Is V/H/S Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot
Yes, 6 out of 10. It's five found-footage shorts and a frame story, each with its own way to ruin a night.
Ruling: Watch it with friends and the lights on, and have a plan for the VCR.
V/H/S runs one hour and fifty-six minutes. A gang of burglars is hired to steal one videotape from a house, and the house has hundreds of videotapes. Anyone paying attention would not start with the one already in the VCR.
The premise, briefly
Four criminals break into a house to steal a tape and end up watching five short horror films recorded on old tapes.
The verdict above is spoiler-free. Everything below, including the ending, stays hidden until you pick a depth.
The gang is picked off one at a time and the old man's corpse comes back to attack Gary. The last tape ends with four friends in a car that gets hit by a train.
Early in the movie, the first tape, Amateur Night, ends with a shy woman revealing fangs and killing two of three friends in a hotel room. The last friend is carried into the sky as the footage ends.
No dog dies in V/H/S. The characters find a pig corpse.
It is a mean, violent anthology with a few jump scares, and the shorts are separate enough that you can skip the one you like least.
How it ends, the scene you're dreading, what happens to the dog, and the bottom line. About twenty seconds to read.
What actually happens
Amateur Night: a hotel room, a hidden camera and a very quiet guest
The movie is five short films inside a frame story, which counts as a sixth. In the frame story, Brad, Rox, Zak and Gary film their own crimes, and an anonymous client pays them to steal a VHS tape from a house. Inside they find an old man's corpse in front of several television sets full of static. Brad stays with the body and plays a tape left in the VCR. That tape is "Amateur Night." Shane, Patrick and Clint book a hotel room for a night with some women, with a hidden camera built into Clint's glasses. At a bar Clint meets Lily, who is very shy and says only "I like you." Her feet turn out to be clawed and scaly, and Patrick bursts into the bathroom with a wound on his hand, saying Lily bit him. This is the scene people dread most. It comes early, on the first tape. Lily shows fangs and kills Shane and Patrick, catches Clint after he falls down a staircase, and lifts him into the sky as a winged creature. The glasses fall and the footage ends. Zak and Gary then find a basement of unmarked tapes, and Brad has vanished.
Reading this instead of watching it is the correct decision. Scaredy Cat makes that decision automatic, for free.
Second Honeymoon: a motel room with a camcorder and an intruder
Sam and Stephanie drive through Arizona on a second honeymoon and film the trip. At a Wild West attraction, a mechanical fortune teller promises Stephanie that she will soon see a loved one again. That night a young woman knocks at the motel door and asks whether she can get a lift from them tomorrow. While the couple sleep, an intruder sneaks in, switches on the camcorder and films themselves holding a switchblade near Stephanie. The intruder also takes cash from Sam's wallet and dips a toothbrush in the toilet. The next day Sam accuses Stephanie of taking the money, which she denies. That night the intruder comes back and stabs Sam in the neck. The camcorder then shows who it was: the young woman from the doorway, wearing a plastic mask. She is Stephanie's lover, and the footage ends with the two of them driving away while Stephanie asks whether the tape has been erased. Rox, in the frame story, has put in the next tape and has not noticed that the old man's corpse is gone.
Tuesday the 17th: a lake, a pig and a killer with a bad signal
Joey, Spider and Samantha follow their new friend Wendy to a lake she visits every year. Wendy brings up an accident that killed her old friends. Whenever Joey points his digital camera at an empty patch of forest, glitchy pictures of mutilated bodies appear in the recording, and he decides it must be broken. The group finds a dead pig, and Wendy tells Joey that everyone is going to die. A knife kills Samantha, and a glitchy figure known as the Glitch stabs Spider. Wendy then admits she is the only survivor of the earlier killings and brought the group as bait. The Glitch kills Joey, and Wendy leads it into a pit and then a bear trap, but it slashes her hand. A bed of spikes impales the Glitch while Joey bleeds out nearby, and Wendy gloats before it vanishes and comes back to kill her. In the frame story, the old man's corpse is back and Rox is missing.
The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger: a video chat with a bump
This segment plays out mostly through video chats. Emily tells her boyfriend James, who is studying to be a doctor, about a bump on her arm that reminds her of a childhood accident. Emily thinks her new apartment is haunted after a ghostly, childlike figure rushes into her room and shuts the door. Her landlord says no children have ever lived in the building. She tries to cut open the bump to find out what it is, and James begs her to stop and promises to look at it when he comes to visit next week. The next night she carries her laptop around with her eyes shut, three entities appear and knock her out, and James walks in. They are aliens, and he cuts a fetus out of her. Emily has been carrying human-alien hybrids for them, and James has been in on it. They wipe her memory, and James breaks her arm so the night looks like an accident. In the last chat he tells her she is the only one he wants. Then he starts a call with a different woman who has the same bump.
10/31/98: friends in costume knock on the wrong house
In the frame story, Gary comes back to find Zak gone. He discovers Zak's body upstairs, and the old man's corpse is now a zombie and attacks him after he falls on the stairs. The VCR starts the last tape without anybody touching it. In "10/31/98," four friends in Halloween costumes go to what they think is a party, but they have the wrong address, and the house is abandoned. They assume the strange events are a haunted house attraction. In the attic they find men standing around a crying woman who hangs from the rafters, apparently staging an exorcism. The men yell at them to leave and then hit the woman, and an unseen force drags the friends into the dark. They run, but come back to rescue her. As the whole house goes wild, they get her into their car and drive off. The car stops, the woman disappears, and the friends find they are on railway tracks with an engine that will not start and doors that will not unlock. A train hits the car as the footage ends. A joke ending, shot separately, has them escape and walk away as the car explodes.
The ending, explained
The frame story ends badly for the gang. Brad and Rox disappear, Zak is found dead, and the old man's corpse comes back as a zombie. Gary finds Zak's body, falls on the stairs and is attacked by the zombie. The last tape, 10/31/98, ends with four friends in a car stopped on train tracks, and a train hits the car as the footage ends. A joke ending was also shot, in which they get out before the train arrives, and the car explodes behind them as they walk away.
The post-credits ruling
Nobody has confirmed whether there's a scene after the credits.
Questions people ask at 1am
The whole plot of V/H/S is hidden, ending included. It stays that way until you ask.
You don't have to sit through V/H/S to find out what is on the tapes. Install Scaredy Cat and it will blur horror like this before you see it.
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