V/H/S: Viral (2014)

V/H/S: Viral is at its best when it feels like you’ve stumbled onto the internet’s darkest corner and can’t look away—an anthology that turns our obsession with filming everything into a jittery, nasty little thrill ride. It’s packed with macabre, tongue-in-cheek imagination: a magician’s “big break” curdles into something wicked, a parallel-world detour goes satisfyingly strange, and a late-film burst of chaos delivers scrappy, crowd-pleasing mayhem with grim humor. The found-footage style keeps it immediate and messy in a way that suits the movie’s viral-nightmare vibe, and when the ideas click, the visuals land with a punch. It’s not for everyone—uneven by nature, and definitely heavy on gore and sleaze—but if you like horror that experiments, plays mean, and occasionally laughs through the blood, it’s an easy dare to accept.

V/H/S: Viral is clearly trying to modernize the franchise’s found-footage nightmare by leaning into “everything is content” internet hysteria and a citywide chaos vibe. The problem is the execution feels scattershot: the wraparound story is more noisy than tense, and the segments swing wildly in tone, so the scares often land with a thud instead of building dread. There are a couple of fun sparks—“Parallel Monsters” has an enjoyably nasty concept, and “Bonestorm” is dumb in a deliberately energetic way—but the pacing and coherence issues make the whole package feel like a weaker mixtape than a curated anthology. If you’re here for the tight, genuinely unsettling punches of the earlier entries, this may feel like a messy sequel chasing virality rather than terror; if you just want quick, gory, found-footage oddities, you might still get some mileage out of it.