The found-footage subgenre is not a novel concept among horror movies today. Popularized around the early-to-mid-2000s, the style has a polarizing place in pop culture, with people both praising and deriding it. Among the most popular entries though, is theV/H/Sfranchise, which is now in its sixth installment (with no inclination of slowing down). It’s not unusual for horror moviesto spawn sequels, but it is rare for a found-footage film to find itself in the position of not only having multiple entries, but also for most of them to be received well. The secret to this could possibly lie in the format for these films because, as many horror fans will know, theV/H/Sseries is an anthology.
What Is the V/H/S Series?
The concept is fairly straightforward: each film will have around four entries (with four different directors), that are loosely tied together with a wrap-around story about a person/group of people who find asuspicious set of VHS tapes— justifying the found-footage hijinks in the franchise. Thanks to the openness of the concept and the lack of significant connective tissue for each entry, the series is set up for constant reinterpretation, where filmmakers — both veterans and up-and-comers — are afforded the freedom to experiment and really stretch the limits of what kinds of stories can be told through the found-footage medium.
Initially distributed by Magnolia Pictures, the first trilogy ofV/H/Smovies opened to generally positive reviews, though the third entry,V/H/S Viral,is regarded as the worst of the entire series, pivoting from VHS tapes to online shorts. In September 2021, Shudder releasedV/H/S 94, the first in the next set of films from the franchise released as a Shudder Original.
The next two films,V/H/S 99andV/H/S 85, both follow the trajectory of their predecessor and go back to the film series’ cassette-based roots, although this new series is arguably bloodier and pulpier than when it started out. The most interesting aspect of this change, is how the series managed to stay true to its roots, while pivoting to a horror niche that’s been coming up in the last few years: analog horror.
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Analog Horror: Our Obsession with Technology and the Supernatural
Analog horror is an offshoot of the found-footage subgenre that primarily uses elements of nostalgic technology to evoke a sense of fear and unease in the viewer. The format has steadily grown in popularity over the last few years and transcended the medium of film to also work in more short-form content like shorts on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, as well as in video games. Generally the hallmarks of analog horror will be the use of visual filters and sound effects that evoke the use of video cameras and V/H/S tapes — withcryptic messages or unsettling imageryplaced in seemingly ‘normal’ backdrops to create a quiet, discordant sense of terror.
Thanks to the easy access of visual and vocal filters, as well as the availability of 3D software (not to mention access to the internet), the genre has spawned hundreds and thousands of smaller creators to upload short horror films that generally work on simple, straightforward concepts. Video games have approached the genre from an even more specific lens, by appealing to that same nostalgic center — smaller developers likeKitty Horror Showare creating horror games that call back to Playstation 1 and 2 graphics, their low-poly, slow-render style deliberately playing into the uncanny valley to scare players.
In film, the most recent example of this niche isShudder’s very ownSkinamarinkthat took the internet by storm for a few short weeks. The grainy analog nightmare was soaked in grungy atmosphere, with a loose story and a strong focus on unsettling the viewer through sight and sound alone. The film opened to polarizing reviews, with some praising it for its experimental format, while others referred to it as an exercise in boredom. That said, one thing is for certain: the genre is constantly growing and reinterpreting itself across mediums to create a shared mythology all tied up by the same concept — that is, if seeing is believing, then what does that mean for me?
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Mythology in the Modern Age
Analog horror may have been borne of the internet age, but both its roots and mythology can be traced back to when we first started telling each other scary stories, recounting inexplicable phenomenon and living through impossible situations. Despite our leap into the future, the tenets of our fear more or less stay the same, and so, through the internet, analog horror has its own set of shared myths and monsters that dominate the genre.
There’s too many to count, but some of the more significant entries are The Backrooms (you don’t want to end up there), the SCP Foundation, Slender Man (popularized in the early-2010s) and Siren Head. Almost every single one of these myths are explored by either unnamed audience stand-in protagonists, who explore liminal spaces with nothing more than a video camera — and sometimes a flashlight or a gun, but how helpful is that going to be? — only to be confronted by horrors beyond their comprehension.
Thanks to the shared internet culture, no one idea belongs to anybody, so all types of creators are able to step into these worlds and create shorts of their own, original or otherwise. Going back to theV/H/Sseries, it was widely regarded that the franchise was dead around the time ofV/H/S Viralback in 2014. Without a way to keep the franchise relevant in the modern age, the idea was mostly forgotten.
Luckily, thanks to the rise of ’80s influence in pop culture, which led to retro-styled horror, the franchise took the opportunity to find its footing and rebrand itself in a way that allowed for a wider range of experimentation, pitting their protagonists in similar scenarios, but playing up the visceral, handheld terror through a myriad of special effects. Let’s face it: they’re almost all quite bloody good.
