In the sprawling, grimy graveyard of modern horror franchises, the V/H/S series has always been the strange, feral cousin—the one you don’t invite to dinner but can’t stop watching through your fingers. By 2023, the series had already time-traveled through the 1990s ( V/H/S/94 ) and the 2000s ( V/H/S/99 ). But with V/H/S/85 , the anthology didn’t just revisit a decade; it dissected its rotting heart.
And it is terrifying.
★★★★½ (4.5/5) Best watched with the lights off and your hand hovering over the eject button. V H S 85 2023
But the crown jewel is Guerrero’s “They’re in the Walls” —a relentless, Spanish-language slasher set during a live televised lucha libre match. When a news crew follows a luchador home to document his “simple life,” they discover that the real monster isn’t in the ring but in the family shrine. The finale, shot entirely through a shoulder-mounted Betacam’s night-vision mode, is a strobe-lit ballet of blood and azulejo tiles. It’s the most beautiful massacre you’ll ever hate to witness.
Unlike the uneven pacing of some franchise entries, 85 builds like a concept album. The wraparound segment, “Total Copy,” presents itself as an earnest PBS-style documentary about a “new form of life” discovered in a Nicaraguan lake. But as the “expert” grows increasingly unhinged, the documentary’s slick veneer cracks to reveal a Cronenbergian body-horror nightmare—one that subtly connects every other tape in the collection. In the sprawling, grimy graveyard of modern horror
V/H/S/85 (2023) is not a fun haunted house ride. It’s a slow, cold crawl through a dead medium, asking uncomfortable questions: What if the past wasn’t simpler? What if it was just better at hiding its horrors? And what happens when we rewind the tape, only to find something rewinds back?
The genius of V/H/S/85 is its understanding of the year itself. 1985 was a hinge point: Reagan-era optimism colliding with the Satanic Panic, the rise of home video (and the “video nasty” moral crusade), and the creeping awareness that technology could betray you. The characters in these segments are not jaded; they trust the camera. They believe recording something makes it real, containable, evidence. The film’s ultimate cruelty is showing that the camera does not protect you. It simply ensures someone will watch you die. Later. In a basement. On a cracked 19-inch screen. And it is terrifying
Where previous entries leaned into camp or nostalgia, 85 weaponizes the very limitations of its format. The year is, of course, 1985—the peak of the home camcorder boom, when families recorded birthdays and serial killers recorded basements. Director David Bruckner (returning to the franchise he helped launch with 2012’s Amateur Night ) and his cohort of filmmakers—Scott Derrickson, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Natasha Kermani, and Mike P. Nelson—treat the VHS artifact not as a gimmick but as a ghost. The tracking errors, the blown-out highlights, the haunting moment when the tape runs out and snow fills the screen: all of it becomes a language of dread.
Watch it alone. On an old TV, if you can find one. And when the tracking wavers during the quiet parts… do not adjust the picture.