The fashions and references may change, the meaning of “video” may shift, but at heart, these movies are like classic short-story collections, the kind you might read by flashlight on a dark and stormy night. Truthfully, though, the appeal of V/H/S is indeed rather timeless. Each functions like a video flashback to a different era, aiming to send viewers on a nostalgia trip while sending shivers down their spines. ![]() Where once these movies seemed only vaguely retro in their format and framing, they’re now intentionally so. ![]() The latest installment, V/H/S/85, which lands on Shudder today, continues this unlikely franchise’s ongoing stroll down memory lane with stories explicitly set during the Reagan years and filmed to look like they were shot then, too. Since moving to Shudder, the series has become an annual tradition, with a new crop of scary shorts arriving every October and breaking records for the streamer. Yet here we are, roughly a decade later, and there are now six V/H/S movies and counting, directed by an ever-growing stable of rising and established filmmakers. A sequel seemed about as likely as VHS itself mounting a comeback. ![]() “Timeless” was not a word that leaped to mind while watching this collection of digital campfire stories. V/H/S was also steeped, of course, in the language of a more distant past: It was a Creepshow-style anthology of the kind that was last big in the ’80s and was named for a movie-watching technology that had gone obsolete around the turn of the 21st century. Roping together a handful of spooky short films all shot in the style of home videos, the omnibus project was clearly made to capitalize on the found-footage craze that Paranormal Activity had resparked a few years earlier. When the first V/H/S made its way to theaters and VOD in the autumn of 2012, it looked like a one-off curiosity, not the beginning of a regular showcase for exciting voices in horror.
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