The devil is in the grainy, slightly out of focus details.
The found-footage sub-genre has become a popular choice among filmmakers since its birth and success in The Blair Witch Project. For over a decade, it has been telling us ambiguous stories in a way only a shaky hand cam could deliver. We’ve been scared, we’ve been surprised, and we’ve been nauseated. V/H/S gives us the best and the worst that this sub-genre has to offer, but is it worth the trouble?
The film begins with a group of 4 criminals going around the city terrorizing and destroying, all while recording their exploits on an old school cassette camcorder. The group is hired by a mysterious man with an odd request: Retrieve a VHS cassette from a stranger’s house. The mysterious man says that they’ll know which cassette it is when they see it.
After breaking in the house, they stumble upon a room with a dead guy in a recliner facing a wall of televisions with a VCR and a floor of scattered VHS cassettes. But which cassette is it? I guess we have to watch as many as we can. This then leads into an anthology of horror shorts each more different than the next.
