V/H/S/94 (2021)

V/H/S/94 arrives as the fourth entry in a franchise that has always understood its own limitations, which is to say it understands that audiences come for degraded videotape and screaming, and it delivers both with the solemnity of a religious observance. The frame narrative, directed by Jennifer Reeder, follows a SWAT team through a warehouse of televisions and eyeless corpses, and the four segments within it cover a sewer cult, a funeral home wake gone wrong, an Indonesian mad scientist, and a militia of white supremacists keeping a vampire in a shed. The period detail is exacting, with 1994 rendered through tracking lines and the specific grime of consumer camcorders. It is a craft exercise, and a competent one.

The politics here are incidental, which is the honest way to describe them. Several segments place women at the center of the carnage, and the film counts female directors among its roster, but nobody pauses to explain the significance. The segment Terror casts a white supremacist cell as its antagonists and lets them be devoured by the monster they kept in captivity, a gesture toward racial politics that functions as a punchline instead of a thesis. The Subject, shot in Indonesia with a largely Indonesian cast, offers the most sustained display of body horror in the collection, and its pleasures are entirely visceral. Diversity of casting exists on screen. It is not accompanied by a lecture, and the film is the better for that restraint.

The remaining categories of contemporary cultural accounting find nothing to work with here. There is no environmental sermon, no indictment of wealth, no meditation on body image, no neurodivergent protagonist, no rewriting of the historical record, and no moment where a character turns to the lens to instruct us on how to behave. Instead we get a severed head thrown from a doorway and a woman vomiting a corrosive liquid onto a news anchor. The film's ambitions are modest and its execution is workmanlike, which places it in a long tradition of horror anthologies remembered for their gore and forgotten for everything else. A tidy piece of work. Nothing more.