When sound becomes the monster

There is a particular pleasure in discovering that a horror franchise still has something left to say after nine instalments.

The V/H/S series has spent more than a decade turning the mechanics of recorded media into engines of terror. From the battered tapes of the original anthology through the annual Shudder revivals, the franchise has repeatedly asked what happens when the camera becomes an unwilling witness. The technology has changed, the settings have shifted and the filmmakers have come and gone, but the fundamental proposition has remained remarkably durable: somewhere, somebody has recorded something that should never have been recorded.

V/H/S/MIXTAPE takes that proposition and turns up the volume.

The ninth instalment doesn’t abandon the franchise’s found-footage DNA so much as recognise that recorded media has never really been about pictures alone. Sound is equally capable of preserving a moment, transmitting a memory, altering behaviour or opening a door that should have remained closed. Here, music and audio aren’t simply atmospheric accompaniments to the horror. They are the medium through which the horror arrives.

That distinction matters.

Because V/H/S/MIXTAPE is at its most effective when it stops treating sound as something that makes horror scarier and starts treating it as something that creates horror.

The result is an anthology that can move from grotesque puppetry to sonic experimentation, cosmic horror, claymation and splatter without feeling entirely fractured. The individual segments are wildly different, but they are bound by an idea that proves considerably more fertile than another collection of cursed recordings.

The tape has found its soundtrack.

THE MIXTAPE

The original V/H/S arrived in 2012 at a moment when found footage was already threatening to become exhausted. The form had been repeatedly exploited by filmmakers looking for inexpensive ways to manufacture realism, but the anthology format gave V/H/S an advantage: it could make several different experiments within a single film.

That has become one of the franchise’s great strengths.

The subsequent films have played with periods, aesthetics and genres — V/H/S/94, V/H/S/99, V/H/S/85, V/H/S/Beyond and last year’s V/H/S/Halloween among them — while retaining the central fascination with media as evidence.

Mixtape feels like the next logical mutation.

The title is important. A mixtape is not simply a collection of songs. It is an act of arrangement. One sound follows another. A mood develops. The transitions matter. The listener becomes aware of the relationship between individual pieces and the larger composition.

That is essentially what the V/H/S anthology has always attempted to do.

Only now the metaphor has become literal.

The film is presented through a structure in which GWAR host an MTV-style show from hell, while music-video interludes directed by Flying Lotus and Tobias Forge punctuate the principal stories.

It is an appropriately filthy framework for the material.

GWAR have always existed somewhere between heavy metal performance, horror spectacle, grotesque theatre and deliberate bad taste. Their presence therefore makes perfect sense within an anthology concerned with the point where music becomes performance and performance becomes horror. They don’t simply provide comic relief between segments; they help establish the film’s wider argument that music and horror have always shared an appetite for excess.

The V/H/S franchise has traditionally asked us to watch.

Mixtape wants us to listen.

DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE

Renee Zhan’s “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance” begins with one of the most immediately disarming ideas in the anthology: somebody decides to revive a long-cancelled children’s puppet programme.

It is difficult to think of a premise more perfectly suited to practical horror.

The puppets were created with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, and the resulting creatures possess exactly the quality that digital effects can struggle to manufacture — physical presence. They have weight. Texture. Imperfections. They occupy the same space as the actors.

And then they start doing things that puppets really shouldn’t do.

Zhan’s segment understands something fundamental about puppetry: the unsettling quality isn’t simply that an artificial object appears alive. It is that we have already agreed to pretend it is alive.

Children’s television depends upon that agreement. A piece of foam, fabric and fur becomes a character because an audience accepts the illusion. Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance simply turns that relationship against us.

The result has the peculiar macabreness of a corrupted childhood memory. The familiar language of children’s entertainment remains visible, but its innocence has been excavated and replaced with something considerably more unpleasant.

The practical effects are consequently more than a technical achievement. They are part of the horror’s psychology.

These creatures look as though they could be standing in a forgotten television studio after everyone has gone home.

And perhaps that is worse than anything a computer could create.

Zhan has also been open about the particular difficulties of shooting puppetry within found footage. With the camera restricted to the perspective of the recording, concealing the puppeteers becomes an elaborate practical problem in itself.

That limitation becomes an advantage.

Found footage has always imposed restrictions upon its filmmakers. Here, those restrictions become part of the illusion.

HEARTBEAT

David Moreau’s “Heartbeat” moves the anthology into more explicitly physical territory.

Two YouTube urban explorers enter a decommissioned military facility once used for sonic experimentation, turning forbidden infrastructure into online content.

It is an appropriately contemporary premise.

The protagonists aren’t simply exploring an abandoned building. They are performing exploration for an audience. The camera is both witness and commodity. The experience only really exists once it has been recorded.

This is an important evolution of the V/H/S formula.

The franchise began with the anxiety of discovering recordings made by strangers. In Mixtape, recording is already part of everyday life. People document themselves constantly. They explore, perform, react and publish.

Moreau consequently turns sound into an attack on the very bodies producing it.

The human body becomes an instrument.

Breathing, heartbeat, vibration and the noises generated internally become increasingly sinister. Sound ceases to be something coming from the outside world and becomes something the characters cannot escape because they are generating it themselves.

Moreau has described precisely this attraction to sound as a storytelling mechanism, arguing that audio and visuals are fundamental to cinema and that the opportunity to make sound carry the frightening elements of the story was particularly exciting.

That philosophy is evident.

Heartbeat isn’t necessarily the anthology’s most conceptually elaborate segment, but it performs an important function: it makes the premise bodily.

The horror isn’t merely something you hear.

It is something you feel.

THE MUSIC OF MR. SZE

Then comes Ernest Dickerson’s “The Music of Mr. Sze”, and the film suddenly becomes something stranger.

This is the segment that most completely understands what V/H/S/MIXTAPE can do with its central concept.

A college film student begins a documentary project about a reclusive and tormented musician. The apparently straightforward documentary gradually opens onto something far more supernatural.

On paper, it is the kind of premise that could easily become another variation on the familiar “young filmmaker discovers disturbing old man” formula.

Dickerson takes it somewhere considerably more interesting.

The segment embraces cosmic horror, animation and the notion that music can communicate something beyond ordinary human comprehension. The result feels less like a story about a strange musician than an encounter with an aesthetic language humanity was never supposed to understand.

This is where the film’s connection to Lovecraftian horror becomes most potent.

Lovecraft’s monsters are often less frightening than the knowledge surrounding them. The true terror lies in discovering that the universe is considerably stranger than human beings have permitted themselves to believe.

Music provides a remarkably elegant vehicle for that idea.

You don’t need to understand a sound for it to affect you.

You don’t need to translate it.

You don’t even need to know what it means.

You can simply hear it.

And perhaps that is enough.

Dickerson’s use of animation pushes the segment beyond the limitations of conventional found footage. The documentary begins as an attempt to record reality but gradually encounters imagery that seems to belong to another order of existence entirely.

It is an especially effective contradiction: a format obsessed with realism becoming a doorway into the impossible.

Dickerson has explained that his protagonist’s camera is built into his glasses, allowing the found-footage conceit to become part of the character’s documentary practice. He also offered the wonderfully sensible advice that perhaps when you hear strange music, you should simply leave it alone.

The character, naturally, does not.

And horror history has always been rather unkind to people who ignore that particular piece of advice.

Of the principal segments, “The Music of Mr. Sze” is the one that most successfully transforms the anthology’s theme into mythology.

Music isn’t merely dangerous.

Music is knowledge.

And some knowledge is better left unheard.

DEATH TONE

RZA’s “Death Tone” brings the idea back into the world of music production.

A young sound engineer follows instructions left by her late father in an attempt to create the ultimate track.

Where Dickerson approaches music as cosmic communication, RZA approaches it as obsession.

There is something inherently appropriate about RZA directing a story built around the pursuit of a perfect sound. His own career has been built upon the manipulation, layering and reconstruction of sound, making Death Tone feel like a particularly natural contribution to this particular mixtape.

The father-daughter relationship also gives the story another frequency.

Sound becomes inheritance.

What is passed from one generation to another isn’t necessarily a physical object or even a memory. It can be a voice. A song. A recording. A piece of music carrying emotional information that survives the person who created it.

The desire to finish the track therefore becomes something more than artistic ambition.

It becomes an attempt to communicate with the dead.

And that is a very old horror story indeed.

THE SOUND OF THE FRANCHISE

What makes V/H/S/MIXTAPE worthwhile isn’t that every segment reaches the same height.

It doesn’t.

Anthologies rarely do.

Its achievement lies instead in finding a sufficiently flexible central idea to accommodate wildly different interpretations.

Puppetry.

Urban exploration.

Cosmic horror.

Music production.

Animation.

Claymation.

Practical effects.

Music videos.

GWAR.

These could easily have become ingredients in a cinematic junk drawer.

Instead, Mixtape finds a common frequency.

That frequency is recorded sound.

The franchise’s original fascination with VHS technology was always partly nostalgic, but there was also something deeply unsettling about analogue recording itself. A tape could preserve a moment. It could be copied. It could deteriorate. It could contain something you didn’t remember recording.

The technological anxiety has changed.

The tape has become the playlist.

The cassette has become the stream.

The camcorder has become the phone.

And the found footage has become an endless audiovisual culture in which almost everything can be recorded, uploaded and consumed.

Mixtape understands that the next logical question isn’t necessarily what are we watching?

It is:

What are we hearing?

GWAR’S SHOW FROM HELL

The GWAR material deserves particular attention because it gives the anthology a sense of cultural lineage.

There is a long history of horror and heavy music feeding from one another. Horror provided metal with imagery, mythology and theatrical vocabulary; metal returned the favour by turning volume, performance and spectacle into their own forms of transgression.

GWAR have spent decades deliberately collapsing those boundaries.

Their appearance here therefore feels less like celebrity casting than a statement of intent.

They represent the film’s understanding that horror can be music, and music can be theatre, and theatre can become horror.

The Flying Lotus and Tobias Forge interludes extend that idea into the music-video form.

This gives Mixtape a more fractured rhythm than previous V/H/S entries, but that fragmentation is appropriate.

A mixtape shouldn’t necessarily play like a conventional feature.

It should jump.

Abruptly.

It should change mood.

It should occasionally give you something you weren’t expecting.

And occasionally it should play something so strange that you wonder why it was included in the first place.

That’s part of the fun.

TURN UP THE HORROR

After nine films, the danger for V/H/S is no longer that audiences don’t know what they’re going to get.

It is that they know too well.

A handheld camera.

A terrible discovery.

A frantic escape.

A sudden cut.

Blood.

Static.

Another tape.

V/H/S/MIXTAPE can’t entirely escape those conventions.

Nor should it.

The franchise has developed a grammar of its own.

But it can change the vocabulary.

And that is where this entry succeeds.

The best sequences don’t simply place horror footage against a musical backdrop. They make sound structurally necessary to the terror.

The horror cannot exist without the music.

The music cannot exist without the recording.

The recording cannot exist without the person who chose to press record.

And suddenly the familiar V/H/S question — who made this footage? — becomes something more unsettling:

Who made this sound?

That is a small but meaningful evolution for a franchise that has survived precisely because it understands that horror is often most effective when it finds new ways to corrupt familiar technology.

The Prognosis:

V/H/S/MIXTAPE isn’t the reinvention of the franchise.

It doesn’t need to be.

What it offers instead is a smart thematic mutation — one that takes an established cinematic language and discovers that there was another sense waiting to be exploited all along.

Its strongest material is genuinely inventive.

“The Music of Mr. Sze” is the standout, finding an unusually fertile intersection between documentary filmmaking, animation, cosmic horror and music. “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance” gives the film its most memorable physical creations, with the work of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop providing a wonderfully macabre reminder that sometimes the most convincing monster is the one that can actually stand in front of the camera. And “Heartbeat” finds a particularly nasty way of making the human body itself part of the soundtrack.

Around them, RZA’s Death Tone, the GWAR material and the music-video interludes complete an anthology that is less interested in simply frightening us than in asking how sound can alter the way we experience fear.

The V/H/S tapes have always been haunted.

This time, they have found their voice.

And it is screaming.

Turn up the volume.

• Saul Muerte

V/H/S/Mixtape is streaming on Shudder from Oct 9th.