This Intense V/H/S Segment From the Director of ‘Pearl’ and ‘X’ Shakes Me to the Core Like No Other

When the first V/H/S film came out in 2012, it was a shot in the arm for the horror genre. The movie wasn’t a big box office sensation, but instead a fun playground that allowed some of horror’s best filmmakers to come together for an experiment that combined an anthology film with found footage tropes. It was such a success that it launched a franchise which continues today with the recently released V/H/S/Halloween. The original movie will always be the best, and while many fans rightfully choose “Amateur Night” as the scariest segment, the one that will send chills down your spine and get deep under your skin is Ti West‘s “Second Honeymoon”. Forget monsters and jump scares, it’s the unnerving realism that will terrify you.

Many V/H/S Segments Follow a Predictable Formula

Horror experienced some dark times in the 2000s, but by the 2010s, it had rebounded with hit films such as The Conjuring, Insidious, and Sinister. V/H/S was there too, igniting a spark by taking two familiar formulas and combining them to create something new. Making an anthology horror movie of nothing but found footage segments was a genius move, but if there has been one main criticism of the franchise, it’s that it has fallen into the lazy trap of doing the same thing over and over again.

From both the best and worst V/H/S sequels, too many segments have relied on predictable beats. A director comes in with an interesting idea, only to drop characters into a setting who encounter several jump scares from some sort of monster, then run around screaming with their shaky camera. It can be an assault on the senses in a format where less is supposed to be more. That’s exactly why “Second Honeymoon” is so good, because it does the exact opposite of what has become exhausting.

What Is “Second Honeymoon” About?

“Second Honeymoon” had the unfortunate task of following “Amateur Night,” which knocked it out of the park with a well-crafted and scary segment. What could it possibly do to follow something so good? Well, for one, “Second Honeymoon” had Ti West in the director’s seat. Today, he might best be known for movies like X, Pearl, and MaXXXine, but in 2012, he was already a rising star thanks to the vastly underrated The House of the Devil, a slow-burn nightmare which perfectly recreates the atmosphere of a film from the 1970s.

In “Second Honeymoon”, we watch personal video footage of a young married couple named Sam (Joe Swanberg) and Stephanie (Sophia Takal) who are traveling through Arizona on their second honeymoon. At one stop, Stephanie goes up to one of those creepy robotic fortune-tellers, who predicts she’ll soon be reunited with someone she loves. That night, a strange woman (Kate Lyn Sheil) knocks on the door of their small motel room asking for a ride, only to be sent away. Then, in the night, the couple’s camcorder turns on, but this time it’s not Sam or Stephanie who holds it but a mysterious intruder who films themselves holding a knife and caressing Stephanie with it, before stealing their money.

You might think you know where this one is going, but “Second Honeymoon” ends with a bloody twist. The next night, the intruder, wearing a creepy, clear mask that distorts their features, enters the hotel room again and hits record on the camera. However, instead of targeting Stephanie, the intruder pulls out a knife and jabs it into Sam’s neck over and over, causing him to die slowly as he drowns in his own blood. It’s then revealed that the killer is the woman who had knocked on the door. To top it off, she and Stephanie kiss. The bride was in on killing her groom all along.

“Second Honeymoon” Does So Much With So Little

“Second Honeymoon” is effective on multiple levels. This segment is a tonal shift from the rest of V/H/S, which features monsters, aliens, and the supernatural. Those can be scary, of course, but the viewer can also detach and hold the horror away from them because we know this can’t happen in reality. “Second Honeymoon” is so scary because it’s raw and real, with only very human people carrying the weight. There are no jump scares, no running and screaming with the camera, just a couple talking as they are seemingly being stalked.

The segment is effective because it builds up our expectations before tearing them down. “Second Honeymoon” leads us to believe that Stephanie is the target in a genre where young women are always the victims. We even have that fortune-teller telling us she’ll be reunited with a loved one soon, so we immediately take that to mean that she’s going to die. But then, bam, out of nowhere, it’s Sam who gets a knife to the neck. Gore can sometimes be overdone in the V/H/S franchise, but there is nothing in “Second Honeymoon” until it matters most. Instead of showing only a stream of the red stuff, it spurts from Sam, and we’re forced to listen to him choke on his life fading away.

“Second Honeymoon” is even better on a rewatch, not despite knowing the tricks, but because of it. It takes on a new dimension to see Sam and Stephanie together and know we saw it wrong the first time. We want to scream at him to run, but there’s nothing we can do. The story, like a snuff film, has already been told. Our only job, as the audience, is to catch up and take it all in. We hear stories like this on the news, now we’re forced to watch it go down with our own eyes, witnesses to the unpredictable horror. That will always be more unnerving than any fantastical monster and gimmicky scare tactics.

V/H/S is available to stream on Prime Video and Hulu in the U.S.

Release Date

October 5, 2012

Runtime

116minutes

Sequel(s)

V/H/S/2, V/H/S/94