favorite holiday films of all time.
V/H/S 94 is second, again for both release and setting (and isnât that perfect?). Overall, this film takes itself the most seriously. While WNUF is not an anthology film, both of the V/H/S entries are. Our frame story here, Holy Hell, follows a SWAT unit on a drug bust that turns into a snuff film ring bust that quickly goes sour. As the film progresses, so to does our little unitâ deeper and deeper into the facility, uncovering more and more eyeless bodies and strange TVs, until itâs finally revealed that the two female officers were the leads of the snuff film cult all along. The take a camera to the head of the final SWAT officer; lenses shatter and brain chunks splatter.
 Overall, the shorts in this film are delightful, and all in various ways. Storm Drain is most similar to WNUF, as it also parodies a news broadcast. Being a direct broadcast from the mid-90s, the camera quality has improved distinctlyâ only to drop again for the next short, The Empty Wake. After all, a funeral home certainly wouldnât have the same quality cameras as a news station. You could (and people certainly have) argued that The Empty Wake is middling at best; a simple and obvious story that excels mostly with its use of effects and occasionally with its building of tension. Yet the use of three fixed cameras calls back to early survival horror in a delightful way. It feels almost Poe-esque, a sort of 90s Gothic Iâve never really seen before. Overly-haunting funeral music, a raging storm and a sea of brown. Brown chairs, brown carpet, ugly light fixtures that constantly threaten to go out. Its delightfully evocative of the sort of empty beige wasteland of many Midwest baptist churches. The only things unique here are the girl and the casketâ and whatever monster lurks inside.
The third short, The Subject, is my second favorite. The effects are stunning and CGI is used sparingly, and Iâm a sucker for mad scientist/Frankensteinâs Monster stories. Though it makes the least effort to maintain an âauthenticâ appearance, the creature and set design elevate it. Thereâs also a delightful emotional core; the girl becomes a monster of the soldiersâ own creation, and it is Jonoâs kindness that helps re-ground her. I can only say itâs unfortunate Jono died, considering they each save the other (and heâd only ever been kind to her, trying to protect her from the start and even lying to his commander about seeing her crawling away before they run into each other again in the midst of her killing spree). Iâm not sure whether I wouldâve preferred that they both died together, or both escaped together, but having only the girl survived feels... odd. Especially considering the world she is escaping into is likely to hold little kindness for her.
Interestingly, the fourth short (and by far my favorite) has a similar sort of âmonster of your own creationâ through-line, though with a distinctly more serious twist. A white supremacist extremist group is preparing for a domestic terrorist attack, using vampire blood as a bomb. Itâs got the grittiest, most low-quality footage of any of the shorts (which, again, makes sense â theyâre using cheap, handheld cameras) and feels the most real to me. Itâs set near Detroit, but the snowy wilderness is familiar as someone who grew up in the northern midwest. Each day, at a certain time, the militia members shoot the vampire in the head. One such scene opens the filmâ the vampire pleads for his life. Each subsequent time, the vampire pleads less and less, until he simply kneels in silence and accepts a bullet through the skull. At the end of the film, through a series of drunken mishaps, the vampire is released and all of the militia members are killed. The vampire uses the militiaâs fail-safe to open a large window and expose himself to sunlight, killing himself and destroying the compound. It feels less tragic than The Subject, but remains very understandable. When youâve spent most of your life being demonized, sometimes you do just want to let yourself become the demon.
The third and final film, V/H/S 99, is more consistent aesthetically than V/H/S 94, as it leans almost entirely into handheld, home movie style film-making. It is also mostly focused on teens suffering the consequences of their actions. There was certainly a specific brand of mean-spirited, Jackass-style âprankâ content prevalent in this era alongside the blossoming newgrounds community of shock animations and flash games. All that to say, teenagers of this era fucking sucked.
Shredding, the first short, features a group of irreverent douchebag punks who break into an abandoned music club only to mock the deaths of Bitch Cat, the last band who played there before a fire broke out inside the building. Only one of them shows any concern for their actions, but all of them die gruesomelyâ and in a delightfully gory bit of effects work, their dismembered corpses are reassembled and puppeteered by the zombified ghosts of Bitch Cat to perform one last song.
This is followed by Suicide Bid, pivoting from punks to bitchy sorority girls who decide a great hazing prank would be burying a desperate girl alive for a night. Of course, as shitty as that would be on its own, there also has to be a ghost involved. The ghost of Giltine attacks Lily as the coffin slowly fills with rainwater after a storm starts, and the sorority sisters come back to a mysteriously empty coffin the next day. Lily gets the last laugh by trapping all the other girls in their own coffins, having made a deal with Giltine to offer the sorority girls in exchange for her own soul.
Ozzyâs Dungeon pivots from revenge against shitty teens to revenge against shitty adultsâ all while parodying Nickelodeon game shows. Itâs gross, itâs sleazy, and itâs wonderfully demented in a SAW-esque way. Itâs also an interesting look at failed child stardom. Donna was supposed to be the one who got out, the one who made it big, but now her leg is mangled. Her own mother says it looks like dog meat, goes on this revenge crusade that Donna barely takes part in. When she does, her mother takes over for her. Her father makes token protests but ultimately lets the mother take the leadâ and the game show host was always more worried about appearances than anything else. At the end of their little vengeance plot, the host helps Donna and her family sneak back onto the set of the show to meet the titular Ozzy and get a wish granted (the promised prize of the show which no one ever won). Donnaâs mother prompts her to wish for for a new car, for 15 million dollarsâ Donna wishes for everyone who used her to die.
The frame story of this film, stop-motion animated segments of a teenâs home movie made with toy soldiers, feeds directly into the fourth short, The Gawkers. Weâve returned again to the world of shitty teensâ this time, to popular teen boys. They think theyâre hot shit and treat women as objects, trying to sneak panty shots of girls in a park before being chased off, and later spying on Brady and Dylanâs neighbor. Itâs hardly the most enjoyable watch, but it is quite gratifying. The teens who treated women as nothing more than sexual objects are themselves turned into literal objects. It turns out the neighbor is a gorgon, and she caught the boys spying on her through her webcam thanks to Bradyâs programming skills. She attacks them all and turns them to stone for invading her privacy, betraying her trust and sexualizing her without her consent. This is the short that relies most heavily on CGI (to create the Gorgon) and it does feel extremely weak. The gorgon doesnât seem to have any weight to her and the snakes on her head do not move naturally in the slightestâ budget constraints are understandable, but this is why I much prefer The Subjectâs merging of practical and digital to elevate the practical and execute what couldnât be physically built.
Last, but certainly not least, is To Hell and Back, a short following to videographers recording a Y2K party hosted by a coven of witches as they attempt to summon a demon into the body of a willing host. A lower demon crashes the party, and as the witches banish it back to hell it grabs onto the two cameramen and drags them to hell with it. The only short that has nothing to do with vengeance (or teens), the two men must instead venture through the pits of hell in an attempt to find the demon being summoned and catch a ride back to earth. They succeed, but ruin the covenâs summoning and are killed for it (one of them using his blood to write the name of another lower demon who had helped them escape in the witchesâ book before dying). The film closes as the videographersâ camera runs out of battery.
Each of these films captures a very specific era in the lifetime of VHS as a medium, and captures it extremely well. From the image and color distortion of WNUFâs faux home recording to the differences in camera quality to match the shortsâ settings in V/H/S 94 as we transition from newscasts to funeral homes, to amateur documentaries. V/H/S 99 is more consistent than 94, as stated, but this is inherent to all of their shorts being filmed by amateursâ the most polished segment is the beginning of Ozzyâs Dungeon while the actual show is being filmed. Itâs an excellent depiction of the astounding jump in technological quality in such a brief time. At least in what was available to professionals. Perhaps the most charming part of this era of VHS is that while technology got smaller and cheaper for consumers, it did not necessarily get better. A cheap, handheld video camera is still a cheap handheld video camera.
In their commitment to this horror time capsule project, WNUF Halloween Special and most of the shorts from the two V/H/S films rely heavily on practical effects. It is, at times, bad-looking. You know itâs a guy in a rubber suit. The leech-like vampire isnât really chewing a guyâs face off. Giltine is... well, an unarticulated latex mask with equally unarticulated hands. These monsters are fake and you know it, and that is part of the charm. It is a low-budget 90s film you picked up from the bargain bin, a home-burned DVD your friend gifted you of their high-school slasher created during summer vacation. Itâs a guy in a mask, and it might be a guy you know, but youâve got to suspend your disbelief. Youâve come home from Blockbuster with every intention of seeing that guy in a mask and believing he is a monster out to torment assholes, and itâs golden.
Iâve said it before, seen it said by others, and will absolutely say it again: bad practical effects will always be better than bad CGI. I donât care how cheap it looksâ if thereâs a real, tangible thing in front of the actors Iâll buy it so much more than PS1 graphics slapped against the background. Something with weight, something the actors can really react to. A good performance can make bad practical effects passable and passable effects amazing. You forget you can see the wire in certain shots until some dude on IMDb points it out in the trivia section. The actors sell it. The film scares you. Youâre 14, 15, 16 and you snuck a horror movie out of the rental place your parents would never let you watch normally. Youâre tuning into the late-night broadcast of Ghoulies or Reanimator or Killer Klowns from Outer Space. It scares you because itâs not something youâre supposed to see. None of these tapes were something we were ever supposed to see, but here they are.
Hereâs death, hereâs gore, hereâs horror. Hereâs a man in a mask. Hereâs a cheap video camera and hereâs the nostalgic sound of your tape thunking into place in your VCR, whirring to life as a commercial flickers across the screen as that home recording of your favorite movie comes on. The one you were only supposed to see once, that Halloween night, preserved carefully now on your shelf lined with hand-labelled tapes. Maybe itâs not as scary as it used to be, but itâs joyful! Itâs a trip down memory lane, an experience not many of us will get back (at least not the way we all individually remember it), but we can still plug in any of these masterfully crafted movies and get a dose of nostalgia whenever we want. Theyâll always be thereâ and you can always be a friend.
Just remember to rewind when you reach the end.
