Director David Bruckner is a veteran when it comes to anthologies. His filmography includes V/H/S, Southbound and segments of the TV series Creepshow, and his directorial debut was directing a segment of the three-part 2007 feature The Signal. The guy definitely knows what it’s like to work within the special medium… but his experience working on V/H/S/85 was a completely new experience due to the fact that he helms the project’s wraparound story (Titled Total Copy).
With the exception of V/H/S/99, all of the movies in the V/H/S franchise have utilized wraparound stories to contextualize the contributions by different filmmakers, and I spoke with David Bruckner about taking on that responsibility for the latest installment during a virtual interview earlier this month. It’s the hardest part to craft in any anthology movie, and the filmmaker explained why:
The wrap is notoriously difficult because you can't hold the audience's attention. It's hard to build a mood when you're only in there for a minute. But the tradition of it was interesting to me across the films, and it has become an experimental ground. Filmmakers go there to try different things in some ways.
Previous wraparound directors in the V/H/S franchise include Adam Wingard (V/H/S), Simon Barrett (V/H/S/2), Marcel Sarimiento (V/H/S Viral), and Jennifer Reeder (V/H/S/94). Brucker, who has produced the last three films in the series, didn’t originally intend to make the frame story for the anthology, but that was ultimately a responsibility he realized he had to take.
He explained that efforts to make a segment for V/H/S/99 didn’t pan out, and when it came time to develop the sequel, there was an eventual realization between himself and screenwriter Evan Dickson that they would have to be responsible for the wraparound. Said Bruckner,
I didn't know if I was gonna do a short for V/H/S/99. We couldn't work that out. And then I landed on 85 and then Evan [Dickson] and I had a lot of ideas as an individual short, and then it became apparent to us, it was like, 'We're gonna have to be the ones to do the wrap. [Laugh] So how are we gonna approach it?’
To figure out what the story would be, the first step was to look at what had been done in the past. The first three wraparounds in V/H/S, V/H/S/2, V/H/S Viral, and V/H/S/94 develop a loose continuity, but that idea has been altered with the last two movies. V/H/S/99 uses material from writer/director Tyler MacIntyre’s The Gawkers, suggesting that the installments that precede it taped over other footage. Brucker took that idea and ran with it for V/H/S/85:
We just got really excited about the challenge, honestly, because in the tradition of V/H/S wraparounds, the first few did try to explain the origin of the tapes, and then new origins of the tapes kept popping up. And then the audience was kind of onto us at a certain point, and it was actually V/H/S/99 where we had first come up with this idea of a mix tape where what you're watching the entire film is a kind of relic that's been discovered in some weird archival cabinet somewhere and that the shorts are actually taped over some bit of programming. And there's something kind of eerie and incomplete about that.
As explained by David Brucker, Total Copy unfolds in snippets throughout V/H/S/85, and it is made in the style of television documentary shows of the titular era like Hard Copy, Unsolved Mysteries and In Search Of. The story centers on a group of scientists at a university who have discovered a shapeshifting creature and have named it Rory. Experiments are conducted, and, in classic franchise fashion, there end up being some very violent consequences.
The other segments in V/H/S/85 include Mike P. Nelson’s No Wake/Ambrosia, Gigi Saul Guerrero’s God Of Death, Natasha Kermani’s TKNOGD, and Scott Derrickson’s Dreamkill (which is a semi-sequel to his 2022 film The Black Phone). Total Copy was the last short produced for the anthology project, and that gave David Bruckner and Evan Dickson to create something that would operate “like a rug that ties the room together” (a Big Lebowski reference that certainly didn’t escape me). Bruckner said that ingredients from the other projects combined to influence his work:
V/H/S is a feature film; it does need to be a ride in its own sense. So in the way you order it and what the kind of stylistic tonal influences are, we didn't want anything to be an island in and of itself. So we pulled from, you know, two of the shorts have professional characters: a rescue team and police officers… so that influenced us, and led us to scientists. And then Mike's piece has all this great body horror, Natasha's piece was sci-fi, so all of that kind of influenced us in one way or another and kind of what the wrap would be putting those ingredients together.
The trickiest part of the endeavor was balancing the desire to tell a full and interesting story but not break the illusion that the feature as a whole tries to present: the idea that you’re watching an old VHS tape. This meant, despite filmmaking instincts, that Total Copy couldn’t be constructed with clear and intentional breaks in the action:
It's like filmmaking, but you can't get caught filmmaking. There has to be a kind of randomness to it to some degree or another…We're trying to shape a story, but we're also pretty careful to not be too punctuated. We still want to go out at the worst possible time, not at the best possible time in some ways. It's fun to construct that, and it takes you, again, into just some really, really strange places.
V/H/S/85 had its premiere late last month at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, but it’s now streaming exclusively for Shudder subscribers. It’s the best installment of the anthology franchise yet, and it’s one of many great movies available on the horror-centric service.
