Delayed Reaction: Holidays

Premise: A horror anthology themed after different holidays.

 

The more horror anthologies I see, the more I've come to understand the simple reason why I love the first two V/H/S movies so much. The found footage aspect helps certainly. I'm a sucker for that. But, the reason they are so good is because all the shorts want to be scary.

 

That's it. That's all there is too it. There's a consistency of tone and intent to all the stories. The main reason I dislike the third V/H/S movie so much is the opening story, which aims for camp and oddness, not scares. That totally takes me out of the mood. Very often, horror filmmakers want to be funny. I get it. Comedy and horror come from a similar place: surprise. Anthologies tend to be fun projects for the filmmakers, so they bring some levity to it. I'd like to formally ask that they don't do that. The only time I haven't minded this comic approach was Trick r' Treat, and I suspect that it's because it was all made by the same filmmaker rather than a collection of them. If a horror movie is going to be funny, aim for consistent humor.

 

I think you can see where I'm going with Holidays. It's a horror anthology from a handful of different filmmakers. Like with most anthologies, there sure are some highs and lows in it. It started off really poorly for me. Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Days were far too campy and playful. The scoring really hurt this movie; in the early shorts in particular. The music called attention to itself far too much. After that, there were a few shorts that I really liked. The Easter short was delightfully deranged. It took a funny idea and made it so demented that it was actually creepy. The Father's Day short was my favorite. It's really just a mood piece and is all build and tone setting until the end. It doesn't over-explain itself. It's just tries to creep the audience out. I really appreciated the twist in the New Year's Eve short too. It's silly but rather than try to underline the silliness of the scenario, it plays it straight and trusts the audience will see the joke.

 

Not every horror anthology can be full of winners. It's hard enough to get one filmmaker to make something great. Asking a handful of them to is fighting some unfavorable odds. Holidays has enough good to be worth seeing. I'm going to look a couple of those filmmakers up for their other work. The others, I'll just ignore.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend