In the wake of The Blair Witch Project, found footage horror movies quickly wore out their welcome; after a while, all the shaky-cam shenanigans made a body feel queasy and a brain feel bored. But the celebration of the form via the V/H/S anthology franchise – which featured three entries in the early 2010s and helped elevate the careers of directors like Ti West and Adam Wingard, and was revived by Shudder in 2021 – is an enjoyable annual spooky-season tradition. The latest is V/H/S/Beyond (now streaming on Shudder), which sort of almost kinda purports to boast an aliens/UFO theme for its five short films, and as ever, the results tend to be fun, but they absolutely vary. V/H/S/BEYOND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? The Gist: Jay Cheel directs the wraparound framing narrative, Abduction/Adduction, a mockumentary about the UFO phenomenon that features interviews with believers and skeptics alike, and builds to a nutty final sequence that plays into the popular narrative about the, shall we say, exploratory things curious aliens do to humans. The first short is Stork by Kevin Downey, which uses POV police body cams to follow a cadre of cops who search a house for a slew of kidnapped babies and find the place heavily populated with They Live-looking zombie people. A chainsaw and slurpy-gulping noises play prominent roles here. Short no. 2 is Virat Pal’s Dream Girl, which follows a pair of paparazzi “journalists” in Mumbai as they gain access to a movie set where a Bollywood superstar follows up her song-and-dancestravaganza with a little bit of off-the-rails violence. Let’s just say the phrase “putting on a face” has literal meaning here. The third is Live and Let Dive by Justin Martinez, where a body cam on a scaredypants skydiver captures a UFO encounter that begins at a few thousand feet and continues on the ground. Next, Christian Long and Justin Long (yes, that Justin Long, Beyond’s highest-profile filmmaker) helm Fur Babies, about a crazy doggy-daycare lady who has some, shall we say, offbeat taxidermy methods, and the activists who target her little operation. And finally there’s Kate Siegel’s Stowaway, about a wanna-believer who films some strange lights hovering over the desert and, as the title implies, ends up taking her camcorder on board an alien craft. What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I already mentioned They Live, whose influence can be seen in the aesthetic of the hostile whatever-they-ares in Stork. Otherwise, Live and Let Dive brings District 9 to mind, Stowaway nods to David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Fur Babies implies that Justin Long being transformed into a walrus in the thoroughly hideous Tusk may have scarred the poor guy for life. Performance Worth Watching: Alanah Pearce anchors Stowaway with an authenticity that matches the film’s gritty, grainy aesthetic. Memorable Dialogue: Tara, the Bollywood star, delivers this doozy more than once, with increasingly funny results: “Do you want a selfie?” Sex and Skin: Only skin being peeled off faces! Our Take: What feels like a very loose UFO theme comes apart completely with the weakest film here, Fur Babies, which not only has nothing to do with rectal-probing greys and the like, and comes off grating as it tries too hard to be funny. The best is probably Live and Let Dive, which gets really creative with the POV stuff (it plays out like one long take), and effectively uses gore as a form of sick comedy. Stowaway is just about as good, giving us the true, creepy VHS aesthetic, which uses the classic what-you-don’t-see-is-worse-than-what-you-do-see horror trope to make a body horror sequence seem extra disturbing. Appropriately, Stowaway is preceded by a mockumentary bit in which a talking head quips, “everybody likes filming spooky things on VHS cameras!” If only all the shorts adhered to this methodology – and to the UFO theme – then V/H/S/Beyond might more easily buck the hit-and-miss nature of anthologies like this. As ever, there’s a tendency for found-footage horror shorts to stick to similar narrative methodologies; holding longer shots so we peer into the grain and try to snatch a visual clue before a big reveal is a significant stylistic touchstone, and all of these directors are for the most part wise enough to show us nothing, then show us a little before showing us the big shebang. That’s what makes this stuff fun. Our Call: Stowaway and Dive are sure-fire winners. Stork gives us visceral first-person-shooter action (and a pretty bizarre reveal). Dream Girl is shrugworthy, but at least delivers some subtext about the nature of fame and performance. And sorry, but Fur Babies is a dud. The math: 3.5 out of five ain’t bad at all. STREAM IT. John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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