Halloween 2012 Day 13: V/H/S (2012)

Halloween. The best holiday? Its the one day a year when we can pretend that horror movies are real. That our, generally bleak, painful, or at best simply tedious, reality can be more than that. Maybe there's something there that is even worse out there, something that, if we could even comprehend it, would terrify us to death. Or you get drunk and dress up and thats really cool too. My version is sadder, tho.
V/H/S inhabits a world that insists its darker than we see. A horror anthology set within a framework of depravity and violence. In the frame, we meet a gang of rapists and consensual pornographers who are contracted to retrieve one tape from the house of a collector. Inside the house, they find the collector dead in front of several televisions and VCRs. As the gang watch the VHS tapes on the tv, they begin to disappear. The shorts are all generally well done:  A group of dudes try to date rape a feral vampire, a couple on a road trip uncover a secret in the desert, a Friday the 13th homage, a college student moves into a haunted apartment, and a group of guys on their way to a Halloween party stumble into an occult rite.
All the shorts and the framework are shot cinema verite and the VHS conceit allows them to introduce artifacts and glitches into the films which, while at some points feel unnecessary and tired, are usually pretty great and effective. In particular, the way the glitches obscure certain "supernatural" elements in the Friday the 13th vignette are excellent. There are definitely weak parts in the film, surprisingly enough the Ti West short, Second Honeymoon, is far and away the weakest, but overall it stands up surprisingly well. I hadn't heard of most of the directors, Ti West excluded, so I'm looking forward to looking at their material. Definitely the best horror anthology I've ever seen and a good argument for more depth being plumbed in the cinema verite style.