On a rainy day in late May, I walked up to an unassuming record store in Brooklyn, unaware I was about to spend an incredible day watching disgusting movie magic happen.
When I officially entered the set of Alex Ross Perry’s V/H/S/Halloween segment, “Kidprint”, the local record store was transformed into a vintage Halloween paradise, stuffed to the gills with Facebook Marketplace finds that I wished I could pack into my luggage. It was a tiny space, but a perfect one to capture the feel of “Kidprint”, which is covered in a ’90s grime that’s hard to shake off.
This is where I met Perry himself, a tall man with a love of band tees, baseball hats, and comfortable shoes. And while you may know Perry from his feature film, Her Smell, or his recent experimental documentary, Pavements, it’s always been his dream to make a horror film, especially after he saw The Blair Witch Project at the age of 13 in theaters, which he describes as “one of the all-time movie experiences of my life.”
“I took the train into Philadelphia to see it at the Ritz Theater, not knowing that it would be a phenomenon, but knowing it would be popular. And I got there thinking I was seeing a 2 PM show, but when I got there at 1:15, every showtime for the day until 9:00 PM was sold out,” said Perry. “So my friend and I got tickets to the nine and had to call home, pre-cell phones, and say, I’m seeing a 9 PM movie, I’ll be home at 1 AM. So we just hung out in the city all day and then came back, and the line was around the block. The hype was insane in the theater. It was a seminal movie moment in my life.”
That inspired a love of found footage, which is part of the reason why he’s been a fan of the V/H/S franchise since the very beginning. But it’s also because of his own personal connections to the franchise’s humble start.
“A lot of friends made the first one. It was Joe Swanberg and Ti West, specifically, so I was super aware of [V/H/S],” Perry said. “Back then, the model for at least the first two was that it would be at Sundance and then festivals throughout the year for a release later. I remember seeing the first two at film festivals and just being proud of all the people I knew. I was especially impressed with the second one and a lot of the format and the theatrics of what people had done.”
For years, he was a fan of the series, and then, during a chance meeting with Sam Zimmerman from Shudder, he simply asked, “How do you pick those people? I would love to be involved with that.” Surprisingly, Zimmerman’s response was “Let’s do it. Do you have any ideas?”
And ideas Perry certainly had. He loves found footage and how you can create an air of truth even with a minuscule budget.
“The format to me is always intriguing and always exciting, not just because of the way it interacts with mood and horror. It automatically grounds [the horror] in something resembling reality, or it gives the freedom of knowing that whatever is on the other side of the image is not going to be seen,” said Perry. “It just sets the mood for me. Even the lowest of low-budget films can be satisfying just by forcing the relationship between image and audience to be different from what it is in every other movie you watch. That is really fun if it’s done even remotely well. I’ve just loved it my whole life.”
He combined that love with perhaps one of the darkest stories featured in the series to date. Instead of a supernatural force or something obviously fantastical tormenting his segment’s character, it’s very grounded in the reality of disappearing children, the real monsters responsible, and how parents grasp at straws to protect their kids. Here, the desperation comes in the form of Kidprint, an actual program that existed in the late 80s and early 90s.
“Amidst a then-booming time of kidnapped children, electronic stores, specifically Blockbusters, in collaboration with John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted offered this service that I’ve always been interested in and fascinated with, where in order to have contemporary, customized, relevant imagery of your child, you would bring them in and a very brief quotidian interview would be conducted with your child in front of a carceral looking backdrop,” explained Perry.
“I’ve always been fascinated by these; the ones that you can see online are extremely strange. They have that classic liminal video quality. If it’s a Blockbuster, it’s overhead fluorescent lighting. So they look weird. That audio sounds like there’s people talking, the lights are humming, they sound weird, they look weird,” he added.
So, Perry took these strange videos and formed his idea, all grounded in reality. “I love this franchise. I have no problems when one of these segments is incredibly grounded for 15 minutes and then becomes supernatural. But my instinct was to want to do something that was just the opposite of that,” he told me. “It gives to me as a filmmaker and a fan of the genre, the most important thing of all, an ironclad understanding of what is being filmed and why.”
This is where his segment takes a dark, harrowing turn that was filmed in the dark, dank basement of the aforementioned Brooklyn record store. Here, blood was about to be spilled and splattered all over the white walls to convey Perry’s more extreme take on the film’s themes. After all, this is a segment all about kids disappearing and then dying horrific deaths at the hands of an adult with repulsive tastes.
In fact, this may be the darkest segment in the V/H/S series, as it’s all about really hurting kids for no other reason than to inflict pain. I won’t spoil any of the gory details, but the photos below illustrate the kind of carnage that awaits in Perry’s segment. He never held back in what he wanted to show on camera, which was captured perfectly by his DP, Robert Kolodny, who previously worked on pseudo-documentaries like his directorial debut, The Featherweight.
While this is Perry’s first official foray into horror as a filmmaker, horror has always been part of Perry’s life. To him, horror has always been about fandom and the ability for people to show their love of the genre through tattoos, t-shirts, and massive Blu-ray collections, but then go back to their day jobs. But now, Perry’s dreams have come true with “Kidprint”, and V/H/S/Halloween has made it easier for those horror dreams to be realized. While he’s been trying to develop an original horror project, this was inherently easier because V/H/S comes with a built-in audience.
“You’re making it with a release date. But also most importantly, if you created something new, even as a somewhat known filmmaker in many ways, you’re starting from zero. You’re hoping that the press, the marketing, the aesthetic of the movie carry people into it,” said Perry. “But [V/H/S] is great because people are watching it immediately. And I know that because that’s me every single time one of these has come out. That’s really amazing. And it gives a lot of confidence in filmmaking.”
He continued, saying, “Not to make it all about me, but what I like about these is if you know the filmmakers, you can kind of see a bit of the personal touch in what they do and the aesthetics that they’re drawn to. And certainly that was true in the Scott Derrickson V/H/S/99 segment.”
And the same exact thing is true for Perry. While he doesn’t typically tackle more extreme horror about child killers, there is a throughline here regarding Perry’s own obsession and fascination with media consumption and reproduction.
“Inasmuch as I’ve never done something in this exact tonal register or the genre, I also made a three-hour documentary about video stores and video consumption in America,” said Perry. “Essentially, if you count this and my documentary, I’ve made four consecutive movies examining music or movie distribution consumption in the 1990s, which is true of the movie I made, Her Smell, the documentary I have out now, Pavements, and this video store movie called Video Heaven. All of these movies are set in 1992 in some way.”
While “Kidprint” is a darker side of Perry, it’s also still part of this project, this “returning to my youth and reexamining what that era meant,” as he describes it. It may be a little different, but it’s still familiar.
“To me, yes, it’s a horror thing that’s very gory and very bloody and very practical. But it’s also just another thing about media distribution in the nineties, which is clearly an obsession of mine.”
V/H/S/Halloween comes exclusively to Shudder on October 3, 2025.
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