Our V/H/S/Mixtape review starts with a confession: by the halfway mark, Arthur’s jaw was basically resting on his knees. We got an early look at the ninth film in the V/H/S franchise, and it is completely unhinged in the best possible way.
This one is built around sound, music, and heavy metal; it streams on Shudder starting October 9, 2026, and we gave it 7.5 out of 10 Digs. Every time we thought we had a handle on it, the next tape came on, and we were back to staring at the screen going, “What is happening?“
This one is just batshit crazy.
If you are the kind of V/H/S fan who lives for the cuckoo-bananas segments, you are going to have a very good night.
What Is V/H/S/Mixtape About?
The early V/H/S movies did not stick to a theme. That changed after the yearly run of V/H/S/94, V/H/S/99, and V/H/S/85.
Since then, every entry has had a hook: V/H/S/Beyond went sci-fi (Arthur is a sucker for sci-fi horror, so he loved basically all of it) and V/H/S/Halloween went full spooky season. V/H/S/Mixtape turns to sound. Audio, music, and noise are where the horror lives, or they become the weapon itself.
The general vibe is heavy metal, even if you get little bits of other styles along the way. A couple of segments lean hard into sound design, the actual noise you hear, and those hit us hardest. Arthur said it reminded him (very slightly) of Undertone.
The wraparound is a deranged take on a 90s MTV-style music show, specifically metal-focused, and it is hosted by GWAR. Meaghan had not seen GWAR since Empire Records, a movie a friend showed her in high school and one she still quotes on a regular basis.
In that film, Mark eats a pile of brownies, gets very high, and watches GWAR climb out of a music video to talk to him before a monster eats him. So yes, she knew exactly who they were.
Here, GWAR keeps popping VHS tapes into the machine, and that is how each segment gets introduced. The first five minutes threw Meaghan off completely. The band is being gross with each other, and you sit there wondering what the rest of the movie could look like. It sets the tone, though.
It really did, because some of those segments are pretty out there. Weird, let’s put it that way.
Quick tip from experience: do not eat dinner while you watch the opening. We did. It was a mistake.
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V/H/S/Mixtape Segments Reviewed
There are four full segments plus two short interludes. Here is how each one landed for us (light spoilers, nothing that ruins the big turns).
Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance (Renee Zhan)
The first tape is a puppet show, and it is hilarious. Directed by Renee Zhan and co-written with Zoe Cooper, it follows a studio crew heading to a warehouse that still holds the puppets from a defunct children’s show. The plan is to scan them into 3D for a digital reboot. Barbara Crampton plays the studio exec, her son tags along to film a behind-the-scenes documentary, and an assistant handles the scanning. The guy who looks after the warehouse is weird. Immediately weird.
The puppets come from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, and you can tell the second you see them; they look like they belong with the Muppets, just funnier and a lot more deranged. One is named Botulism. Another is Riptide. There is also a mosquito. Pretty quickly, the crew realizes the puppets might not be puppets so much as murderous entities, and every other puppet in that storage space comes to life too.
It was kind of a children’s show, except the puppets kill you.
It got a lot gorier than we expected. The “Dance Dance” song is a total earworm that genuinely sounds like it came from a kids’ show, and keep your eyes peeled in the warehouse for a fun cameo nodding to the candy segment from V/H/S/Halloween.
Between this and Buddy, Meaghan wondered if we are all aching for nostalgic children’s TV that has been made seriously messed up. It is campy, but it works. We have nothing bad to say about it.
Heartbeat (David Moreau)
Heartbeat is written and directed by David Moreau, the filmmaker behind MadS. If you have not seen that one, it covers the first hours of a zombie outbreak, all in one take, and we both think it is fantastic.
Here, a couple of urban explorers with a YouTube channel get a tip from a viewer about an abandoned military facility somewhere near the border of Belarus (everything inside is in Russian). It is completely off-grid. They show up loaded with gear, including a generator to power the electric doors, and that preparation does not serve them well.
Inside, they find an anechoic chamber: a room lined with those triangular foam cones on every wall, floor, and ceiling, so nothing bounces back. It is total silence. The only thing you can hear is your own body. Your heartbeat, your stomach, your blood pumping. Arthur pointed out that people are told not to stay in rooms like this for more than fifteen or twenty minutes because it starts messing with your head. These two get stuck inside.
Things devolve. That is all we will say. The performances are great, and the idea behind it is terrifying exactly because it is so simple: isolation, plus the sounds of your own body slowly driving you mad. There is also a twist we will not spoil.
It was not going where I thought it was going to go.
Another Cabin (Flying Lotus)
The first interlude is a short stop-motion piece from Flying Lotus, the composer and DJ (we also caught him acting in Night Patrol this year). A young boy and his super abusive grandmother are stuck in a cabin while a giant monster in the woods attacks. It takes the shape of whoever it eats; it is about 30 feet tall, and it eats you with its tongue. The stop-motion looks great. It is creepy.
The Music of Mr. Sze (Ernest Dickerson)
Ernest Dickerson wrote and directed this one. He is a longtime Spike Lee collaborator (Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X), and he also directed Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight. A film student moves into the creepiest boarding house we have ever seen, a strange mix of dilapidated and freshly painted, and decides to document his everyday life. He shoots on a handheld camcorder and smart glasses that record video.
One night he hears Mr. Sze, the older man living in the attic, playing a piece on the violin, and he becomes instantly obsessed. When Mr. Sze realizes which piece the student means, he tells him to never mention it again and to move to another floor. The student does not listen. Meanwhile, Mr. Sze’s hair keeps shifting from black to gray, and his hair and beard grow longer every time that music comes up.
We cannot say much about what happens in the attic without spoiling the entire thing. Let’s just say it involves a cosmic entity, and if you like Lovecraft, this is your segment. It was the one we most wished was longer.
You could have almost made this into a full-length film. There was a lot going on in a very short period of time.
Premature Burial (Tobias Forge)
The second interlude is literally a metal music video, directed by Tobias Forge, lead singer of the Swedish masked metal band Ghost (a little 80s metal, a little modern). A woman abused by a man pulls a Romeo and Juliet on him, drugging him so he seems dead and getting him buried alive. Messed up, pretty cool, and it fits right into the “sure, now we’re in a music video” energy of the whole film.
Death Tone (RZA)
Yes, that RZA, from the Wu-Tang Clan. He directed Death Tone and co-wrote it with Matt Landsman, and it felt like the longest segment, almost a full feature.
A young woman’s father, a successful music producer, has passed away. He left her a tape with his steps for producing the perfect sound and the perfect song. The steps are vague (you need a baseline, you need rhythm), and the whole segment is about interpretation. She takes his advice in the craziest direction possible.
You could be using instruments, or you could be killing people to get your sounds.
We will not detail what she does to other people (and to herself) to get that sound. It is dark the whole way through, a real descent into madness, and you finally hear the finished song at the end. Arthur thought that context completely changes how you hear it. Neela Jolene, who plays the lead, is incredible; she carries the entire thing, and her madness is fully on display without ever feeling unbelievable.
Is V/H/S/Mixtape Scary? Our Scare Level and Digs Score
On our fear factor scale, we landed on creep me out. It was not terrifying, and there were not enough jump scares to push it there, but it is deeply creepy. On scare level, we settled on solid scares. Arthur pushed hard for nightmare fuel, and he has a case: Heartbeat is messed up, and that saw in the puppet segment is something else. Meaghan held firm at solid scares, and that is where it stays.
It wasn’t terrifying. It was just creepy.
Arthur gave it an easy 8 out of 10 Digs. It is the kind of movie he would put on for friends just to watch their reactions. Meaghan landed at 7 out of 10; she loved a couple of segments and the overall vibe, but found it a bit less cohesive than some other installments, with a few weird choices she was not sure she loved. That makes our final score 7.5 out of 10 Digs.
Our Favorite V/H/S/Mixtape Segments
V/H/S/Mixtape (2026)
Directed by David Moreau & Renee Zhan & RZA · 98 min · NR
V/H/S/Mixtape is the ninth V/H/S film, and this time the horror lives in sound. GWAR host a deranged, metal-soaked MTV show from hell, popping in tapes full of killer Henson puppets, an anechoic chamber that turns your own heartbeat against you, a cursed violin piece with cosmic baggage and RZA's Death Tone, where one woman will do anything (and we mean anything) to record the perfect song.
Picking favorites from an anthology is like being asked to name your favorite horror movie. Arthur has a list of 100. We still ended up with the same two picks.
Arthur would choose Death Tone every single time, for how involved and gnarly it gets. His second pick was a fight between Mr. Sze and the puppets, but he went with Heartbeat for how psychologically heavy it is without ever getting that crazy.
Meaghan put Heartbeat at number one for the tension. She is now convinced she will like everything David Moreau makes. Death Tone is the one she knows she will remember long after future V/H/S films come out.
Every V/H/S has at least one segment that sticks: the candy one in V/H/S/Halloween, the two connected Mike P. Nelson segments in V/H/S/85, and Kate Siegel’s alien spaceship segment that closes out V/H/S/Beyond. V/H/S/Mixtape adds a couple more to that list.
What an interesting, cuckoo-nuts-bananas installment in the V/H/S franchise. This one really went for it.
Does V/H/S/Mixtape Have a Post-Credits Scene?
Yes. Do not turn it off when the credits roll. Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance gets a short post-credits clip (about thirty seconds) featuring the puppets and everyone they got to. GWAR bookends the film on the way out, too, and their costumes are as great as ever. Good for them for coming back for this.