#I wish more people funded cheap horror anthologies and put them on large platforms

[seeminglyseph]

This is probably like. A weird thing to be concerned about, but like. The degree of polish and like. Quality in some of the recent entries to the V/H/S franchise sometimes is like… intimidating and feels like. I mean I don’t wanna tell people specifically to be worse at film making or anything, and it’s not like I think anyone broke rules making their entries I don’t think. But I think I mostly mean this to say towards audience members sometimes, ‘cause a lot of V/H/S is kinda *supposed* to be lower budget and experimental in comparison to blockbuster movies or whatever. That’s why the first one has that like “what the fuck?” Aspect to some of the shorts, they kinda feel like student films, because they were like… “gather some people up, get some relatively affordable equipment you can maybe rent, and go film on a rented set or out in the woods which is mostly free”

It feels cheap because it is cheap, and the cheapness makes it have that exact kind of horror vibe it was going for by being VHS. The more polished and high budget and impressive it gets, the less it feels like an experiment in cheapness.

I think there’s a really strong charm to the shorts that feel a little like “film makers create a student film” and I’m not using student film as an insult because I think there’s something really interesting and raw to the like. Sets and characters and costumes put together when you’ve got really really passionate, but broke and unpolished creators? When you’ve got like the cameras and equipment rented from the school and you’re filming it in the weird woods by your old house because you always thought they looked cool and wrote a lot of stories there anyway and now you’re trying to make one of them into a reality and the makeup person might just be your friend who spends too much money at Sephora so everyone voted them to be in charge of makeup and now they’re having a nervous breakdown because they only know how to do their own makeup and they’re looking up tutorials online for blood effects and actually really pulling it off and maybe figuring out something new about themselves.

One of the biggest personal expenses turns out to be a Cricut machine for the prop department but then the fact you don’t have to worry about carpal tunnel taking out your prop and costume department does make up for it eventually. Also someone made you a custom graphic T and you stop grumbling about the budget for a while.

Chances are also probably good you made a deal with the local produce shops to take the cabbage and melons that go bad for reduced price if you’re making a movie with violence, for all the free sound effects available online, it helps to have something live on the day. And head of cabbage or a melon works good on a low budget set.

It has been like two decades since I’ve been anywhere near even a low budget TV/Film set in Canada and I think some of these might be stage tricks instead. But still. There’s so much charm to them??? And it’s why I think a lot of horror fans love low budget horror.

(Also I should note, I was like. A youth working as an extra on a couple filming projects and took independent personal acting/filmmaking classes that taught me about aspects of the industry and tricks of the trade, but I never got super deep into anything. I saw how stuff was done and did some amateur filming projects which is how I learned how to fake things, but I never learned how big budget things were made. Everything I ever learned was cheap corner cutting for people making things on grants or for the passion of arts, not… uh. Millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars. I learned small Canadian Arts Film, not Hollywood Filmmaking. They were… not all encompassing and I am not positioning myself as an expert in anything… just… running my mouth like a know-it-all honestly.)

And like. I think most of V/H/S still accomplishes a lot of it. Praise Ratma.

It’s probably just a couple like… big sensational show stopping shorts by directors who really know how to work with their budgets more than like… any kind of change to the system. And the fact that I like it when it’s kinda messy and sloppy and shows the seams and the actors aren’t super great and the premise feels a little half baked? Not… fully bad because that “actually the cult was fake and the raid was a ploy by us, the sexy lady cops who are actually… big name sexy snuff film peddlers who’ve been profiting from all the sick twisted videos you’ve been watching and we’re gonna make out while killing you” was like. Running a full sprint into a wall, like they almost made it and then they just made a really bafflingly bad decision in the final moments to like. Completely derail that train at the station and I don’t think anyone was satisfied with how that ended.

I don’t think I have the most solid of a point, really, except that a lot of films are very big and polished and expensive lately. And horror is one of those last bastions of “no budget? No problem.” Mindsets. And I kinda love it for that. And I wanna see it continued. I wouldn’t mind it catching on to other genres again because too much of everything has to look and feel and seem high quality making the barrier to entry nearly impossible to pass. But, I hope V/H/S maintains its cheapness because it’s kinda integral to keeping horror accessible. It’s good, it’s fun, it’s experimental, it creates access to new voices.

Yeah going back to the early entries some of it is like “wow that’s pretty gross” but like. There’s a reason most of those characters died horrible deaths. They were shitty garbage trash people on purpose and you were supposed to hate them so when they were brutally murdered you didn’t feel too bad about being like “ohh my got holy shit” and probably doing the mix of laughing and wincing and screaming when the rapist gets his dick literally ripped off and thrown across the room you don’t really feel that terrible about your fear response also being kinda giddy and giggly.

I am overthinking this. Idk. I love this franchise. I hope it lives in cheap gritty gross weird glory forever. Anthology Horror is such a good genre.