Recently, Nightmarish Conjurings’ Shannon McGrew chatted with five of the six directors of the anthology: Maggie Levin (“Shredding”), Flying Lotus (“Ozzy’s Dungeons”), Tyler MacIntyre (“The Gawkers”), and Joseph and Vanessa Winter (“To Hell and Back”), with a surprise appearance from EP Josh Goldbloom.

During our chat, we discussed everything from the hellish logistics of shooting loads of gooey horror to cultivating their individual segments and what has been the favorite part of being a part of the V/H/S franchise.

Thank you all so, so much for taking the time to speak with me today. First things first, how does it feel to now be a part of the V/H/S franchise?

Maggie Levin: What an honor man to join this alumnus [and] being a part of a legendary cult favorite. Also, to play in this particular playground is just such a joy. The parameters [given] are a year and [it’s to be] found footage, and then you just get to take it to the absolute maximum. What an incredible gift as a creative.

Vanessa Winter: Ditto. Joseph and I the night before the premiere were re-ranking all of our favorites and I was getting so stoked as a fan. It was kind of this bizarre like, Oh yeah, I’m a part of this. Why is life so good? [Laughs].

Joseph Winter: Honestly, it’s been a dream of ours for years to be invited to participate. So when we actually got the call from [producer] Josh Goldbloom, it was literally a dream come true for us.

Tyler MacIntyre: It’s at the point now where when we started casting for this, for our individual segments, one of my actors, Emily Sweet, was like, Hey, wait a second, is this part of a series? I was like, yeah… and she is one of the biggest horror fans in the world and really knew about V/H/S. She was over the moon.

In creating the look and feel for your V/H/S/99 segments, what was important for each of you to showcase in order to immerse the viewer into the 90s? 

Maggie Levin: I went for authenticity in every single pixel from the cameras we used, to the kind of glitches we created in the edit, the collage that we made on Rachel’s wall that the amazing production designer, Britt Keller, made. I think nailing the authenticity was not just a joy to do, but it was a real trip to walk onto those sets and to watch my actors come out of wardrobe. I started having the weirdest nineties acid flashbacks in the best possible way. Not that I was doing acid in the nineties, I was a child [Laughs].

Tyler MacIntyre:  All the actors in my series were kids. None of them were born in the nineties. So they were kind of riffing on things. They kept asking questions like, did they have Spiderman in the nineties? We had this Woodstock ’99 joke in there and they were looking up the bands and they were like, Korn with a K? Then they were like, Oh, Metallica? Just kidding [we] know that one [Laughs].

Flying Lotus: For me personally, I really wanted to get that feeling of this kind of innocence in the nineties. There was this kind of like naivete. It was a beautiful time for some people and in a lot of ways, we didn’t have windows to all the world’s problems. We were just in our own little bubble sometimes. There was just something about that, that I wanted to capture.

Maggie Levin: It was really fun to do [tackle the idea of] everything old in feminism is new again when dealing with Riot Girl bands. To have them answer questions like they invented feminism, was a thrill for me [Laughs].

A lot of the segments take place in very close quarters while also incorporating gooey, sticky practical effects. Can you talk about some of the challenges you each faced with bringing your stories to life for V/H/S/99? 

Maggie Levin: I thought for some reason that I was going peak gore when I took children and dismembered them and put them back together at the end. And then I watched the rest of the movie and I was like, Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet after you’ve seen mine. You got so much icky… it’s a goopy, wet horror movie. I love wet horror. Personally, it’s my favorite.

Flying Lotus: I had a tough time with the games [we incorporated] just because it was a very small space where we shot that and were trying to make it feel like a bigger space. You don’t know where the edges of the room are was kind of the goal – we don’t know how large this set is. Just trying to get my head around that was kind of difficult. All the people experiencing it were like, it’s cool man. We’ll make it look big. We got angles and we can move this over, etc. But it was great and I had the best production designer.

Tyler MacIntyre: I definitely had a hard time originally. We designed it to be like a two-day thing and, at the end of the second day, it was supposed to be the climax, which is a five-minute long shot in two houses with a window break and a bunch of stunt stuff, and then like six or seven effects shot all at once. All the actors are younger. One of them is 15, so we can shoot for nine hours but it gets dark at 10 o’clock, and he can’t shoot past midnight. The makeup effects take eight hours. We had a 45-minute window to shoot while trying to get everyone on the same page. And they just really crushed it. We got a really good take of it, trying to balance all those things, but that’s V/H/S baby! [Laughs]. A lot of things you think are restrictions are actually blessings and that’s what’s sort of fun about the format.

Vanessa Winter: We described our hell as gooey hell [Laughs]. I think that was also the challenge, getting everything out into the desert. We had moments where people were like, we’re out of goo. And we were like, what do we do? And we would have to drive two hours [for more].

Joseph Winter: With creature effects, if you have any experience with it, you learn really fast that you can’t do creature gags and move quickly. Those are two things that don’t really go together. In our [segment], we wrote in all the creature gags and we didn’t actually, honestly, assess if we could pull it off in the allotted time. So on set, just having that panic of, we have four more creatures tonight to film before the sun comes up. That was probably the biggest challenge with that.

Jumping off something Maggie said earlier about parameters, for V/H/S/99, were there additional guidelines you needed to follow outside of it taking place in the 90s and having it filmed in a VHS style? Were any of you able to visit the other sets to get a sense of what else was being created?

Maggi Levin: We were all operating as independent entities. And I think for at least two of us, many of the segments were a total surprise. It was like Christmas for me to sit and watch everyone’s movies all the way through and to recognize what kind of company “Shredding” is in. We were all just off doing our own things. Josh Goldbloom knew everything, though. [Laughs]

Josh Goldbloom: We had the production schedule where we shot like three or four segments back to back in Los Angeles. It can be a lot just because everybody does operate independently, right? So we wanna make sure that nobody really shares the same crew. There’s not much rollover. Joseph and Vanessa shot in Utah. Tyler shot like a month or two after we wrapped in Los Angeles

To wrap things up, V/H/S has been a wildly popular horror anthology since it first debuted in 2012. With that said, what has been your favorite part about being a part of this franchise? 

Maggie Levin: The spirit of playful maximalism. I am personally a maximalist in every aspect of my life, so just getting to take horror ideas and the authenticity of it and the groundedness and the performances was really important to me. But other than that, it was just about running absolutely buck wild to the hills of every single idea. There is no more joyous experience that you can have as a filmmaker than hey, please take your idea to 11 or to 11 1/2 if you can. So, just a pleasure.

Flying Lotus: I think having been a fan of this stuff too, it’s been a really cool pressure on my back. Not in a bad way. Just like a nice pressure. I liked Timo Tjahjanto’s segment “The Subject” from last year’s V/H/S/94, and I love the zombie cam from V/H/S/2, and Gareth Evans’ episode, “Safe Haven”. I’m a big fan of all that. So having that in my mind, all right, well you gotta do something on that level. Also obviously having all the amazing filmmakers be a part of this.

Tyler MacIntyre: Yeah, it was a really cool experience. I had to be more aware of the other segments because we were trying to do some of the wrap material. I wrote my segment and then [they asked] if we could do something that was the wrap-around. So it was really supposed to be spread out and then it just became more. I had to keep watching it and trying to balance everything. But then, once you’re trying to do that, there’s all sorts of support. It’s like, oh, we have a problem over here and then all of a sudden you’re on a Zoom call with David Bruckner and the Radio Silence guys and you’re really putting brains on the job, you know? It’s been a great experience to see the type of people this kind of project attracts and to be a part of that legacy.

Joseph Winter: For me, it was the people that I’ve met along the way. There are a lot of people involved in V/H/S/99, but every single person that we’ve had to collaborate with or work with in any capacity, it’s been really, really great.

V/H/S/99 will be released exclusively on Shudder on October 20th. For more on the film, check out our review.

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Shannon McGrew

Founder/Co-Owner at Nightmarish Conjurings

Shannon is the Founder of Nightmarish Conjurings and a lover of all things horror and haunt related. When she's not obsessively collecting all things "Trick 'R Treat" related, or trying to convince everyone that "Hereditary" is one of the greatest horror films ever made, you can find her designing interiors for commercial restaurants. An avid haunt fan, Shannon spends the entire year visiting haunts and immersive experiences throughout the Southern California area and hopes to one day design her own haunted attraction.

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