V/H/S/MIXTAPE (2026)

Studio:   Shudder
Director: Various
Writer:   Various
Producer: Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Josh Goldbloom, Brad Miska, Michael Schreiber
Stars:    Various

Review Score:

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Summary:

Shocking videos document murder, paranormal possession, revenge, and cosmic creatures in six stories involving macabre music.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE (Director: Renee Zhan, Writer: Zoe Cooper)

As a child, George participates on the children’s show “The Curious Chorus” while puppets named Riptide, Botulism, Hemlock, and Skeeto sing a song titled “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance.” Years later, George grows up to become a puppeteer in the same workshop where those puppets were retired after the show’s end.

With “The Curious Chorus” planned for an updated reboot, aggressive studio executive Vanessa visits the workshop with her adopted son Sam and producer Chris to start the process of digitizing the original puppets so they can be turned into 3D avatars. Upset over plans to alter Riptide, Botulism, Hemlock, and Skeeto, George greets the team with brusque displeasure.

When the puppets are digitized, the computer strangely renders them as demonic figures. George later brings Vanessa, Chris, Sam, and his intern Daisy onto a stage where he angrily insists they each put a puppet on their hand. After the song “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance” starts playing, the puppets come to life.

Riptide kills Vanessa by tearing off her arm. Skeeto releases a mosquito swarm that kills Daisy. Botulism vomits acid that melts off Chris’s face. Sam tries to escape only to run through a gauntlet of other sentient puppets that terrorize him before the original four characters saw off his head at the jaw. George later turns the four victims into macabre marionettes.

ANOTHER CABIN (Director: Flying Lotus)

In an isolated cabin, a massive monster with a long tongue emerges from the surrounding forest to attack a boy living with his abusive grandmother. Following a struggle during which she tries using him as a shield, the boy allows the creature to decapitate his grandmother. The monster’s head then morphs into the old woman’s face. The boy tries to flee, but the beast uses its long tongue to swallow him, which subsequently transforms its face into the boy’s.

HEARTBEAT (Director/Writer: David Moreau)

Intending to record a viral video, content creators Maya and Wes sneak into a secret Soviet military building hidden in a forest on the Bulgarian border. While investigating the facility, which had been abandoned since the Cold War, the couple becomes trapped in a test chamber. Painfully unsettling sounds start driving the two of them mad. While attempting to stop Wes from thrusting an awl into his ear, Maya inadvertently punctures his throat and he dies. Maya considers killing herself until she hears a heartbeat coming from her stomach. Succumbing to the madness while being stranded and starving, Maya begins eating Wes’s body to feed the baby now inexplicably growing inside her.

THE MUSIC OF MR. SZE (Director/Writer: Ernest Dickerson)

After renting a room in an unusual boarding house, Philip Howard begins recording his daily life for a student documentary project. Philip records unusual encounters with his quirky landlady Mrs. Blandi as well as other renters who include a strange man that never speaks and a scary guy who yells.

Philip eventually manages to meet reclusive musician Mr. Sze, who lives on the house’s top floor. Having become fascinated by the haunting music he repeatedly hears through his ceiling, Philip convinces Sze to be recorded while playing his violin. Wanting Sze to play a specific song, Philip starts humming an odd melody he overheard the night before. As if something is trying to break through the windows, the room’s shutters shake until Sze screams for Philip to stop. Sze worriedly warns that Philip will have to move to a room on the first floor now that he has heard that music, although he offers to pay the rent.

As his hair mysteriously greys, Sze refuses further requests to be interviewed by Philip, who moves into the first floor room at Sze’s insistence. Drawn to the hypnotic music once again, Philip ascends the stairs one evening to find Sze with glowing eyes and his hair now completely white.

After Sze leaves the house, Philip sneaks into his room. Philip finds a collection of occult papers and illustrations along with a glowing stone that shows him otherworldly visions of cultists and ancient cosmic creatures.

Sze returns to see a massive monster emerging from the distance outside his window. After warning that the creature is now coming for Philip, Sze furiously plays his violin to stop its advance, but he is unable to prevent the tentacled, one-eyed entity from killing him. Philip flees downstairs as the creature moves after him, killing Mrs. Blandi, the scary guy, the strange man, and a handyman named Josh. Philip escapes outside, but the monster catches up and destroys him too.

PREMATURE BURIAL (Director: Tobias Forge)

As revenge for sexual assault no one knew she suffered, a female doctor violently murders her male colleague. She also ends up preparing his body for his funeral, which allows her to manipulate the corpse. At the funeral, she sneaks a radio into his coffin. Sometime after his burial, the man comes back to life. Hearing muffled screams from the mouth she sewed shut, the woman returns to the cemetery and decapitates the man with a kick when he emerges from his grave.

DEATH TONE (Director/Writer: RZA, Writer: Matt Landsman)

Following the death of her beloved father, a legendary music producer, Lydia Van Horn decides to honor him by mixing music from his old demo tapes. Lydia finds a cassette labeled with her name. On the tape, Lydia’s dad lays out occult instructions for making macabre music with organic sounds that he promises will allow them to be together forever.

Lydia begins by bringing home a man from a bar whom she tears apart through torture in order to record the sound of his spine separating. She then lures a musician to her father’s studio to record his screams while she kills him with a chainsaw. Lydia kidnaps a homeless junkie next, and she records intestinal gurgles while the woman is repeatedly stabbed.

Detective Sharpe visits the studio to ask about a string of missing persons. Successfully refusing the detective’s request to come in on two separate occasions, Lydia goes on to extract another victim’s teeth, behead a man, and play a woman’s tendons like a violin to record more bizarre sounds.

Her father’s final lesson instructs Lydia to put herself into the music. As Detective Sharpe breaks into the studio to execute a search warrant, Lydia records herself being violently impaled. Detective Sharpe exits after calling in the grisly murders. Lydia manages to play the finished song, which supernaturally restores her entire body.

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Review:

After 2025’s “V/H/S/Halloween” (review here) hit a high in quality and critical reception that the anthology series hadn’t seen in a decade, 2026’s “V/H/S/Mixtape” induces whiplash by furiously shoving the long-running franchise back in the opposite direction. “Worst” is too subjective a term for a broad declaration about this movie’s rank among other “V/H/S” entries. Instead, more people might concede “Mixtape” is at least the sloppiest and schlockiest in both conception and execution.

In keeping with the very, very loose theme of music connecting this batch of shorts, Grodius Maximus of the “shock rock” group Gwar bursts onscreen for the first bumper, which isn’t a real wraparound, but rather a bunch of unrelated skits featuring the band’s various metalhead monster personalities. Grodius starts by saying, “We’re here jacking off in my mom’s room today” and introducing a zipper-masked gimp with, “I’m borrowing my mom’s butt boy.” Next, Grodius masturbates to “Mama’s titties” until he ejaculates green goo that brings a drawing of a hot dog to life. Grodius then says, “It’s covered in my cum, that’s kinda gross, I like that” before taking a big bite out of the bun.

All of this happens in the film’s first 60 seconds and that’s only the beginning of the grotesqueries Gwar has in store for their intrusive interstitials. During the next 60 seconds, Mama puts a gun to her head and blows her brains all over the wall because she’s upset the “boys are jacking off” without her.

I get that Gwar’s gimmick has always involved cartoonish yet extreme violence and pornographic parody. But fans who attend their shows choose to opt in to that experience. Gwar is still a niche novelty act. Forcing their brand of “humor,” which includes creature penises shooting neon fluids along with suicide as crass comedy, into the faces of general audiences is an aggressive way of alienating viewers right from the top.

The main movie gets going with “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance.” It features genre mainstay Barbara Crampton overplaying the part of a stereotypical studio executive who plans to carelessly cannibalize an old children’s show by rebooting beloved puppets with digital animation. It also features puppets created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, although I’m not sure anyone would guess that based on how unmemorable the four main designs are. A predictable piece where these puppets come alive to kill the new producers, “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance” would be average enough for an “it’s fine” if not for the muffled audio and poor video resulting from being shot on something that apparently fit in the palm of one person’s hand.

From the moment its title appears to the moment the movie moves to Gwar’s next bizarre but boring bit, “Another Cabin” lasts just two minutes and 40 seconds. Directed by Flying Lotus, this surreal sequence where a massive monster terrorizes a boy in the forest boasts eye-catching animation. This glancing blow also comes and goes so quickly, once you slog through the next hour and change, you might forget it ever brushed by your face.

“Heartbeat” centers on one of modern moviedom’s most overused and annoying character types: content creators. This particular pairing even unironically says, “Hit Subscribe, smash that Like button, and come along with us” before proceeding through a nondescript forest, then into an abandoned building, for a shaky cam jaunt. “Heartbeat” manages to squeeze out a genuinely claustrophobic moment or two, but if we’re still doing haunted building “found footage” in 2026, there has to be more to it than merely that moment or two.

Ernest Dickerson retells H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann,” practically beat for beat until the finale, with “The Music of Mr. Sze.” With its macabre montage of cultists, colossal creatures, and other eldritch evils, this segment comes close to inarguably qualifying as the highlight of “V/H/S/Mixtape.” Then it becomes a lowlight because Dickerson kneecaps the trippy chills of cosmic horror by populating his piece with sitcom sidekicks.

I had mostly shrugged off repeatedly silly sights like Mr. Sze’s series of worsening wigs and a clownlike landlady dressed as though she’s auditioning for the circus. Then after “The Music of Mr. Sze” hits its peak of otherworldly atmosphere, Dickerson again upends the eeriness by having the landlady return to shriek in a green Munster facemask with her hair done up in curlers. Whatever the idea was here, Dickerson’s bizarre directorial decisions murder what could have been a consistently unsettling mood.

“Premature Burial” is just a music video for the same-named song by a band called Repugnant off their album titled “Epitome of Darkness.” That title is misspelled onscreen as “Repitome of Darkness” in what is either a proofreading mistake or, well, I don’t know why else someone would have added an R. “Premature Burial” at least tells a visual story while the song plays. It also fulfills the first part of the film’s tagline, “low fidelity, high body count,” by being shot so shoddily, this might be the closet recreation of a retro MTV Headbanger’s Ball clip since it looks like you’re watching it off a tape of a tape playing on a 40-year-old tube TV.

Relative to the largely underwhelming segments that precede it, “V/H/S/Mixtape” finishes with its strongest short by default. RZA’s “Death Tone” chronicles a grieving girl following occult instructions to essentially “Evil Dead” her music producer father back from the grave. Once again though, gruesome shots of gory deaths such as exposed tendons played with a violin bow or a man’s spine pulled apart are compromised by cheapness in other areas. Sets such as a bar and a couple of street corners look like they were staged in the same small space as the main music studio. Then there’s the hard-to-ignore absurdity of a detective, who executes a search warrant with no other police officers present, being played by someone who almost certainly gets carded when buying beer.

Horror movies have an unfortunate history of rolling end credits over obnoxious garage metal songs. But the one that concludes “V/H/S/Mixtape” is such a chainsaw in the ear, the movie lands one last thud that reinforces the impression of a film that wants to be badass when it’s really just a loud lump of noise. Had I seen this movie in a theater, I would have had to exit immediately while plugging my ears in pain. Others likely would have done the same, although judging by many unimpressed reactions, their hasty escapes might have had more to do with clunky content than one unlistenable song.

NOTE: There is a post-credits scene.

Review Score: 40

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