Let’s jump right in shall we?
This season starts out creepy right away with two lovers named Leo and Teresa (played by Adam Levine and Jenna Dewan-Tatum) walking up to an abandoned Briarcliff Asylum. Teresa loves the creep factor of the place and they decide to sneak inside to look around. After getting rather frisky they do more exploring and find a locked room with a slot in the door. Leo sticks his arm in there to inspect it more and gets his arm ripped clean off by someTHING on the other side of the door.
Directed by a numerous amount of people (Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg and the group known as Radio Silence) this movie is about a group of young guys that are hired to break into a home a steal a specific VHS tape. To their surprise they find a collection of tapes stacked throughout the house. One of the guys goes through the tapes trying to find the one they were hired to grab but he quickly realizes what he’s watching is footage of grisly murders and supernatural happenings.
V/H/S takes the “found footage” and “anthology” genres and really turns it into something fantastically creepy. Just a few weeks ago someone asked me what movie I thought was scary/creepy and it took me a long time and I still couldn’t think of anything. As of now this one takes that spot. The way this movie played out was something I’ve never seen. There is five short films that are wrapped in a sixth one that served as the main storyline. Each one was innovative and a very unique take on each subject. I think one of the things that made this fairly eerie was that the way that each short was filmed. Each director made it look as real as possible and used really clever camera work. The other being the way that us as viewers are basically seeing what they are seeing and what we see is what basically fits in the viewing area of a handheld camera. Between each one you’re brought back to the main story and reminded that there are people watching these tapes. I thought this was a fantastic way of weaving them all together for a purpose and not just lump them all together for the sake of making a regular anthology film. I will say that the Creepshow films are some of my favorite film of that genre (Not including Creepshow 3. We just won’t talk about that one) but V/H/S could definitely sit right next to it and become a cult classic horror film that people will love to watch ten years down the road. I purposely didn’t want to go in depth too much about each short beacause I want every person out there that reads this to go check it out. I’m certain you’re going to love it and remember to watch it in the dark.
This short written and directed by Benjamin Howdeshell this is apparently a small prequel story inspired by the Jill Valentine character from the Resident Evil movies according to Milla Jovavich via her twitter page. This is a great little film and I guarantee you that if you are a fan of the RE films of just a fan of zombies period you WILL love this! Great job Ben and congrats on all the hard work you put into this!
You can follow Benjamin Howdeshell on twitter here