V/H/S Halloween Summary and Review - Press Play...if You Dare

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’Tis the season for horror anthologies, and this year the long-running V/H/S franchise grabs the blood-drenched Halloween baton with relish and and sprints screaming toward the finish line.

The wrap-around story centres on the testing of a sinister new soda, “Diet Phantasma,” which quickly sets a dangerous tone before we’re plunged into a selection of Halloween-themed shorts. From haunted houses and urban legends to trick-or-treating gone horribly wrong, the anthology blends grotesque imagery, gallows humour, and a particularly disturbing entry involving disappearing children. 

Tape by Tape

“Coochie Coochie Coo” follows two high-school girls who go trick-or-treating one last time and experience increasingly bizarre and grotesque horrors when lured into a house by a local urban-legend figure.

“Ut Supra Sic Infra” delivers a Spanish take steeped in Iberian horror atmosphere, centring on the sole survivor of a massacre at a Halloween party in an abandoned mansion. When investigators return to the site, events spiral far beyond imagination.

“Fun Size” blends absurdity and horror in a segment in which a group of nostalgic adults go trick-or-treating and get sucked into a horrifically surreal candy-factory nightmare.  

“Kidprint” features a video-store owner who creates tapes to help identify missing children (echoing the real 1990s “Kidprint” programme), but behind this public service lies something far darker.

“Home Haunt” closes the show with a family who turn their backyard into an elaborate haunted house each Halloween. When the father “acquires” an old record of Halloween mood music, he unleashes genuine horror upon the neighbourhood. turning a fun suburban spectacle into supernatural carnage.

Manic Energy and Demonic Chaos

V/H/S/Halloween takes a solid stab (pun intended) at revitalising classic Halloween imagery, twisting familiar tropes just enough to keep things lively. While not every segment feels fresh — “Ut Supra Sic Infra”, despite its atmosphere, treads familiar ground — others stand out. The grotesquery of “Coochie Coochie Coo” and the twisted humour of “Fun Size” and “Home Haunt” lift the collection, while “Kidprint” is something of  an outlier, its Halloween connection tenuous at best. It's the anthology’s most disturbing entry and its inclusion may raise eyebrows. Deeply unsettling, this one will divide opinion.

The wrap-around sequence, with its shades of Halloween III, ties everything together with demonic chaos and enough gore to please long-time fans, breaking up the slightly lengthy runtime with manic energy.

Gruesome Goodies

I've seen most of the franchise and, unlike some, this stays close to its roots: a trick-or-treat bag of gruesome goodies from which most viewers will come away with a favourite. While it doesn’t entirely avoid the genre’s clichés, it's a weird, wacky, darkly comic — and sometimes disturbing — offering. For horror anthology and found-footage fans, it’s a fitting treat to close out the spooky season.

3/5

 Segment Director(s) Writer(s)
“Diet Phantasma”  Bryan M. Ferguson  Bryan M. Ferguson
“Coochie Coochie Coo” Anna Zlokovic  Anna Zlokovic
“Ut Supra Sic Infra” Paco Plaza  Paco Plaza & Alberto Marini 
“Fun Size” Casper Kelly Casper Kelly
“Kidprint” Alex Ross Perry Alex Ross Perry
“Home Haunt” Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman  Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman 

Year of release: 2025
Runtime: 115 minutes 

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