V/H/S/Mixtape (2026) — spoiler review. My rating: ★★½/5. A collection of cursed recordings, murderous puppets, sonic experiments and musical detours, with some interesting ideas and rather too much noise.
The trouble with a tape labelled ‘surprise’
I used to like the fact that a VHS tape could arrive with almost no explanation. A handwritten label, a slightly battered sleeve, something recorded off television and the distinct possibility that somebody had taped over the ending. Mixtapes worked in much the same way. You trusted whoever assembled them, then discovered whether they had good taste or simply a great deal of enthusiasm.
That unpredictability has always been what brings me back to the V/H/S films. They’re effectively a place for filmmakers to try the sort of ideas that might never survive as full-length features. Every new instalment is a gamble: occasionally something genuinely nasty and imaginative, occasionally a dreadful little experiment, and sometimes both in the same hour. I don’t mind that. The anthology structure means you’re not committing to one story for an entire evening, and if one segment doesn’t work, another is usually along shortly.
V/H/S/Mixtape (2026) takes that understanding and adds a musical theme. Rather than the horror being something you discover on a forgotten recording, sound itself becomes the threat. In theory that is a particularly good fit. Music can make a scene unsettling long before anything appears on screen. Unfortunately, by the end of this instalment I was wondering whether I had watched a horror anthology, a collection of very strange music videos or an extended test of how much noise I could tolerate. It certainly surprised me. Enjoying those surprises was another matter.
The franchise finds another format to abuse
This is the ninth main instalment of V/H/S, following the franchise’s experiments with specific decades, science fiction and Halloween. Released on Shudder in October 2026, Mixtape is built around four substantial horror stories, two shorter music-video interludes and a framing device featuring the American shock-metal band GWAR. The filmmakers include Ernest Dickerson, David Moreau, Renee Zhan, RZA, Flying Lotus and Tobias Forge, an unusually eclectic selection of directors and musicians.
There’s a certain logic to bringing musicians into a film about sound. RZA comes with his background in the Wu-Tang Clan, Flying Lotus with experimental electronic music and filmmaking, and Forge with Ghost and his earlier death-metal work. Dickerson has a long cinematic history, including his cinematography for Spike Lee and his own horror films. What the collection lacks isn’t talent. It’s a sense that somebody listened to the finished tracks together and asked whether they made a particularly satisfying album.
The low-fidelity packaging and VHS aesthetic still do a fair amount of nostalgic work. I remember tapes being part of daily life rather than collector’s objects: recording television, borrowing films, making copies and hoping the tracking didn’t ruin the good bits. The physical imperfections suggested another story around the recording, which was crucial to the early films. Here, that idea is increasingly treated as branding rather than a rule.
GWAR takes over music television
GWAR hosts the wraparound as a grotesque approximation of an old music-video programme. There are outrageous costumes, deliberate bad taste and the sort of jokes that make clear almost immediately who the intended audience is. The group has never confused restraint with entertainment, so the material is entirely consistent with what they do on stage.
I understand the impulse to recreate the old experience of accidentally catching something baffling on late-night music television. During the era when music videos still had to compete for attention, directors sometimes slipped very strange visual ideas into a medium that welcomed experimentation. But a sequence that works as a brief novelty between songs isn’t automatically a good framework for a horror film. I quickly found the GWAR skits more irritating than funny, and rather than connect the stories they repeatedly interrupted them.
Perhaps that’s an unfair complaint to level against a band whose whole business is excess. It may also be the point. All I know is that I started looking forward to the segments precisely because they meant GWAR would stop talking for a while.
Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance: never meet your childhood puppets
Renee Zhan’s Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance begins with a studio’s plan to resurrect a cancelled children’s programme, The Curious Chorus. Barbara Crampton plays Vanessa, a television executive overseeing the revival. Sam (Christopher Romero Sosa) films the visit and Chris (Zach Jobe) is there to help turn the old physical puppets into digital versions. George (Josh Willis), a former child performer associated with the programme, has guarded the originals for years and isn’t especially welcoming.
The puppets have other ideas about being retired. Their seemingly harmless world rapidly turns into an exceptionally bloody revenge story, accompanied by a relentlessly cheerful song. It’s the contrast that sells the premise: soft, brightly coloured characters performing acts that belong nowhere near children’s television. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop provided the puppet work, and you can see the value of objects with real texture and weight. Their expressions seem alive in ways a digital replacement might have struggled to reproduce.
The satire is easy enough to recognise. Entertainment companies don’t merely bring back old programmes; they strip them for familiar elements, replace the awkward handmade bits with cheaper contemporary equivalents and hope nostalgia does the selling. These puppets have an unusually firm view on creative ownership. The problem is that once they demonstrate their capabilities, there isn’t much further to go. The practical effects are memorable, the joke lands, and the story spends the remainder of its time repeating the joke with increasing quantities of blood. It’s one of the more entertaining offerings, though hardly the deepest.
Another Cabin: a brief interruption from another dimension
Flying Lotus contributes Another Cabin, a short stop-motion nightmare involving a boy, his grandmother, an isolated home and a terrible creature from the woods. The animation is attractively strange, and the monster’s appearance has the quality of something made in the back room of a particularly inventive practical-effects workshop.
It reminded me of those obscure animated music videos you occasionally caught without context during the 1980s and 1990s. You’d sit through a peculiar couple of minutes and then the channel would carry on as though nothing had happened. That’s an enjoyable kind of disorientation, but it isn’t quite the same as telling a story. Another Cabin feels more like an experimental interlude than a piece of found footage. I was happy enough to watch it; I just couldn’t think of much reason for it to be inside a V/H/S film beyond the film’s desire to be different.
Heartbeat: the dreadful sound of being alive
David Moreau’s Heartbeat has the anthology’s most immediately unsettling concept. Maya (Julie Clergerie) and Wes (Elie Kaempfen) are urban explorers documenting an abandoned military facility. Predictably, they enter the one room they should leave alone: an anechoic chamber designed to suppress echoes and reflections. The door traps them inside, and the absence of ordinary background sound makes the noises of their own bodies impossible to ignore.
Breathing and heartbeats become intrusive, followed by the dreadful awareness of how much a human body does without asking permission. What would ordinarily be an imperceptible internal soundtrack becomes oppressive. The film exaggerates the consequences of such a chamber, but I don’t particularly mind when a horror film takes a plausible idea and pushes it into nightmare territory. This one needs very little explanation before it starts to get under the skin.
Unfortunately, as the couple deteriorate, the premise becomes less interesting than the punishment. Wes grows increasingly desperate to escape the noises inside his head, while Maya’s pregnancy adds an especially cruel element to the segment’s closing revelation. It’s uncomfortable and sometimes effective, particularly through the sound design and the geometric panels of the room, but I finished wishing the writers had done more with the psychological side of the idea. The setup deserved something beyond a prolonged escalation of misery.
The Music of Mr. Sze: something is listening upstairs
Ernest Dickerson’s The Music of Mr. Sze follows Philip Howard (Jihad Brent), a student filmmaker assembling a documentary about his neighbours. He becomes fascinated by music coming from the apartment of a reclusive violinist, Mr Sze (Alex Hsu). The camera-equipped glasses Philip uses are a neat contemporary variation on found footage, allowing the film to maintain a recorded viewpoint without pretending everybody still carries a camcorder.
The segment draws on H. P. Lovecraft’s short story The Music of Erich Zann, and the central notion is an excellent one. Mr Sze’s playing isn’t simply an artistic obsession; the music has a function, holding something from beyond ordinary reality at bay. Philip’s curiosity threatens the fragile arrangement. I like horror built around the idea that an everyday activity might secretly be protecting us from something incomprehensible.
The film has a genuinely eerie premise and some striking lighting, particularly as familiar rooms begin to look less familiar. But the performances and dialogue are uneven, and the effects-heavy revelations don’t always match the atmosphere the earlier scenes have established. I preferred not knowing exactly what Mr Sze was trying to keep out. The moment the story starts showing us more, some of the mystery leaves with it.
Premature Burial: a death-metal video in the middle of everything
Tobias Forge’s Premature Burial, built around music by his earlier band Repugnant, is another short detour, this time towards a morbid story of drugging, premature burial and revenge. Its deliberately aged imagery and medical-horror look are well suited to the song, and as a piece of metal-video filmmaking it has an appropriately disagreeable personality.
But I kept asking myself whether the distinction between a horror music video and a horror story had been considered. A music video can get away with atmosphere, montage and spectacle because the track does much of the work. The same images, inserted between narrative shorts, feel less substantial. Nothing about Premature Burial particularly offended me, but it underlined the anthology’s refusal to settle on what sort of experience it wanted to offer.
Death Tone: the perfect recording, at any cost
RZA’s Death Tone closes the substantial stories and comes closest to making recording itself the horror. Neela Jolene plays Lydia, a young sound engineer following instructions left by her deceased producer father. She believes he has supplied the secret to an extraordinary composition, one that requires sounds no ordinary instrument can produce. Her search for the perfect track becomes a series of deeply unpleasant recording sessions built around human suffering.
There’s an obvious, grim joke here about artistic perfectionism. Anyone who has worked on a creative project knows the temptation to make just one more alteration, adjust one more detail, export one more version. Usually a deadline or a client eventually puts a stop to it. Lydia has neither a healthy sense of perspective nor anything resembling professional boundaries. Her victims become sources of sound, useful only for what she can extract from them.
Detective Sharpe (Understanding Diggs) begins investigating the disappearances, but Lydia is far more concerned with finishing the work her father left her. The ending takes her obsession to its logical extreme as she incorporates her own final moments into the composition. Does the finished piece actually transcend anything? The film leaves that doubtful, which is probably the right choice. A person can sacrifice everything to create something extraordinary without anybody else being obliged to hear it that way.
I liked the studio setting and the use of familiar recording equipment as sinister props. Jolene gives Lydia an intensity that makes the descent believable enough within the segment’s outlandish world. But once the pattern is established, it also becomes repetitive. Another unpleasant recording, another escalation, another reminder that our protagonist is beyond rescue. I admired the underlying concept rather more than the experience of sitting through it.
Is this a horror musical, exactly?
I’m still not sure a horror musical is the correct description. Characters don’t routinely sing their feelings, and the stories don’t unfold according to the logic of a conventional musical. It’s a horror anthology about music and sound that sometimes stops to show actual music videos. That sounds pedantic, perhaps, but the distinction helps explain why I found the film so uneven.
Heartbeat uses the absence of background sound as a threat. The Music of Mr. Sze turns melody into protection. Death Tone transforms recording into a means of doing harm. Those three ideas are substantial enough to build stories around. The rest of the production occasionally mistakes volume and visual excess for something more profound. Being startled by a noise, assaulted by one or genuinely frightened by what it suggests are different sensations.
The better V/H/S shorts leave an idea rattling around in my head afterwards. I’ll be going about an ordinary afternoon and suddenly remember some small detail from a segment, and the atmosphere returns. Mixtape gave me several memorable images but very little that lingered in that way.
When the tape becomes just a logo
The other thing that bothered me is how elastic the found-footage concept has become. The original films’ worn recordings and unstable cameras did more than create an aesthetic: they gave us a reason to believe the events had been captured accidentally and discovered by someone who didn’t fully understand them. The damage on the tape was part of the storytelling.
Of course there are now wearable cameras, phones, security systems and endless forms of digital video. I don’t expect every film to remain stuck in 1987. But when music videos and carefully staged animation sit beside supposedly recovered recordings, the format starts to lose its narrative purpose. The anthology could almost be called anything, provided its logo looks enough like a battered cassette label.
Perhaps this is just me being a slightly stubborn analogue-media holdout. I’ve lived long enough to remember tapes as ordinary, troublesome objects rather than collectors’ curiosities, so the physical conceit matters to me. It also gave the early entries an identity beyond being collections of short horror films.
A mixtape with too many tracks
There’s certainly material here that I appreciated. The puppet work is excellent, Heartbeat starts from a strong idea, and The Music of Mr. Sze at least tries to build an old-fashioned mystery before revealing the cosmic threat. I respect the willingness to experiment, particularly nine films into a franchise that could easily settle for repeating itself.
But the GWAR sequences wore out their welcome, the interludes kept interrupting the rhythm, and several stories appeared content with one striking premise and a lot of punishment. The result was more exhausting than frightening, which is a curious achievement for a series built around the pleasure of being surprised.
I still don’t want V/H/S to become sensible. Sensible is probably the last thing this franchise needs. I would rather have occasional spectacular misfires than a run of entirely safe, forgettable stories. Mixtape simply happens to be one of the instalments in which more of the experiments missed than landed, at least for me.
It’s not one of my favourites. I doubt I’ll be returning to the whole thing soon, though I might revisit a couple of individual segments. When the next collection arrives, however, I’ll probably press play again. There’s always the possibility that somebody has recorded something wonderful on the next tape. I’ll just keep the volume at a reasonable level.
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