Watch A Terrifying New Trailer For V/H/S 94
The letters "SOV" have come to stand for a great many things over the years: "Single Occupancy Vehicle," "Share of Voice," "Shut Off Valve," but for anyone who spent their formative movie-watching years standing in the video store and trying to decide which of schlocky horror movies they're going to try those letters can only mean one thing — "Shot on Video."
Hard to believe, but before streaming and even before the advent of chain video stores like Blockbuster or West Coast Video, most mom and pop video shops only had a very limited supply of the big budget movies available to watch on VHS. That problem had a very lucrative solution in the form of low (and sometimes no) budget horror shot on videocassettes. Rental places were stacked with films like this and it became the obsession of horror hounds everywhere to pour over every tape in search of the diamonds in the rough.
Beginning in 2012, there's been an anthology horror film series dedicated to that love of tape-hunting called "V/H/S." Three movies were released between 2012 and 2014 each with roughly the same content — mysterious VHS tapes with cursed, horrific content are discovered, slowly bringing the viewer(s) to their proverbial knees.
It's been a few years since the last film in the franchise, but today we finally got our first full trailer for the next ode to the classic format — "V/H/S/94."
A connected anthology story that is not for the whole family
As you might guess, "V/H/S/94" is set in the year 1994 — which is a pretty good year to set a series of horror stories. Not only was it the year Wes Craven gave us his final Freddy Krueger film "New Nightmare," but John Carpenter gave us the mind-bending "In the Mouth of Madness." 1994 was also a year serial killer John Wayne Gacy was put to death, and the year Nancy Kerrigan was assaulted by the then-boyfriend of Tonya Harding over Olympic figure skating, and it's the year that began the O.J. Simpson murder trial. In short — there's plenty of real-life and fictional things to pull from that year if you're making an anthology horror movie.
The latest "V/H/S/" is technically a reboot for the franchise, and there's something else that sets it apart from the previous films: all the stories will connect to a central plot in a way that is more than incidental. The wrap story seems to be about a police raid entering a building only to find a near-endless supply of corpses — and a bunch of VHS tapes, of course.
There are 5 stories in all and they will be told by people involved with previous horror films like "Ready or Not," "The Night House," and "You're Next." The film's trailer seems to promise monsters, zombies, body horror galore, and a little QVC shopping for flavor. "V/H/S/94" debuts at Fantastic Fest on September 26 and will be streaming on Shudder beginning October 6.