Found footage horror is one of those subgenres that tends to divide people. Back in the days of the Blair Witch Project, it was fairly easy to get wrapped up in the realism of it all — personal cameras weren’t exactly rare but they weren’t popular enough that everyone had one yet, and the idea of accidentally capturing or finding something terrifying was all the more fascinating and believable for it. The immersion necessary to be truly scared by found footage has been somewhat lost as times have moved on, but V/H/S/94 seems to be totally aware of that. It actively takes us to the past to give us a new take on an old idea.
With the overarching plot taking us back to 1994, we follow a police SWAT team who find a collection of VHS tapes that belong to some kind of sinister cult. Through their discovery, we get five separate stories which all stand reasonably well individually, but the standouts are ‘The Empty Wake’ by Simon Barrett, and ‘The Subject’ by Timo Tjahjanto. The former is an evil spirit/possession story and the latter appears to be an homage to Tetsuo: The Iron Man, but they share an intangible element somewhere that feels like they come from the same place despite being so different from one another. In a way, and in the best possible way, it feels similar to watching multiple episodes of a more adult-orientated spin-off of Goosebumps. Perhaps that’s a credit to how well its characters are written and presented — no matter which segment they’re a part of, they all feel like they’re from 1994.
In the past, the V/H/S franchise has provided a bit of a springboard for young filmmakers to transition from shorts to feature films, or at least from super-low-budget films with hardly any backing to something more mainstream. Ti West (X, Pearl) and Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong) are probably the two names that stand out the most from the list of filmmakers who’ve been involved in the franchise in the past — although Gareth Evans made an appearance on V/H/S/2 after his success with The Raid. From that point of view, it’s a bit of a shame that the two segments that stand out the most from V/H/S/94 are from filmmakers who aren’t making their V/H/S debuts in Barrett and Tjahjanto.
An unfortunate quirk in the concept of V/H/S/94 is the issue of making a new film look old. That isn’t to say they failed to — they actually do an incredibly good job for the most part. Practical effects are utilised for gore, and digital effects that feel like they’ve been plucked out of time are present when they’re needed too. The problem is that none of it is filmed on the low-resolution technology that it consistently imitates, and that can be quite jarring. In attempting to manufacture that kind of aesthetic there are digitally added tracking lines and video overlays, and none of it ever really comes close to replicating the warm feeling of the real imperfections that are present in the analogue formats it copies. Even though everything else looks authentically early-‘90s, it’s quite clear that the footage itself isn’t.
Despite its flaws, the self-awareness of V/H/S/94 is what makes it such an enjoyable watch — there’s no pretence that this has to be anything other than campy schlock-horror nostalgic fun. Most of the practical and digital effects are unashamedly stuck in the early ‘90s, the characters all look and feel as if they’ve called their cable company to say “I want my MTV” — it gets the majority of what it tries to do quite right. It taps into a niche that almost gives the concept of found footage horror a new life — one that takes us back to a time when this kind of thing wouldn’t have been easily disproved by the internet and when a sense of mystery surrounding it all still existed.
V/H/S/94 releases in the UK on February 26th
