V/H/S/Halloween: A Haunting Entry (2025)

 
The poster for the 2025 anthology film "V/H/S/Halloween"
 

V/H/S/Halloween: A Haunting Entry | 4/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 10/8/2025

A new year comes, the seasons change, and V/H/S has released the newest entry in their yearly October offerings. Featuring six shorts from seven directors, we have our most cohesive theme yet with each short focusing on Halloween night (or the week leading up to it, as the case may be). It’s the kind of vision for the franchise that I’m amazed we hadn’t seen before here. V/H/S has strongly come into its own as a franchise to highlight filmmakers, and heavily theming the entries has done a great amount of the heavy lifting in what makes it all work. Without a doubt, this is one of the most consistent V/H/S to date, without the traditional “one that’s really bad” so many of the entries seem to suffer from.


As with last year's review for Beyond, I’ll be allowing myself to talk freely about this entry. If you’d like to avoid potential details being spoiled for you, pick up a Shudder subscription and check it out before coming back.


In what feels like a shocking turn, Bryan M. Ferguson’s wraparound segment Diet Phantasma is one of the standout shorts of the anthology. Much like the wraparound for V/H/S/85, Halloween brings a consistent story focusing around a scientific team. Rather than research a strange shape-shifter, in this entry we’re focusing on nailing their formula for the titular new soda. I thought we had a strong concept here—it actually made me really excited to see what we had going. A haunted soda lab? Sign me up. Bryan did a great job with all the aesthetic work, nailing the kind of style that many of the decades trilogy never quite managed to always get. Frankly, I would have been thrilled to see this in any of them, but it ended up working perfectly here as well.

Unfortunately the same can’t be said for how I feel about Anna Zlokovic’s short Coochie Coochie Coo. I thought we had some potential here, but it simultaneously pulls too much from the opening for V/H/S/Beyond in the house setting, so I found it to generally fall a little flat. A little too one-note in its gross-out horror, but more importantly, it used AI to generate images that are referenced throughout the short. I could have forgiven the fact that our entire plot is a little too heavily ripping off the monster from Barbarian, but combining that with AI images makes me wonder how much original thought went into this at all. It cheapened what could have otherwise been a decent enough short. It’s disappointing, because though I enjoyed Zlokovic’s film Appendage well enough, this short ended up being a heavy discouragement to looking into more of her work.

Luckily we do immediately bring things back with Paco Plaza’s short, Ut Supra Sic Infra. Having only just seen REC for the first time about a week ago, I was thrilled to see he was going to be featured on the new V/H/S. Taking place jointly on Halloween and the ninth of November, we follow a detective trying to figure out what happened to a group of teens who were brutally murdered by their friend. I had a blast with this one. After repeating the Latin written on the wall three times, Enrich (Teo Planell) is possessed. For me, Planell is one of the standout actors from this entry. Before he’s possessed, he works a clean balance of being a bit of a dumbass teen just out for a good night with his friends, and after, he does a great job as our newly possessed villain. That, combined with some killer effects involving eyeballs, made this a standout for me.

At this point we finally get to the short that a great deal of people were likely incredibly excited for, Fun Sized by Casper Kelly. Many people might know him as the man behind the Adult Swim smash hit, Too Many Cooks, which had a sense of humor that bleeds into this as well. This is a short that puts fear second after a heavy dose of humor. Groan-inducing dialogue combined with some really well-timed delivery makes this the head and shoulders entry for the funniest short of the entire anthology. A goofy villain delivers a proportional punishment for the biblical levels of greed that leads to taking two pieces of candy from the “take one per person” bowl. What more could you ask for?

Kidprint is the brainchild of Alex Ross Perry, the man behind Ghost’s Rite Here Rite Now concert movie. A local video store is running a program where they record kids before they go out trick-or-treating on Halloween. There’s been a slew of kids getting kidnapped and murdered in town, and these videos have been a “peace of mind” gesture for concerned parents. I don’t have much I can say about this without summarizing the whole short, but suffice it to say this is one of the better shorts based around pure disturbing content that lands. There isn’t a second wasted here: from start to finish we’ve got an uncomfortable, brutal short that delivers on its premise amazingly.

Our final short might embody the franchise as a whole the best. Home Haunt, written and directed by Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman, feels like a great capstone for the anthology. As the name implies, we’re visiting a small, home haunt whose sparkle has faded. Keith (Jeff Harms) looks forward to doing this as a family event every year, but his son Zach (Noah Diamond) has had enough of getting bullied by his friends for being involved in something this cheesy. There’s an earnestness to this short that I can’t help but smile at. We make our way through each room of their home haunt, now haunted for real after playing a demonic record, and each room feels so carefully put together. You can’t help but smile at each of the incredibly basic ideas behind each room come to life. It’s a smart ending, pulling us back from the downer energy that Kidprint gave us and launching into the credits with Chat Pile’s nine-minute nightmare track grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg playing loudly over-aggressively edited clips from the shorts.

Each new V/H/S entry is something I look forward to. I have mixed feelings toward them as individual entries, but as a whole I’ve been a fan for ages. It’s great to see an opportunity to see different filmmakers play around in short film format. It’s always an October highlight for me, kicking off the Halloween season in a really strong way.

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The Long Walk (2025)