A sequel’s existence is rarely justified beyond capitalizing on the success of its original, and because hits (outside of superheroes and beloved book series, for example) can be unexpected, their follow-ups are usually hollow ticket bait. Sequelmakers often neglect to consider what connected to so many viewers the first time around, resulting in a dogged exercise in greed. And then there are sequels like V/H/S/2, a new miscellany of horror shorts which adhere, again, to the “found-footage” schematic of last year’s V/H/S, which have no real dollar success to bank on, but instead stake their claim in broadening the scope of its central premise. At this, V/H/S/2 as a whole winds up being a marginal triumph.
Framed around a pair of private investigators who stumble upon heaps of unmarked videotapes and an abandoned laptop while searching a missing student’s desolate apartment, the content of those tapes, popcorn-directed by the helmers of You’re Next, The Raid: Redemption, The Blair Witch Project and Hobo With a Shotgun, might give an insight to what happened to the kid, but mostly they just illustrate the ingenuity of the “found-footage” technique as well as its restrictions.
As the past fifteen years have proved, the “found-footage” conceit can be severely limiting as its leading source of creativity is finding new ways to account for an always-rolling camera so as not to breach realism long enough to defy scares. Sometimes the imagination reaches its apex while solving that very problem, as in Adam Wingard’s opening segment “Clinical Trials”, in which the camera is installed directly into a man’s damaged eye socket as part of some trial run for new hospital technology, or in the fourth and final short, Jason Eisener’s fun “Slumber Party Alien Abduction”, in which the camera is attached to the head of a scampering terrier.
Once the cameras are mounted and the audience’s suspension of disbelief is accounted for, the vignettes in V/H/S/2 largely turn into fairly standard riffs on horror baddie staples (Wingard gets ghosts, Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale try zombies, Eisener does aliens, etc.). What’s most dispiriting is just how standard the lesser segments are. Not counting the framework story, Wingard’s opening segment plants a particularly dour seed. It’s not just the least frightful, but also, save for its inspired camera rationalization, the most ineptly made.
From its inexcusable Acting 101 performances to its county-fair face-paint makeup jobs, it even possesses a blind spot in how to dish out shock or even gore (the squirmy moment the whole short is building toward doesn’t even happen on screen). “Jump scares” are a lamentable horror trope, and they only seem to exist in films devoid of any other type of scare tactic. But leaning on them within a found-footage construct is bottom-barrel laziness, not to mention total nonsense. Every viewer knows those harsh BLAM!s that coincide with the appearance of a ghoulish figure aren’t elementally organic, and instead comes from a synthesizer in a booth which Wingard makes no attempt to hawk them as anything but. Eisener employs the jump scare too, but he cheats it well, by attributing a sporadic thunderous techno-roar to the alien spacecraft its slinky extra-terrestrials rode in on.
Sánchez and Hale’s zombie romp “A Ride in the Park” is a welcome change of pace from Wingard’s nugatory nonsense. Its daytime setting and sprinkles of humor begin to wane the hitherto vapidity, but it’s the short that follows that slingshots V/H/S/2 to can’t-miss territory.
All hail “Safe Haven”, the omnibus’s longest, best and bloodiest mess. With it, directors Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption) and Timo Tjahjanto (The ABCs of Death) push not only the boundaries of “found-footage” horror, but that of the entire genre. Here is a concept that harkens back to the format’s ground zero, The Blair Witch Project, in which a small film crew faces unspeakable dangers while documenting an ominous subject, this time a religious death cult in Indonesia. The major difference here being the execution gets a substantial upgrade. Evans and Tjahjanto mount an arsenal of cameras cleverly enough that it often makes it easy to forget this footage is “found” and they only employ the tottering first-person perspective when necessary. It’s solid evidence that “found-footage” doesn’t need to be synonymous with “shaky-cam vomit factory”.
Another tired effect relied on far too heavily in the other segments is a false video static that for some ungoldy reason is only implemented over the action, which doesn’t adhere to authenticity so much as obscure the money shots. This is another instance in which “Safe Haven” stands high above; if anything the picture becomes even sharper when flaunting its most gruesome and gag-inducing carnage. It is unflinchingly graphic, made all the more shocking by some astonishingly seamless special effects, and for resolving to base its evil (for a while, at least) in reality. Epy Kusnandar’s cult leader, credited merely as The Father, is goosebump material even before all literal hell breaks loose, and that the members of the film crew are so well fleshed out and earning of our sympathies makes “Safe Haven” all the more disturbing when it does.
Horror is the genre with the most room for innovation, which means it also carries with it the vastest potential for disappointment. Widely-released horror tends to be as formulaic as insipid romantic comedies. So few chances are being taken in a genre that is designed to burrow to our very core and shake up our consciousness. Collectives like this grant its assembled team of bellowing voices in the genre a chance to experiment with form and shatter conventions. While an extended “Safe Haven” would easily make for a riveting feature, it’s more at home in this box-set package than out on its own.
Best known for his martial-arts films The Raid: Redemption and Merantau, which attracted attention for their graceful, balletic ultra-violence, Evans is by no means a seasoned horror director. But in this – hopefully continuing – V/H/S series, he’s given a gory expanse in which to play, and winds up having the tautest grip on the genre. His and co-director Tjahjanto’s names aren’t even in the first fifty that come to mind when talking horror, but here they are reminding a chunk of those fifty how it’s done.
We could do with more experiments like this.
Tape 49 (Directed by Simon Barrett): C-
Clinical Trials (Directed by Adam Wingard): D-
A Ride in the Park (Directed by Eduardo Sánchez & Gregg Hale): C+
Safe Haven (Directed by Gareth Huw Evans & Timo Tjahjanto): A-
Alien Abduction Slumber Party (Directed by Jason Eisener): B-
