V/H/SHalloween Team Explains Sinister Rick Baker Cameo and Other Tricks and Treats

Well before she joined a team of half a dozen other filmmakers to bring V/H/SHalloween to spooky season, director Micheline Pitt was living it. Which is to say that like a lot of the genre fans who count horror as sacred ground, All Hallows’ Eve has always been a special time of the year.

“I’m a big Halloween kid,” Pitt says when considering the allure of the holiday that gives the latest V/H/S its title. “It’s part of my personality, it’s in my DNA. Our house permanently looks like we celebrate Halloween, but it’s just our stuff. And we spend days decorating; we’re known as the Halloween house in our town.”

The ‘we’ Pitt that refers to is colleague and husband R.H. Norman, with whom she co-wrote and directed “Home Haunt,” the segment which acts as the grand finale to this month’s latest V/H/S flick. In this way, she and Norman are paying tribute to both the reason for the season, as well as the appeal of every V/H/S: to find inventive ways of having fun while saying boo.

“There’s a heavy weight of expectation on it,” Norman says about the new film. “It could become an annual watch for people. Everyone’s always looking for Halloween anthologies, especially in horror. So there was [an onerous that] ‘this has to be special,’ because Halloween is special.”

It is indeed kind of surprising to realize that despite there being seven previous V/H/S installments—making Halloween lucky number eight—this is the first of the anthologies to be set entirely around the pleasures and terrors of Oct. 31. Previous installments have dabbled in the macabre and autumnal, and several have been set exclusively in slivers of actual VHS technology’s glory days during the 1990s and ‘80s, but the newest Shudder original in many ways returns to its roots. After all, the V/H/S franchise has often as much been about the mischief of how a filmmaker is going to adapt to the constraints, and sometimes advantages, of the found footage conceit inside of a handful of minutes as it is purely about the scares. These segments want to be tricks and treats.

Take “Fun Size,” for instance, the new segment in V/H/S Halloween from writer-director Casper Kelly wherein adults go trick-‘r-treating in full-costume, and two of them speak to the irony-poisoned moment of Gen-Z while dressing as “Found Footage Filmmakers.” As the unsuspecting victims of the most comical of the new V/H/S segments, these cats wind up bedeviled by what Kelly gleefully describes as Willy Wonka but in Hell.

“It’s just the joy of being scared in a safe way,” Kelly says about the segment that features adults ignoring the “Please Take One” sign over a bowl of candy and getting dragged down to a netherworld where the chocolate is made. Let’s just say the ingredients include more than milk and coco. Says Kelly, “I just wish [candymaking] was more inventive, but maybe I’m wrong…. People are trying to do weird things now, like peanut butter cups with cinnamon in it, but I wish they were doing more inventive candies, we’ve had the same ones for all our lives.”

An interesting thing about setting all of this V/H/S segments around a single holiday and cultural event is how many motifs unintentionally run throughout the wildly different shorts. For instance, the cosmic punishment of ignoring a “Please Take One” sign occurs more than once in Halloween, as does fallout from partaking in an annual tradition that inspires you to consume mass-produced candies and foods.

“If your favorite drink is diet soda, uh oh,” jokes Scottish filmmaker Bryan M. Ferguson, the director of the wrap-around short “Diet Phantasma.” He continues, “I just thought it was funny because we don’t know what we put in our bodies, especially you folks in the States. You guys are like [possessed] with chemicals. Everything that gets exported to the UK from here is a different version of it, so I thought let’s make something and have the guy be an American testing on the idiots in the UK.”

There’s cheeky cynicism here—which can sometimes careens into outright nihilism, as is V/H/S’ wont—but more so than previous installments, this chapter of the franchise seems determined to celebrate what Norman notes is the spirit of the holiday. But then, he and Pitt have an especially strong gateway for that in their backyard since they count a seven-time Oscar-winning makeup design artist, Rick Baker, as a neighbor and pal.

“We loved Halloween as kids, but the big moment for [Norman] was when I took him to my friend Rick Baker’s house on Halloween,” Pitt explains. “He got to see how his family does a home haunt. It’s like a diorama, and he does these amazing prosthetics and costumes, and set pieces, and the entire neighborhood—I’m talking hundreds of people—line up. Not just for the full-sized candy bars but to also see what [the Bakers] do, and also getting to spend time with the family, and getting to know them and their stories.”

It inspired Pitt and Norman’s “Home Haunt” short, which the couple describes as Evil Dead in maze. Here a 1970s Burbank family goes all out every year decorating their garage and backyard with Halloween stylings that a teenage son now acts like he is too cool for. But after Dad brings home a record with demonic chanting—to add, you know, atmosphere—things go sideways fast. This short has everything you want in spooky season: zombies, witches, demons, and… Rick Baker himself in a polo shirt.

“He definitely hates polo shirts for sure in real life,” Pitt laughs. “This will be the first and last time.”

Yet the appeal of having multiple short films in one overarching feature is the mix of tones and temperaments. If “Fun Size” and “Home Haunt” are relatively lighthearted, “Coochie Coochie Coo” interrogates the same holiday from a bleaker perspective.

“I went trick-‘r-treating when we were 17 with my best friend, and we dressed as babies. And people didn’t like it,” writer-director Anna Zlokovic says. “I was like ‘let us have fun!’ And I think there’s a special kind of hatred for girls who are acting not their age. There is an expectation for women to be more mature, so I had a lot of fun with two girls who were like, ‘Fuck everything, we’re going to have fun!’”

In “Coochie Coochie Coo,” two teenage BFFs decide to film their last year trick-‘r-treating in a neighborhood that might resent how they dress, but also simply resents that they’re “too old” to be asking for candy. Yet they run into a more chilling inversion of their vibe when one house leaves a door open for them to come get candy… and then traps them in a space where they want them to be both childlike and maternal.

“I think there’s also something scary about being forced to take care of people,” explains Zlokovic. “I think the forced motherhood element of it scared me more than anything.”

In some ways this mirrors what is the most disturbing short of the anthology in this writer’s opinion, “Kidprint.” Based on an actual quasi-forgotten 1990s relic of “protection technology,” in which parents would have local, self-styled (and haphazard) filmmakers videotape their children in case they were ever kidnapped, this short film by Alex Ross Perry regresses viewers to an allegedly simpler time when predators might have hidden in plain sight, and tech meant to keep children safe this Halloween season instead haunts the psyche.

“I encourage you to look on YouTube for kidprint videos,” Ross says. “You’ll see if kids have them, they upload theirs, and they’re very creepy, they’re very strange, a lot of tracking lines, a lot of weird, open sound, a lot of erratic camerawork on behalf of the videographer.” While Ross didn’t experience making them in his own youth,  he became aware of kidprints by stumbling on an old Blockbuster Video commercial for them where John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, encouraged parents to keep their kids safe by filming these. Which has chilling implications. 

Ross found it disquieting—and intriguing for a horror movie. “I [thought], I should file this away somewhere,” he remembers. So when V/H/S came around, he wound up pitching the concept to producer Josh Goldbloom, whose own father shot kidprints in the ‘90s. “Growing up in the late ‘80s or ‘90s, it was just a slightly dangerous time for me in a way,” the filmmaker considers, “and I wanted to point that out.”

Being able to channel that into found footage has been a boon for Ross, and all parties we discussed the latest V/H/S with at Fantastic Fest. Yet the one who seemed most pleased about the collaborative, ensemble-like quality of the project might be Paco Plaza. But then, for Plaza participating in this franchise marks something of a homecoming after directing cult classics in the found footage subgenre like the original Spanish Rec films, as well as Veronica.

“I’ve always felt like part of the family without being part of it until now,” Plaza chuckles. “It resonates the same way as with The Blair Witch Project or with Ruggero Deodato when we met, and he had made the amazing Cannibal Holocaust. It was like being part of sharing a secret. ‘Oh how does it feel to shoot found footage?’ For me, it’s been a real honor to join these amazingly talented people and having fun together.”

And now the secret is spreading like any good Halloween ritual.

V/H/SHalloween is playing on Shudder now.