V/H/S/85 (2023) is not a fun haunted house ride. It’s a slow, cold crawl through a dead medium, asking uncomfortable questions: What if the past wasn’t simpler? What if it was just better at hiding its horrors? And what happens when we rewind the tape, only to find something rewinds back?
In the sprawling, grimy graveyard of modern horror franchises, the V/H/S series has always been the strange, feral cousin—the one you don’t invite to dinner but can’t stop watching through your fingers. By 2023, the series had already time-traveled through the 1990s ( V/H/S/94 ) and the 2000s ( V/H/S/99 ). But with V/H/S/85 , the anthology didn’t just revisit a decade; it dissected its rotting heart. V H S 85 2023
And it is terrifying.
Unlike the uneven pacing of some franchise entries, 85 builds like a concept album. The wraparound segment, “Total Copy,” presents itself as an earnest PBS-style documentary about a “new form of life” discovered in a Nicaraguan lake. But as the “expert” grows increasingly unhinged, the documentary’s slick veneer cracks to reveal a Cronenbergian body-horror nightmare—one that subtly connects every other tape in the collection. V/H/S/85 (2023) is not a fun haunted house ride
But the crown jewel is Guerrero’s “They’re in the Walls” —a relentless, Spanish-language slasher set during a live televised lucha libre match. When a news crew follows a luchador home to document his “simple life,” they discover that the real monster isn’t in the ring but in the family shrine. The finale, shot entirely through a shoulder-mounted Betacam’s night-vision mode, is a strobe-lit ballet of blood and azulejo tiles. It’s the most beautiful massacre you’ll ever hate to witness. And what happens when we rewind the tape,
Watch it alone. On an old TV, if you can find one. And when the tracking wavers during the quiet parts… do not adjust the picture.