V/H/S/85 (2023)
Directors: David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Natasha Kermani, Mike P. Nelson, & Gigi Saul Guerrero
Writers: C. Robert Cargill, Scott Derrickson, Zoe Cooper, Mike P. Nelson, Evan Dickson, & Gigi Saul Guerrero
Starring Freddy Rodriguez, Kelli Garner, James Ransone, Jordan Belfi, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Chelsey Grant, Shelby Steel, Justen Jones, Chivonne Michelle, & Dashiell Derrickson.

Horror

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)
I’ve long loved the V/H/S franchise, even the instalments that most seemed to loathe (2014’s V/H/S: Viral), because it, more often than not, features some of the creepiest, most inventive found footage that’s ever been created; a much needed franchise when so much of the other found footage released year after year just attempts to poorly recreate the sub-genre’s most popular entires (namely The Blair Witch Project). V/H/S/85 is another solid entry into the franchise, taking on a shapeshifting entity that adores TV, a cult of everyday murderers, a one-woman show about the new religion of technology that goes way off the rails, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and a series of strange murders recorded by a serial killer.

While V/H/S/85 isn’t my personal favourite of the franchise it remains one of the creepier in the film series for the way it digs into 1980s North American media and pop culture, along with the overall zeitgeist of America specifically during the ’80s. Nearly every segment in the film, regardless of its end result and quality, touches on some fear that people were feeling during the 1980s, and all of those fears somehow involve an increasing presence of technology in our everyday lives that was becoming more obvious throughout the decade.
The most clearly at-home segment in V/H/S/85 is Gigi Saul Guerrero’s “God of Death” simply for the fact that it actually takes places during 1985, depicting an alternate idea of what occurred during the ’85 Mexico City earthquake. Guerrero uses Aztec mythology in conjunction with the Mexico City quake, after disruptions in the earth apparently disrupt the slumber of an ancient god, Mictlāntēcutli—an Aztec god of the dead, king of Mictlan, the lowest, northernmost section of the Aztec underworld. And what happens next, after Mictlāntēcutli reemerges, draws on the god’s mythology: it was common to give worship to him by engaging in ritual cannibalism; some proper heart eating follows. Guerrero’s segment fits perfectly because it brings together Aztec mythology, the Mexico City quake, and the proliferation of TV/news media in North America during the 1980s, not to mention the news fascination with covering disasters and other gruesomeness. The 1980s is when, fiction or otherwise, death became the most popular form of entertainment for the first time since public executions.

One of the most unique segments in V/H/S/85 is “TKNOGD” which is director Natasha Kermani and writer Zoe Cooper’s vision of how the body and technological advancement were beginning to merge in new, strange, and awful ways. A performance artist named Ada Lovelace (Chivonne Michelle) goes from expounding upon her 1980s pre-Matrix philosophies to becoming a casualty of technology’s reach into our humanity. At first we see some great tongue-in-cheek stuff like “eye phones” which is effectively taking the piss out of Apple Vision Pro and playing off the phonetics of the word iPhone. Ada’s whole shtick is Friedrich Nietzsche crossed with 1992’s The Lawnmower Man: “God is dead . . . We have killed God ourselves” and now we exist in “the black mirror of our digital creation.” The segment inevitably turns horrific when Ada’s performance descends from philosophy into reality, and her death is perceived by the audience as part of the act, illustrating how, even in the 1980s, people were losing a distinction between media and real life. “TKNOGD” is the smartest segment in V/H/S/85., tied only with the overarching Total Copy segment.
While I felt that Scott Derrickson’s “Dreamkill” segment was ultimately a letdown, particularly because it breaks the found footage conventions (and normally, who cares, but in a found footage anthology? c’mon now!), even if it does so in cool fashion with a wonderful Throbbing Gristle needle drop, part of the segment carries interesting themes about brutal, violent legacies passed down by men/fathers/cops. The dream tapes feel like a wasted or not well-executed idea here because there could’ve been so much more done with it ultimately. Although most of “Dreamkill” is Derrickson retreading the found footage territory he previously tread better in Sinister, the segment manages to tell a compelling, dark story that culminates with a son cauterising his cop father’s legacy by way of a bullet.

“We care about us, but existence itself doesn’t.
And we treat other intelligent life horribly.
Why shouldn’t we expect the same
if it gets the upper hand?”

Tied for best V/H/S/85 segment is the overarching narrative featuring a strange being known as Rory, contained in segments about a TV show called Total Copy; the program has an Unsolved Mysteries feel crossed with a regular investigative TV show. Rory was “a mimic” according to the scientists studying him, which we start to see gradually as he begins to transform himself to resemble those around him. This leads into a cinematic examination of how 1980s America was consumed with paranoia and worry over how media was affecting people, particularly young people; it didn’t stop in the 80s, but that’s really when it began. The whole Total Copy segment is a perfect exploration of how American pop culture eclipses, or has become, American culture itself, or at least in the eyes of the academics and the scientific minds. Rory almost becomes like America’s self-fulfilling prophecy, as we see him in the last shots using human bodies to recreate all the different things he’s seen on TV, such as a Jane Fonda-like workout video. He’s the end result of all those American (and generally Western) fears about how media affects the minds of the country’s youth, envisioned in an incredibly unique way.

Even little bits and pieces throughout V/H/S/85—such as a quick flash of a familiar PSA like “It‘s 10pm, do you know where your children are?,” which began in the late 1960s but continued through until the late 1980s—stand to communicate something about/from the 1980s American zeitgeist. The segment titled “Ambrosia” does fun stuff with resurrection, yet its best quality comes from how it feels like a nod to the influence of cults that was at its peak around 1985 in America; the murderous family who practice everything from killing with a sickle to murder by “arsenic brownies” sit in 1985, wedged between Jim Jones (1978), the Rajneeshees (1984), David Koresh and the Branch Davidians (1993), and Heaven’s Gate (1997), among other cults operating in America from the late 1970s to the mid-to-late 1990s. Everything from V/H/S/85 does an excellent job to recreate a general atmosphere of so much that was unsettling about the 1980s in North America. By the end of this anthology, you’ll be glad to be back in the 21st century. At least for a moment. Until you realise that, by and large, things have only gotten more terrifying across the world in 2024, and that’s not just confined to America’s borders.