GWAR is hosting. The wraparound of V/H/S/MIXTAPE is staged as an MTV-style show broadcast from hell, and the trailer Shudder put out Thursday is the first footage of it anyone outside the production has seen. The ninth found-footage anthology world premieres at Beyond Fest on Wednesday, September 30, and reaches Shudder October 9.
Sound is the organizing idea. Every segment runs on music, rhythm or audio as the thing doing the damage, and the finished film runs 98 minutes. Zoe Cooper, David Moreau, Ernest Dickerson, RZA and Matt Landsman share the screenplay credit.
Beyond Fest Gets It Nine Days Early
The premiere is at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, 7 p.m., with a filmmaker and cast Q&A attached. The Los Angeles festival ran V/H/S/Halloween last year too, and the release shape has hardened into a habit: a genre-crowd premiere in the last days of September, a Shudder date inside the first half of October, and the rest of the month to sit in. Shudder has put a V/H/S on the service every October since 2021. Nine days is a short runway for word of mouth, and it is the runway this series has been built to run on.
Tobias Forge Has Never Directed Anything
The Ghost frontman takes one of the music video interludes, and it is his first credit behind a camera. Flying Lotus handles the others, and he is the returning player: he directed “Ozzy’s Dungeon” for V/H/S/99 in 2022, one of the meanest things the franchise has ever run, and scored it himself. Renee Zhan’s segment puts puppets from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in front of the lens, which is the sort of sentence that only makes sense in this series.
A Better Idea Than a Year
Three entries in this run were named after years and sold the nostalgia of the format itself. Beyond traded that for aliens and Halloween for a holiday. Sound is the strongest premise of the three, because audio is the one thing a found-footage camera cannot point away from: you can drop the camera, you can cover the lens, and the tape keeps recording. The open question is whether four directors working the same idea find four different horrors in it, or the same one four times. The first poster did not answer that and this trailer only starts to.
