Shudder’s V/H/S/85 tackles Satanic Panic, VR, and TV news in its strongest installment yet
Another Halloween season means another entry in The Pitch’s favorite anthology horror film series. Shudder brings back V/H/S with it’s sixth installment, featuring segments directed by Gigi Saul Guerrero, Scott Derrickson, David Bruckner, Mike P. Nelson, and Natasha Kermani.
V/H/S/85 takes viewers on a journey into the grim underbelly of the forgotten 1980s. Unveiled through a made-for-TV documentary, five chilling tales emerge: scientists observe an unusual boy fixated on his TV, kids embark on a lake skiing adventure, a TV crew fights to survive a natural disaster, the early days of VR awaken something terrifying, and a deadly dream is captured on tape. Sinister secrets of the 1980s come to life in a way you’ve never seen before.
The film goes some places that are wildly unexpected, and both in tone and messaging this is a meaner, more complicated anthology of stories than some of the previous entries. Elaborate ideas and construction give way to some painfully human moments, occasionally buried under a lot of bodies.
The Pitch sat down with segment directors Mike P. Nelson and Natasha Kermani to discuss what goes into to making a little piece of modern horror history. V/H/S/85 is currently streaming on Shudder.
The Pitch: How did getting to be a part of VHS come about for you? What was the what was the start process here?
Mike P. Nelson: I met [V/H/S producer] Josh Goldbloom in 2018, when I premiered my first feature. Josh and I hit it off, and we just stayed in touch. I got a Facebook message from him asking if I had time to hop on a call. We made some small talk and he let me know they were making more V/H/S movies and wanted to know if I had interest in being a part of it. Of course! I was floored because I loved the series. It was such a “pinch me” moment. The question was: “Do you have any ideas?” I had some on my computer for several years that weren’t going anywhere, and I was sure something from there would be the right match. I had a former manager who loved this one idea of mine—which wound up becoming this segment—and they’d told me to hold onto it because they thought it had something special to it. Sure enough, it was the right match for this. As soon as I pitched it to the V/H/S team, they really responded to it. It’s refreshing to have such a positive response to an idea you weren’t sure was ever going to go anywhere. Sometimes weird and strange ideas that just sit for a long time may eventually find a home. 
Natasha Kermani: Yeah, my my path wasn’t totally dissimilar. I had a great relationship with Shudder at this point. I had done one movie with them called Lucky at this point. We started thinking about the story in the context of 1985. It really started clicking and crystallizing. So we pitched that version of it to the producers, and they were like, cool. Haven’t seen that before on a VHS. I think we’re all such fans of each other. Once we knew what the lineup was of the folks on this movie, we’re like, oh, cool, we have to like really bring it. We got to do something really cool. So So yeah, that was the journey.
What sort of constraints were put up against your original ideas?
Kermani: Our concept was originally set in the future, so we were into the idea of wearable tech that eats a person from the inside out…
Death Tech: The Tech That Eats People?
Kermani: Fuck. We really messed up on the title, where were you six months ago, Brock? Anyway, it was a grounding experience, where we were going into archival videos to ground this in 1985, and discovered that it creates a beautiful dialogue with today’s world—it’s part of an open conversation with our contemporary lives. It brought the pieces to another level and the time frame anchoring made it a bit more fun, a bit less dour as a whole. Also this whole film comes with a visual toolkit, or more accurately it removes a lot from that toolkit. You panic a little that your normal box of tricks might be off limits, but that wound up being really liberating and felt pure in so many ways. It’s a return to the magic of setting up your dad’s camera and trying to make something, which feels so scary. The guardrails here are intimidating early, but wound up being a beautiful experience.
Nelson: Creatively, it really it opened the doors. To Natasha’s point, it does seem like guardrails, at first, it does like it really you think, Well, I can’t do this, I can’t usually do like my normal coverage that I would do to make sure that I’m seeing all the aspects that I want to show, you figure it out, you figure out how to make those aspects read—oftentimes with what I found were better results than when you have the control to shoot multiple angles and edit them all together. There, you discovered more, you discover different ways to create tension that you maybe weren’t willing to or didn’t know, that you could do before. It opened my eyes in a way that, well, I don’t think I’d ever intended my next film to be found footage, but now that I’ve played in the toolbox it seems tempting.
What was in that limited toolkit that you found so intriguing?
Nelson: One of the things that like really opened my eyes was like, what you can do when like a camera just holds for a second. And people enter and exit. And you’re just kind of forced to watch and what could come in at any moment. There’s something really uncertain and unnerving about that. I think whether you’re in the horror genre, or whether you’re, you could be watching a drama. And suddenly somebody leaves the frame? And it just keeps rolling. And you’re like, you’re trying to look, you’re trying to look around to see where the person is. Because normally you’re looking at somebody in the frame. And when they leave it, you’re like, I want to see what’s going on. I found that to be really, really fun—and to hear people react to that sort of filmmaking and storytelling.
Kermani: I think also the idea of letting go of perfection was important. All of the filmmakers on this on this movie, make really beautiful films, cinematic beautifully put together crafted films. But the idea of actually going the other direction and making something that’s ugly and glitchy and has moments of frames where you’re like, “I would never approve that frame. It should be made better.” You know, compositionally, whatever it is, it’s freeing yourself from that sort of the chains of perfect filmmaking—I think is a very liberating process. It was experimental and outside of our comfort zone, but I think ultimately it makes us better filmmakers across the board. And, you know, the truth is as well like in today’s world: our tools are incredible. They’re accessible, not just your cinematography tools, but the sound design tools, editing, you can really make something that is really, really pristine. So to go in the opposite direction and outside of your comfort zone, I think was a really good exercise.
What was it like to have the time and space to let things linger or play out in the way they need to, in order to maintain the illusion of found footage? How did you settle on the time it takes to tell these stories?
Nelson: When you are with a group of talented filmmakers who are putting something like this together, they’re not there to make your piece worse. They know that if you want establish something, it takes time to right. With my multiple segment thing, we had to spend a lot of time upfront to get to know these characters and to get you into a space and a time. But you know, as a viewer, that the bomb has already been placed because you’re watching a V/H/S film—you know something bad is going to happen, and you’re familiar with this territory. As is the case for all 80s horror. Kids go camping and walk past a “No Trespassing” sign and the wink-wink is there about this ending poorly. So what the V/H/S films get to do is really let things breathe, because you know there’s going to be a number of segments and a lot is going to happen, so nothing can really drag its heels. If something is going slow, it’s because it’s deliberately lulling you for the sake of the story, and everyone is on board for that. When it happens, when it hits, it’s going to happen with real brute force. But that doesn’t hit the same if you don’t have all the bits leading up to that, to ground you, and make what comes next as shocking as it is.
Kermani: It’s experimental cinema, 100%. It’s great to be patient with something and to have a team equally invested in making the choices that make this as good as it can be. Often in our experiences—and excuse my French—but a collaboration with the people making your film can wind up with the story getting finger-fucked to death. You can get notes and changes that might make it more commercial and give it more mass appeal but maybe that’s at the cost of it being less effective. It’s weird when people pretend they know what people “want” and inject that art. So overall, this was just a great opportunity to craft, and have producers that were invested in your vision making it to the screen, especially if that vision has some complicated ideas and might be more mean than most audiences are ready for. I’m grateful for that.
In terms of not being able to be a perfectionist, what’s a shot or a line delivery or something small that made it into your segment that would have never happened, had it not been for working in the constraints of a V/H/S?
Kermani: Oh, my God, the whole thing? In what other context would we be allowed to do that? We literally built a one woman show, and then taped it ,and then tore her apart on stage and had people apply I’d like thought that you can’t do that, you know?
Nelson: I have a two parter and in the first part, something goes very wrong and then you’re stuck with a camera on the ground and people screaming and you’re watching a few things happen that just… happen the way they actually would, and that’s fairly brutal. In my second segment, there’s a line that someone improvised that just cracks me up everytime I hear it and I’m amazed it’s in the final film.
V/H/S/85 is currently streaming on Shudder.
