V/H/S/MIXTAPE Turns the Volume Up on Horror This October

Wepa, horror fam, somebody at Shudder looked at the V/H/S franchise and said, “You know what this needs? More noise.” Not just louder screams either. I’m talking RZA, GWAR, Flying Lotus, Tobias Forge, Ernest Dickerson, killer puppets and enough messed-up audio energy to make you side-eye your speakers after midnight. V/H/S/MIXTAPE hits Shudder October 9, and this thing looks like somebody found a cursed VHS tape behind an old Sam Goody, shoved it into a machine and decided whatever came out was everybody’s problem now.

The lineup alone is nuts. Ernest Dickerson, RZA, David Moreau and Renee Zhan are each bringing their own flavor of nightmare to the anthology, while GWAR handles the wraparound with what sounds like an MTV broadcast straight from hell. Tobias Forge and Flying Lotus jump into the madness with music videos, and one of the segments even has work from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Fam, read that sentence again. We got GWAR and Henson Creature Shop energy living inside the same V/H/S movie. That is either beautiful horror chemistry or evidence somebody lost control of the experiment. Either way, I’m watching.

Renee Zhan’s Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance follows a studio trying to reboot a long-dead puppet show with some seriously questionable history attached to it. Anybody who grew up watching puppets knows they already operate about three inches away from creepy when the lights go out, so throwing a mysterious past into the mix feels wonderfully irresponsible. David Moreau’s Heartbeat takes a pair of urbex YouTubers and locks them inside a decommissioned military facility once used for sonic experiments, because apparently breaking into abandoned buildings for clicks was not dangerous enough already.

Then we get Ernest Dickerson’s The Music of Mr. Sze, where a college film student starts digging into the life of a tormented musician for a documentary project. If you know Dickerson’s work, you already know atmosphere matters, so giving him a story built around music, obsession and somebody uncovering things they probably should have left buried feels like a damn good fit. RZA’s Death Tone rounds things out with a young sound engineer following instructions left behind by her late father to create the ultimate track. Because nothing bad has ever happened in horror when somebody follows mysterious instructions from the dead, right?

What has me locked in is that music is not just decoration here. The sound itself is the threat. Rhythm, frequencies, voices and recordings become weapons, hauntings and doorways into whatever fresh hell each filmmaker wants to cook up. That fits V/H/S perfectly. This franchise has always been at its best when it takes technology we use every day and reminds us how creepy that stuff becomes once we stop trusting what it is showing us. Cameras were already unsafe. Now apparently our damn speakers are trying to kill us too.

The film runs 98 minutes and comes from producers Josh Goldbloom, Steven Schneider, Roy Lee, Michael Schreiber and Brad Miska, with Ben Ross and Rami Yasin executive producing. Before landing on Shudder, V/H/S/MIXTAPE makes its world premiere September 30 at Beyond Fest inside the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and filmmaking team. That crowd is either leaving the theater hyped or walking home in complete silence because nobody wants to hear another sound for the rest of the night.

V/H/S/MIXTAPE
Directors: Ernest Dickerson, RZA, David Moreau, Renee Zhan
Featuring: GWAR and work from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop
Genre: Horror
Runtime: 98 minutes
Streaming: Shudder
Premiere: October 9, 2026

Look, V/H/S has thrown a lot of insanity at us over the years, but building an entire installment around sound and then handing pieces of it to RZA, Dickerson, GWAR, Flying Lotus, Tobias Forge and a crew playing with killer puppet energy is exactly the kind of unhinged horror buffet I want from this franchise. This does not look clean. It does not look safe. It looks loud, weird and potentially nasty as hell.

So yeah, horror fam, turn the volume up.

Just maybe don’t turn it up all the way.

The Crusade Never Ends!