V/H/S/Mixtape
Writers: Zoe Cooper, Ernest Dickerson, Matt Landsman, David Moreau, RZA
Directors: Ernest Dickerson, Flying Lotus, Tobias Forge, David Moreau, RZA, Renee Zhan
Cast: Omar Mustafa Adem, Taylor Anne Danehower, Grant Holleman, Sarah Berman, Raymond Carr, Dan Garza, Jihad Brent, Mike Ferguson, Josh Goldbloom, Nour El-Refai, Gustaf Hammarsten, Elie Kaempfen, Barbara Crampton, Gwar
When considering anthology films, there’s an obligation to note that not every segment works; it’s the misapprehended understanding of these critiques that such projects innately comprise a hierarchy of “good” and “bad,” which is a boring and blockheaded way of viewing them. Of course not every one of an omnibus’ contributions will meet the rest in terms of quality, though “quality” is a loaded subjective term. And besides that, the strength of one segment compared to all of the others is the least interesting thing about these movies in the first place. Much more compelling is the question of what each part says when collated into a whole.
Take, for example, last year’s V/H/S/Halloween, the eighth entry in Bloody Disgusting’s horror anthology series, commenced in 2010 before going on a seven year hiatus and returning with new annual releases in 2021. Each segment in last year's V/H/S/Halloween details someone’s Halloween going terribly wrong, but there’s no “there” there, just a relentless edgelord dedication to breaking one of horror’s only true taboos — kid kills — over and over in a demonstration of shock for its own sake. The film stands as one of the brand’s worst, hand-in-hand with V/H/S: Viral, and so the 180 taken with this year’s V/H/S/Mixtape comes as a welcome balm. Defying the unofficial rule that anthologies are uneven by nature, each short in this year’s assembly rank among the best in the series to date.
Whichever one is the least of the lot is up to the beholder’s eye, of course, but none of them drag, lack perspective or vision, or indulge in provocative, hollow tomfoolery. A song played over and over again wears thin fast, after all, and V/H/S/Mixtape’s filmmaker lineup each cues a tune unique to their personalities, whether newcomers like Renee Zhan and Tobias Forge (hilarious as it is to call a heavy metal icon a “newcomer” in any context), or old hats like David Moreau (2024’s Mads), Flying Lotus (2017’s Kuso, 2022’s V/H/S/99), RZA (this year’s One Spoon of Chocolate), and especially living legend Ernest Dickerson, whose credits require no enumeration despite 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight’s “eternal banger” status.
If there’s one minor knock anyone can make about V/H/S/Mixtape, it’s that music, as a motif, is loose. Movies have had scores since Camille Saint-Saëns composed for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1908; thus the relationship between cinema and music is as old as cinema itself. Happily, the film’s hosts, the lads of Gwar, are here to tie the concept together. “The sounds of human suffering,” proclaims Michael “Blothar the Berserker” Bishop during an interstitial moment in the film’s wraparound. “Is there a more beautiful music in all of existence? The euphony of pain, the melodious agony of the tormented soul, horror and sound, inexorably married, entangled like lovers feeding off each other’s suffering, filling our nightmares with the din of dread.” For a guy whose work uniform includes a horned helm and grisly bovine udders, the sentiment is moving in its poetry, and gets across the ways in which aural pleasures blend with visceral ones.
In “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance,” Zhan’s commencing segment, the harmless nostalgia of 1980s children’s programming, a’la Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street, is weaponized against a studio crew, led by Barbara Crampton, who make the mortal mistake of 3D scanning the puppets from the defunct show The Curious Chorus. The plan is to reboot the series in digitized form, and the puppets’ democratic reaction is, in a word, vile. It helps that Jim Henson’s Creature Shop aided and abetted Zhan’s efforts with a Cantina scene’s worth of gonzo puppet designs. (Note that puppeteers are among the most kid-friendly and most utterly demented people in the TV and movie industries.)
Where Zhan shapes her film around a theme song, her peers literalize the brief. RZA’s “Death Tone” borrows slasher tropes and functions (seemingly as an ode to, again, Tales from the Crypt, like season 3’s “Easel Kill Ya”) in a tale about a young woman (Neela Jolene) honoring her late father’s legacy as a producer by butchering randos in her recording studio to capture their screams and incorporate them into her magnum opus; Forge fashions “Premature Burial” as a music video, in which a woman (Nour El Refai) concocts a plot to inter a man (Gustaf Hammarsten) while he’s still alive; Flying Lotus’ quickie, “Another Cabin,” accompanies wonderfully tactile stop-motion animation with his original song, “Dreamshade”; Moreau’s “Heartbeat” locks a pair of adventure travel influencers in the world’s most soundproof room; and Dickerson’s “The Music of Mr. Sze” contextualizes music as a means of repelling darkness. (The less said about it, the better for your viewing experience. Put simply, it’s a stunner.)
The variety in aesthetics across V/H/S/Mixtape’s sum total feels expansive to a degree the series’ past films often don’t, even the very good ones, perhaps because as a project, V/H/S hews toward the low-fi. There’s nothing bad about that, or wrong about that, and in fact there’s much to gain from committing to the gimmick; V/H/S/2 remains the gold standard in the whole lot for a reason, not the least that Gareth Evans’ and Tim Tjahjanto’s “Safe Haven” jams a metric ton of demonic insanity into one half hour. But likewise there’s something to be said for polish and gloss, which V/H/S/Mixtape gets to embrace more fully because the film is structured like MTV before the “M” came to signify “mind-numbing.” There’s grit and grime found here, certainly. It’s just that the package they’re wrapped in is so cleanly made as to be seamless, and so overwhelmingly superior to much of 2026’s horror that, in the end, you’ll never want the music to stop.
