At some point, somebody looked at the increasingly deranged V/H/S franchise and decided what this bastard really needed was a soundtrack loud enough to wake the dead, piss off the neighbors, and rupture a few internal organs. Enter V/H/S/MIXTAPE, a gloriously unhinged collision of analog nightmares, industrial-strength noise, homicidal puppets, and the sort of creative lunacy that makes you wonder whether anybody involved passed a drug test. This time, music isn't something playing underneath the carnage. Music IS the fucking carnage. And with GWAR presiding over the festivities like the bastard offspring of MTV's Headbangers Ball and a particularly unpleasant satanic ritual, the whole enterprise feels like somebody discovered a cursed VHS tape behind a condemned Tower Records and immediately shoved it into the nearest VCR. Naturally, you keep watching. What the hell else are you going to do?
The anthology serves up four different ways to make your ears bleed, beginning with Renee Zhan's Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, which takes the supposedly innocent world of children's puppetry and drags it screaming into a nightmare. Jim Henson's Creature Shop lends its considerable talents to the madness, proving once again that anything with googly eyes becomes infinitely more disturbing when the people operating it have questionable intentions. David Moreau's Heartbeat sends a couple of YouTube urban explorers into an abandoned military facility where sonic experimentation has apparently produced something considerably worse than another insufferable influencer video. Ernest Dickerson's The Music of Mr. Sze follows a student filmmaker digging into the life of a tormented musician, tapping into that wonderful intersection of artistic obsession and the terrible shit people uncover when they refuse to leave well enough alone. Then there's RZA's Death Tone, in which a young sound engineer attempts to assemble the ultimate track using instructions left behind by her dead father. Because nothing says healthy family bonding quite like potentially unleashing supernatural hell through a mixing board.
What makes this particular exercise in audiovisual depravity so appealing is the sheer audacity of its concept. Horror has always understood that sound can fuck with your head long before something ugly crawls out of the darkness, but building an entire anthology around that relationship opens the door to some beautifully perverse possibilities. Throw in music videos from Tobias Forge and Flying Lotus, plus GWAR doing what GWAR does best—looking like radioactive genital warts from another dimension while assaulting every conceivable standard of good taste—and you've got something that feels less like a conventional movie than a late-night cable broadcast hijacked by lunatics. There's a wonderful, filthy nostalgia to the whole proposition, recalling those pre-algorithm days when discovering something genuinely strange required staying awake until 3:00 am and hoping your parents didn't wander into the living room. The appeal isn't refinement. It's excess, experimentation, practical monstrosities, and the delicious possibility that the next segment might go completely off the fucking rails.
Of course, the V/H/S franchise has never been particularly interested in behaving itself, and thank Christ for that. Anthology horror lives and dies by its willingness to take chances, even when some of those chances resemble terrible decisions made after several drinks and absolutely no adult supervision. V/H/S/MIXTAPE isn't subtle, sophisticated, or remotely interested in winning over the arthouse crowd, and that's precisely why the damn thing works. It's a filthy, ferocious middle finger to sanitized horror, a reminder that the genre is at its best when filmmakers are allowed to get weird, get loud, and occasionally get downright fucking irresponsible. Not every nightmare needs to make sense, and not every experiment needs to work. Sometimes you just want somebody to crank the volume, rip the speakers out of the wall, and throw a bucket of blood at the audience. This is horror with its pants down, its middle finger up, and absolutely no intention of apologizing. Play it loud, you magnificent sick bastards.
V/H/S/MIXTAPE streams exclusively on Shudder beginning Friday, October 9.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA.
Runtime: 98 mins
Director: Ernest Dickerson; Flying Lotus; Tobias Forge
Writer: Renee Zhan; Zoe Cooper; David Moreau
Cast: Josh Willis; Christopher Romero Sosa; Barbara Crampton
Genre: Horror
Tagline: Low Fidelity. High Body Count
Memorable Movie Quote: "It's time to sing the song."
Distributor: Shudder
Official Site: https://watch.shudder.com/interstitial/1014978
Release Date: October 9, 2026
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: It presents a new anthology in which music and sound become a source of terror.
