Eight films in, and the V/H/S franchise has reached that strange liminal space between reinvention and redundancy. V/H/S/Halloween promises another grab bag of analog nightmares, but what it ultimately offers is a reminder that this format — and perhaps found footage itself — is struggling to justify its continued revival.

Segmented through Bryan M. Ferguson’s Diet Phantasma, a frame narrative about a possessed soft drink, the film pulses between absurdist body horror and tongue-in-cheek satire. It’s gory, chaotic, and knowingly silly — a kind of VHS-era Cronenberg-lite filtered through Slimehouse aesthetics. It’s amusing enough, but its placement between each short becomes little more than a sugar rush: a filler designed to jolt, not haunt.

Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo aims for Barbarian-esque weirdness but collapses under its own shaky-cam chaos. It’s conceptually interesting — exploring the monstrous side of motherhood and lost innocence — yet the execution feels forced, desperate to shock rather than unsettle.

Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra is easily the standout. The [REC] director flexes his mastery of dread with a metaphysical descent into ritual horror and the supernatural. It’s slick, moody, and genuinely disorienting, proving that when the right filmmaker takes the reins, the V/H/S anthology format can still bite.

Casper Kelly’s Fun Size, however, is a regression — an infantile splatter piece that mistakes noise for novelty. Whether its deliberately bad performances are meant to parody ‘80s horror cheese or are just poorly handled is anyone’s guess, but it grates either way.

Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint ends things on a troubling note, tackling child abduction and snuff imagery with an uneasy hand. The idea — a man unwittingly complicit in a ring of video-taped killings — could have been chilling, but the tone wobbles between exploitative and hollow. It’s a grim finish that leaves you numb rather than disturbed.

And that’s the core issue here: V/H/S/Halloween feels like it’s circling the drain of its own nostalgia. The analog grime, the static, the jittery cuts — once the aesthetic of underground menace — now play like ritualised pastiche. There are sparks of invention, but they’re buried under too many loud edits and too few genuine scares.

The Prognosis:

Maybe it’s time to admit what’s been lurking behind the flicker for years: the found footage format — once raw, immediate, and terrifying — is finally running out of tape.

• Saul Muerte