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V/H/S (Netflix)
I had high expectations for
V/H/S, but I should have tempered those expectations since it combined two horror formats fraught with perils (found footage presentation and anthology). Like other horror anthologies, I thought that some of the horror shorts were very effective, while I turned from the movie to check e-mail or Twitter not because of tension, but because of boredom.
There were two barriers to my emotional investment or enjoyment. First, even though the shorts were written and directed by different people (Adam "You're Next" Wingard, David "The Signal" Bruckner, Ti "The House of the Devil" West, Glenn "I Sell the Dead" McQuaid, Joe "Drinking Buddies" Swanberg, and a group called Radio Silence), I felt pummeled by the same white dude-bro personalities, from the white petty criminal thugs in the framing narrative to the white party dudes from David Bruckner's "Amateur Night" to the male characters in Glenn McQuaid's "Tuesday the 17th" to the Halloween-loving dudes in Radio Silence's "10/31/98." It's one thing to follow a group of white dude-bros over the course of a feature film, like we did in
Cabin Fever, and see their personalities (hopefully) gain depth as they react to the circumstances the film presents them. Instead, with these 15-20 minutes shorts, I only saw enough of the characters to be annoyed by them before they get violently dispatched.
I didn't feel like most of the movies had good reasons for using the found footage format or the first person perspective that the found footage format often presents. I get that the found footage format shares the same advantage as first person video games: it draws the viewer in and makes viewer identification and investment easier. However, it needs to be done carefully. The found footage needs to make sense, and the film needs to be able to stand up to scrutiny. If I can't get a sense of answers for "Who found this footage, does the editing make sense, how did this footage get here, why are the characters and the audience watching this" that are internally consistent, the whole format falls apart. And that puts aside the question that haunts the found footage format: "why would the characters keep filming while all this is happening?" The use of found footage in "Amateur Night," Ti West's "Second Honeymoon," Swanberg's "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger," and the framing narrative answered those questions well enough that my suspension of disbelief remained suspended, but "Tuesday the 17th" and "10/31/98" did not.
Realism might be a strange thing to complain about when it comes to supernatural horror movies, but you need the realism to ground the viewers' expectations about the world in order for the supernatural to stand out. The key might have been how they handled the use of technology in those shorts that seemed to make sense. "Amateur Night" hows us events through a camera embedded in glasses a character wears. Sure, the microphone on such a camera probably wouldn't be able to pick up half the stuff the audience is presented, but I can overlook that because the short committed to this conceit. This commitment actually impressed me. "Second Honeymoon" shows us a vacation tape, and there are enough moments in the short that create verisimilitude. "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger," showed us the protagonist actually holding up a laptop that had a web camera, even if the device that frames the characters doesn't hit the realism mark. And the film's framing narrative could be thought of as a bunch of hooligans filming their misdeeds, even if it made me think of Stringer Bell asking Sean "Shamrock" McGinty, "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" Other than its use of creative static and artifacting, it didn't seem that "Tuesday the 17th" had a good reason to exist as a found footage film instead of a normally shot film.
The other pitfall that found footage movies have to face is the shaky cinematography. Sometimes, it enhances the viewer's sense of confusion and raises tension while it obscures the horror to leave it to the viewer's imagination. Other times, it just makes the film hard to watch. Most of the shorts stayed on the right side of this divide, though "Tuesday the 17th" comes close to crossing to the wrong side.
