Name: V/H/S/Mixtape Review: Music Plays Central to Shudder’s Latest Anthology Entry — Review
Rating: 5

I think I might just have to come to terms with the fact that this latest run of V/H/S movies may never reach the same highs as the franchise’s heyday. Shudder took over the anthology series in 2021 with V/H/S/94, personally my favorite entry in the entire franchise and one of my favorite horror movies of the 2020s, kicking off a mid-series renaissance that has slowly lost some steam. The year modifier attached to each installment was a clever way to recapture the grimy feeling of stumbling across some nasty midnight movie on a VHS tape, but the returns have been diminishing ever since. V/H/S/99 was serviceable, while V/H/S/85 felt like the franchise running back the same trick one too many times.

Thankfully, the series found another way to reinvent itself with 2024’s V/H/S/Beyond, which focused on cosmic and science-fiction horror, before V/H/S/Halloween leaned into the traditions of October’s favorite holiday. I genuinely appreciate Shudder’s commitment to bringing this franchise back year after year and finding new ways to approach the format, even if it’s been a while since we’ve gotten the best version of V/H/S. This time around, the series is pulling out the electric guitars, hitting the studio, and enlisting the likes of GWAR for V/H/S/Mixtape, an assortment of shorts exploring the intersection of music and horror. The results are another pretty mystifying collection of segments that occasionally make good on the central gimmick but rarely deliver the feeling of watching something genuinely new, disturbing, or inventive.

Watching this one, I found myself trying to pinpoint exactly what made V/H/S/94 work so well for me, and why I’ve struggled to connect with practically every entry since. The more recent films have moved away from the upsetting, ambient, atmospheric horror that made the series so effective in favor of something zanier and more overtly comedic. I don’t inherently object to a winking, tongue-in-cheek approach to horror, but it needs to be funny or inventive enough to justify itself. When the humor doesn’t land and the gore feels more like a collection of increasingly elaborate punchlines, I’m left wondering what else the movie has to offer. Found-footage horror is already a tricky format for making graphic violence feel genuinely disturbing, and these recent entries often seem content to turn their characters into paper-thin punching bags rather than people whose suffering might actually get under your skin.

I knew pretty quickly that Mixtape probably wasn’t going to be my thing. The opening five minutes of its GWAR-led framing narrative are full of crude, fourth-grade humor and an aggressively loud energy that did absolutely nothing for me. From there, we move into “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance,” a segment about a children’s television show gone horribly wrong for anyone who sticks their hand inside its leading puppets. It’s essentially an offshoot of Buddy, the recently released Barney-esque horror film, which I thought had considerably more to offer stretching its premise across a feature-length runtime. Here, the idea feels like a novelty that runs out of steam well before its 15-to-20-minute segment is over. There’s certainly an audience for this kind of grotesque puppet mayhem, but I wasn’t particularly interested in spending more time with it.

Things improve with David Moreau, of the quite good MadS fame, directing a more stripped-down segment about horror explorers who stumble into a terrifying soundproofed room. It’s so quiet that they can hear their own hearts beating louder and louder until the very act of existing becomes a source of dread. This isn’t exactly earth-shattering stuff, but it’s one of the better segments in the collection because it understands that horror doesn’t need to be constantly screaming at you to be effective. Moreau makes the room’s foam-covered walls and sound-absorbing spikes look genuinely creepy, while the liminal-space atmosphere does much of the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, the film hits another lull of GWAR-related antics and bargain-bin horror music videos before Ernest Dickerson’s “The Music of Mr. Zhe” gives things another jolt of life. The segment follows a kid who discovers that his apartment building is effectively a portal to hell, thanks to his upstairs neighbor. The final stretch is absolutely batshit insane, with some effective visual effects and Lovecraftian horror that piqued my interest. It’s about as far out there as Mixtape gets while still managing to get under your skin, and I wish more of the film had been willing to follow that impulse. The music connection is admittedly the least convincing part of the whole thing, with a violin melody summoning hellish entities feeling more like a way to justify its inclusion on a music-themed mixtape than an organically developed part of the story. But I’ll take an awkwardly shoehorned premise if the resulting horror is this memorable.

The film closes with “Death Tone,” RZA’s contribution about a girl grieving the death of her music-producing father by committing gruesome murders and using the resulting bone crunches, skin piercings, and victim shrieks to craft the perfect beat in his honor. It’s an acidic, violent little number that I can almost meet on its own gnarly terms, like the most sadistic version of Dexter imaginable. There’s something grimly amusing about the idea of turning murder into a tribute to a dead parent, and the segment certainly isn’t shy about splashing gallons upon gallons of blood across the screen. But once again, the premise ultimately becomes the entire story. There aren’t enough twists, developments, or new mechanics to keep things interesting beyond the sheer volume of violence on display. It’s a nasty idea that gets the point across early and then spends the rest of its runtime hammering it home.

And that’s the frustrating thing about V/H/S/Mixtape: I didn’t hate it, but it feels awfully similar to V/H/S/Halloween and the franchise’s other recent installments. The series keeps offering these eccentric, upbeat, increasingly cartoonish tracks when what I want is something that claws its way into my brain and refuses to leave. Where’s this movie’s equivalent of Raatma? Where’s the segment that leaves me thinking about someone being morbidly buried alive, or a visitation where nobody shows up during the worst thunderstorms of the season, leaving the protagonist with a sinister corpse that might actually be alive? Those are the kinds of settings and images that stick with me, the sort of scenarios that scare the absolute shit out of me precisely because they tap into something more disturbing than a succession of gruesome effects. I couldn’t find that here, and no amount of blood or electric-guitar noise could quite make up for it.

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Apparently, the next installment will tackle the SCP Foundation and involve a co-production with A24, which sounds much more up my alley. The circumstances surrounding that announcement are certainly curious, but I’ll save that conversation for another time. For now, I’m still rooting for this franchise to find its footing again. I appreciate Shudder continuing to give these filmmakers a playground to experiment in, and there are enough flashes of horror here to suggest the format still has life in it. But V/H/S/Mixtape is another middling collection that mistakes eccentricity for effectiveness a little too often. Fingers crossed that next time, the series gives us something worth losing sleep over again.