V H S 85 2023 Now

V/H/S/85 (2023) is not a fun haunted house ride. It’s a slow, cold crawl through a dead medium, asking uncomfortable questions: What if the past wasn’t simpler? What if it was just better at hiding its horrors? And what happens when we rewind the tape, only to find something rewinds back?

In the sprawling, grimy graveyard of modern horror franchises, the V/H/S series has always been the strange, feral cousin—the one you don’t invite to dinner but can’t stop watching through your fingers. By 2023, the series had already time-traveled through the 1990s ( V/H/S/94 ) and the 2000s ( V/H/S/99 ). But with V/H/S/85 , the anthology didn’t just revisit a decade; it dissected its rotting heart. V H S 85 2023

Where previous entries leaned into camp or nostalgia, 85 weaponizes the very limitations of its format. The year is, of course, 1985—the peak of the home camcorder boom, when families recorded birthdays and serial killers recorded basements. Director David Bruckner (returning to the franchise he helped launch with 2012’s Amateur Night ) and his cohort of filmmakers—Scott Derrickson, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Natasha Kermani, and Mike P. Nelson—treat the VHS artifact not as a gimmick but as a ghost. The tracking errors, the blown-out highlights, the haunting moment when the tape runs out and snow fills the screen: all of it becomes a language of dread. V/H/S/85 (2023) is not a fun haunted house ride

Standout segment “God of the Gaps” (Derrickson) reimagines a church youth-group retreat gone wrong, not through demonic possession, but through a technologically transmitted “miracle” that broadcasts a deity’s painful, silent scream directly into the brains of anyone near a cathode-ray tube. It’s a brilliant metaphor: in 1985, God wasn’t dead—He was trapped in the static between channels. And what happens when we rewind the tape,

★★★★½ (4.5/5) Best watched with the lights off and your hand hovering over the eject button.