‘V/H/S/85’ Directors On Crafting Their Own Gritty Versions of the 1980s [Fantastic Fest 2023]
Mary Beth McAndrews
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From the minds of David Bruckner, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Natasha Kermani, Mike P. Nelson, and Scott Derrickson comes V/H/S/85, the latest entry in the beloved found footage anthology series. Following in the series’ more recent footsteps, this entry is placed squarely in 1985, the era of music videos, Ronald Reagan, and the AIDS crisis, among many other things. But instead of opting for a nostalgia bomb, all five filmmakers lean into a grittier version of the 1980s, one that removes any rose-colored glasses.
Read the full synopsis:
An ominous mixtape blends never before seen snuff footage with nightmarish newscasts and disturbing home video to create a surreal, analog mashup of the forgotten 80s.
We spoke with all of the V/H/S/85 directors during Fantastic Fest about getting gritty, getting weird, and how they each individually crafted their visions of fear.
Dread Central: It’s so good to meet all of you in person. I’m going to start with David about the wraparound because you had the biggest challenge. I really like how you broke the format we usually see. So I wanted to hear more from you about tackling the wraparound story of V/H/S/85.
David Bruckner: We had Evan Dickson who wrote it and we had the benefit of going last. So we had to see what everybody else was doing. Something we wanted to do this time was just try to get a bird’s eye view of the film and just ask ourselves, what do we want out of the movie? Rhythmically, and tonally, what vibes can we borrow from? What can we add, what can we bring to the circus? So that was our starting place and really where we ended up was, it was just because of that.
DC: I feel like your previous two films have been so emotional, but this one is a little bit more fun, so it was cool to see you get weird.
DB: It was nice, yeah. It was a vacation from Heavy Topics.
DC: Mike, you also broke format in your V/H/S/85 segment, and I wanted to hear about how that worked in terms of your piece being split up and then bringing it all together.
Mike P. Nelson: It was something that I wanted to do originally with the idea because prior to this being part of V/H/S/85, this was a short, that I was almost at one point trying to turn into a feature. But it just felt like I was expanding on things that didn’t matter, you know what I mean? So it lived in this sort of short form. And then of course when I got the call to be part of the team, I was like, “I have a thing!”. This is the time that I can do this.
I didn’t necessarily have that second part fully fleshed out, but I knew I wanted it to be this break. And it was fun to pitch that to the team and just kind of say, it could almost feel like its own segment. It was a challenge to figure out how to make that second part feel different enough, but also put it in the same world.
DC: Was filming on a boat a nightmare?
MPN: We had pictures where, I swear we have 10 people in that thing. It was difficult. And I was warned by David in one of our first calls. He said, “So Mike. Filming on water, it’s hard.” I was like, yeah, I had a feeling. And he’s like, so just figure out what you can do to make it doable. I think he even said, “I don’t know what that is, but just mess around, try some things.” And ultimately, yes, it was challenging, but we figured things out and we also had a lot of fun. I mean, we brought blood cans on a boat. We had squibs on a boat, we did all the hard things in the hardest spot.
The hardest part was when we were in the middle of a lake and it started pouring. There was really no warning because you look at the weather, it was like a 10% chance of rain, but you see blotches of dark clouds and it’s like, it’s not going to hit us. Nope. See it’s going over. Then you’re just like, keep shooting, keep going. We have to get as much as we can. Then suddenly rain, everybody stops, everybody covers up and we’re not really prepared for it. About two minutes later. Good. Alright, start shooting again. We get everything ready to go, everybody prepped, ready to go, and more.
I remember that second day of shooting on that water, it was challenging because it kept raining. Our first AD, Alyssa, who bless her heart, she made our movie work because we didn’t think we were going to finish that portion. She was like, “It’s okay, Mike, guess what? We’re going to finish it tomorrow.” And we did. And we had extra time.
So anyway, yes, it was challenging, but it wouldn’t deter me from doing it again. I would do it again in a heartbeat. I love putting myself into corners and shooting in tight attics. My DP is going to hate me for saying this. He’s like, “Mike, never an attic again”. Fuck that. I love it. I love challenging spaces. You discover weird shit that you can do and where you can put the camera and what you can do to tell the story in really unique ways when you’re put into that position.
DC: Gigi, what was that like filming your V/H/S/85 segment in that enclosed space with falling rock and debris?
Gigi Saul Guerrero: It was so much fun. We really shot in an amazing building that never got reconstructed or taken care of after the earthquake. A lot of Mexico City still has so much rubble and so many buildings that just never got [built] back up. This building is pretty decrepit. It was a popular gym at the time. And so there’s a section of it that there was just never time or money to fix it up. We’re like, okay, we’re filming all on this side as dangerous as it. That’s how I like to roll. And it was tons of fun. We were covered in a lot of baby powder the whole time. A lot of flour, too.
It smelled like cookies a lot. It was always the boom op just covered in everything with another grip, with a shovel, making it snow all the time. We just had dust, dust, dust, dust all the time. It was just a really cool experience I think more than anything for our cinematographer Luke, who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. He was the only blue-eyed blonde guy there and he had to be dressed as the cameraman. Our lead, the camera guy, was just always hugging him and saying all the lines, hugging him. So however he would react, he would drag our cinematographer with him. So they were always hugging.
DC: Do you have pictures of that??
MPN: Oh, that’s cool!
GSG: Yes! They’re both dressed together and it was so funny, every time we call cut, our cinematographer was covered in all those things. For him was a very cool experience because he would just not speak in Spanish, he would just feel whatever the actors felt to record the right moment. So it was one of the coolest filming experiences ever. And filming in VHS we had no idea what we were filming until afterwards. We would just take out the cassette so carefully and put it in the VCR to watch.
DC: That’s terrifying. That gives me anxiety.
GSG: We learned our lesson. You can see it in the opening, seeing real glitches. I learned very quickly that we were damaging the tape every time we would do playback, to the point where it was too many lines, too much damage that we were like, “Let’s just do three takes of everything until the cassette is over and I’m the editor. I’ll figure it out in post.” So as the director I just watched on the monitor the one time, and if that experience felt right, great. Next scene or next shot.
DC: Yeah. Can you do more Aztec God horror by way, please? I was so into it.
GSG: We’ve all seen Alien Vs. Predator, but I think it should be Mictlan Vs. Raatma in the next one. But just to finish it off, what I really wanted was just I think for all Mexicans, especially for Mexico City, what is the reason earthquakes keep happening in September? Why? And so it was just an interpretation at the end as to living on top of the Aztec Empire and why it keeps happening. So hopefully people like it.
DC: Natasha, I loved your incorporation of VR in V/H/S/85. So I wanted to hear about how you went about designing the VR world in your segment.
Natasha Kermani: Yeah, I mean the joke was in 2023, can we do Lawnmower Man, Tron-style world? So it was a lot of fun. I mean it was a really interesting process because we really created it. All of the department heads, all of us were like, “We are filming a performance.” So even our attitude wasn’t like we were making a film. It was we’re making a performance piece and then we are archiving it. And so that was really our attitude.
I think the most traditional filmmaking was the stunts we had to do takes and all that. But for the most part, it’s just big long takes of an actual performance and having several cameras running and just literally archiving the performance. The performance music was built, but there were some elements that were built beforehand and then it’s all live. So everything you see in the piece is all 100% live. We recorded on two mics, like a dry mic, and a wet mic. Then obviously we did some post-work to distort it once the shit goes down. But it was very much live, live, live.
But then of course your question is the opposite of that because building this whole CGI world. Tron was really what we were kind of going for initially. We know we wanted bright colors and all of that kind of stuff. The creature herself was really fun because it was kind of a risky thing. Dave [Bruckner] and I talked about this and I was talking with the other V/H/S/85 filmmakers. It was like, I don’t know if this will work or not, but I love the idea that the God is timeless so that everything else, the world, the environment is of the period, but the God looks a way that would not realistically look in 1985, right?
So there’s this uncanny valley thing that’s happening and then we did a lot of fun stuff where we would actually blow the image apart. So obviously it’s created in a computer. It’s a CGI thing.
DC: You didn’t conjure the actual God of technology??
NK: Well, at one point I was like, “Chivonne [Michelle who played Ada Lovelace], this is too real. You need to dial it back. You’re actually summoning something from the deep.” [Laugh] Dave is a wonderful producer. I think he really pushed it because at first we presented our image, and it looked like something made in a computer. And then we said, “OK, what else can we do here?”
We actually split the monster out and ran just her image against a black-green background through several analog processes. So we took the CG image, put it on a cassette tape, ran it through a bunch of times, tried some different funky things, found a sort of amalgamation of those techniques, comped her back on, and then ran the whole thing through one more analog process. So my point is it was a real blend of 2023 techniques and then really deconstruct, deconstruct, deconstruct from there.
DC: I loved the poking fun at performance art, Brooklyn basement performance artists who think they’re doing something profound.
NK: That was my childhood. My mom was a performance artist for my first few years, so my joke is I was raised at The Knitting Factory. My parents were broke and we didn’t have childcare, so I went along. So I have to think these really, you’re a child, you’re four years old and you’re seeing Laurie Anderson doing their thing up there and I’m sure that’s why I’m into horror. But it’s otherworldly. They are conjuring spirits up there. They’re doing crazy stuff. So it was really like a love letter as well to those folks. And they’re goth as hell. My mom’s stage name was Ella Dread. They were out there doing all kinds of crazy goth shit but in the art world. So nobody knows about it, but we are poking fun at it with some love.
DC: Then Scott, you went back to Sinister roots with your segment. How did it feel going back to that shooting style again and these really weird disturbing kill scenes that feel like you’re watching a snuff movie?
Scott Derrickson: Yeah, it’s fun. That’s the motive for doing one of these, that there are no limitations. If you miss, it’s something like this. It’s not going to be hugely consequential, but if you hit, you can make something really unique. And that’s what we were trying to do. I do love Super 8 film and I’ve gotten really fascinated with it since I did Sinister. I mean ever since I did the test footage for that movie and then saw it projected, I’ve always felt like there is something about the quality of that material that just doesn’t feel like anything else. To me. It feels upsetting.
If you projected anybody’s grandmother’s Super 8 footage that’s in their attic on a big screen, it would feel wrong. And so the starting point for me was starting with this idea of also being interested in the earliest days of VHS cameras in the 1980s. We were shooting on some of the very first-generation cameras. We didn’t do the kind of big processing thing that Natasha did. So it’s all captured as the material looked at the time. And then the transfer of the Super 8 material onto that, we actually shot it off a monitor.
For me, the starting point was the medium itself and being able to play with the visceral, powerful qualities of Super 8 footage blended with early 1980s video technology and to try to come up with a story. The starting point was a look for a story that would push the boundaries of what found footage can do. So once I came up with the general concept of these are recorded dreams of very violent murders that will take place and not just murders in a found footage objective way, but the murders you’re subjected to. They’re even scored.
DC: The soundscape for the dreams you made was so cool. I was so into that. At first, I was confused about the non-diegetic music, but it’s cool how you play with those expectations.
SD: Everybody said, “I was really mad at first.” [Laughs] And I mean the second murder is just “Hamburger Lady” by Throbbing Gristle, just that track. But the other two are mostly scored by my son Atticus, who’s a composer.
But also to have all that stuff but then try to make an actual narrative movie that’s 22 minutes long with characters, with a lot of backstories. They have names, they have backstories, and they have complex relationships. It’s very difficult to do and to do that in a way that still moves and is scary. So it was just something that Maggie [Levin] encouraged me to do. I said no, I was not going to do V/H/S/85 until I came up with the idea and then wrote the script in two days. And once the script was written I was like, “Oh, I’m really glad I’m doing this.” But it was hard to do because we had so many locations, we had a lot of places to go. You got to move the production. We only had five days to shoot it.
DC: This question is for all of you. I love how V/H/S/85 takes the existential dread of the 1980s and makes us all wonder about our place in the universe. And I’m curious if that was intentional going into this and how you wanted to interpret the 1980s.
DB: With everybody, there was just a desire not to do anything that was to 1980s pop. That was something that had super explored lately. Also, V/H/S/99 was a lot of fun and it captured more of a pop vibe, it was very much the spirit of [the film] in that way. So we were just thinking we got to do something a little bit different. And by really embracing old media, I think everybody in their own ways just running with the format and getting really, really into the nasty distortion that comes with really, really old tapes. I think it felt like everybody was getting pulled to something that had a bit more grit and we just embraced it through and through with V/H/S/85.
DC: It’s so cool to hear how you all use different tech to make your films feel like they’re from the 1980s. Every single segment felt like a VHS tape that you found.
GSG: That’s what I personally really liked with this is how each and every single one of us, our interpretation of the 1980s, really shines through, whether you grew up in the 1980s or not. I think all of us really used our personal experiences in our segments. I am always such a fan of Mike sharing that through his dad’s tapes and even with Scott always loving to experiment with different ways of filming with different equipment. It’s just really cool how all of us use some sort of experience to create our segments.
V/H/S/85 is now streaming on Shudder.
Categorized:Interviews
