Aahana Swrup
‘V/H/S/Beyond’ is a found-footage horror film that continues the ‘V/H/S’ franchise series, serving as the seventh installment. It presents an anthology of six different short stories tied together with overarching paranormal themes that invite viewers to test their skepticism in the face of mounting terror. As such, the narrative presents various stories throughout its run, including freakish kidnappings, a Bollywood A-star actress named Tara, and a documentary revolving around a Chinese family and their haunted house—among others. With each new story, the film dials up its scope for dread, exploring new mysteries to hold the audience’s attention. However, for the same reason, each self-contained tale also becomes a unique puzzle of its own! SPOILERS AHEAD!
Stork: The Eldritch Toddler Kidnapper
Amidst a tense police investigation into a string of missing infants, the special units team on the case welcomes a newbie to the crew. The newest addition, Segura, recently lost his own child to the kidnappings and is thereby filled with a need for vengeance. As the team narrows down their perp’s potential base, the team goes into the rundown house with their body cams activated. Still, the terrors they face inside the house’s walls are so outlandish one would be hesitant to believe them despite the recorded footage from their body cams. Soon after the team enters the location, they are bombarded with a horde of violent, zombified individuals, who all sport the same wound on their foreheads.
After Segura and his team fight off these outrageous creatures, they venture onto the building’s second floor, following the sound of crying infants. Thus, they discover an enigmatic meteor in the middle of the room, having clearly crashed through the house roof. Furthermore, they’re also able to more closely study one of the zombies and discover that its brain has been emptied from its head. The scene soon dissolves into a massacre as the being looking over the stolen infants emerges from the shadows and attacks the police unit. As such, the reality of the situation appears.
The stork-like creature has actually been behind the kidnappings all this time. Through the presence of the meteor in the house, one can figure out that the stork is actually an alien creature from outer space who crashed into the unfortunate town. Afterward, it started collecting local infants—likely as a natural instinct to look after the young. On the other hand, the zombies in the house could be a result of the stork’s hunt for sustenance in the form of brains.
Since the cops glimpse at the stork feeding the human babies, it’s safe to assume it feeds the same brains to the babies, turning them into hybrids. Thus, the ultimate fate of these infants—and the alien’s influence over them remains terrifyingly ambiguous. The parallel between the creature and a stork’s folk interpretation as a bird that brings babies would be amusing if the situation weren’t so horrific. In the end, the cops manage to defeat the stork-like creature, finally ending its reign of terror. Yet, they decide to keep the reality of the events under wraps to spare the families of the lost toddlers.
Dream Girl: An Actress of Many Faces
This story follows an Indian paparazzi reporter, Arnab, and his cameraman, Sonu, who follow different celebrities across the streets of Mumbai, hoping for an exclusive picture. The duo finds themselves with the rare opportunity to travel to a film set and photograph the overnight success, Tara. Even though the actress is well-loved by the nation, rumors run rampant about her involvement in witchcraft as a way to explain her mounting success. Nonetheless, Arnab, an aspiring actor himself, finds nothing special about Tara, assuming she’s been addled with privilege her entire life.
After catching a glimpse of Tara during her shoot, Arnab sneaks into the closet inside her trailer to snap a few pictures of the actress. However, he instead witnesses a tense interaction between her and the manager, who continuously pushes her to work harder for little compensation. However, his cover is soon blown after he stumbles across a slimy substance and a weird alter inside Tara’s closet. Consequently, he emerges from the hiding spot and attempts to console the actress, likely as a ploy to exit the trailer without trouble.
Nonetheless, Tara ends up taking Arnab’s placation that she can do “whatever she wants” quite literally and decides to give up on her identity as Tara. As it turns out, the actress is an alien cyborg in reality and simply has to peel her face off to achieve the same. Yet, she hasn’t finished with her newfound freedom. After revealing her true self, Tara enters the set and attacks the entire film crew—including her manager, Arnab, and Sonu. In the aftermath, she confronts the media outside the set—bringing similar violence into their lives. Although the narrative never explicitly confirms Tara’s origins, it’s possible that her manager always knew about her reality and purposefully exploited her to get more work for less pay. Either way, Tara finds her autonomy in the end—even if in an uncontrollably violent way.
Live and Let Dive: Zach’s Birthday Celebration Gone Wrong
Jess plans a massive surprise for her husband, Zach, on his 30th birthday, inviting some of their closest friends for a skydiving adventure. For his part, Zach remains intensely fearful of the idea but allows himself to be swayed by the enthusiasm of his wife and friends. Consequently, the group finds themselves aboard a plane, preparing to jump off while strapped to their instructors. Nevertheless, things take a turn after Zach spots a spacecraft in the sky that looks oddly similar to a classic UFO. As the craft—and the spindly creatures it harbors—collides with the plane, it becomes evident that it is an actual UFO.
Soon, the plan explodes in half, compelling the inhabitants to jump off in a rush. Fortunately, Zach is able to get his parachute to work and lands relatively safely in the forest. However, the same cannot be said for his instructor, who has been all but decapitated by the fall. Eventually, Zach is able to find some of his friends in the same forest. Yet, to their horror, the aliens have also landed safely and are now attacking any human they can find near them. Naturally, Zach runs for his life, trying to escape the creatures that have killed his friends and Jess.
Even though Zach is able to find a trucker down the road, the relief is short-lived as the aliens come out of the woods. The trucker falls to his demise, and a gravely injured Zach tries to drive away from the horrifying scene. Yet, fate steals safety away from the tips of his fingers as the truck gets beamed into the alien UFO. Thus, Zach’s predicament becomes much more dire as his birthday becomes one for the history pages.
Fur Babies: Becky and her Bloodcurling Doggy Daycare
Becky Baxter runs a cheery-go-lucky doggy daycare service, advertising a fun and safe environment for canines. However, the people at Humans Against Animal Cruelty are against the woman’s practice of showcasing her taxidermied departed dogs as momentos. Therefore, they plan a sting environment and send Stuart and Angela to the daycare with their boss’ dog, Pickles. On their arrival, Becky puts up a friendly front, undeterred by their inquiries about her taxidermied dogs. Afterward, she offers them a tour of her house, where she lives with her quiet brother, Bo. Yet, Stuart and Angela’s venture into the basement becomes a nightmare as they glimpse at cages occupied by humans.
Soon enough, Becky reveals she doesn’t take kindly to people snooping around in her business and entraps Stuart and Angela with Bo’s help. Thus, by the time the duo’s coworkers arrive at their rescue—tipped off by their radio silence—Becky has already degraded and dehumanized them by treating them as dogs in her basement. Worse yet, she has actually begun a process of turning them into actual duos. As it turns out, Becky’s fascination with repurposing animal corpses extends far past taxidermy. She and her brother use their daycare as a front to collect humans and surgically turn them into humans by attaching dog parts—from paws to teeth and fur—onto them.
Thus, Becky does the same to Stuart and Angela as their team storms the place. Nonetheless, she has little to worry about as she uses her previous experiment, “Gary,” a man turned into a hybrid with parts from her old dead dog. The psychological and physical torture of Becky’s surgery overrides the brains of her victims, turning them into obedient monsters. Ultimately, Gary rips Stuart’s coworkers to shreds, ensuring the activist and his partner, Angela, live out a life of horror as human-dog hybrids.
Stowaway: Halley Pays for Her Curiosity
Halley has been curious about the extraterrestrial for a long time. As such, she finds herself in the Mojave desert to investigate some stories about the interaction between aliens and the locals. Although she is a little bitter about missing her daughter’s birthday for the same—something that her ex-husband would hold over her—the curiosity to explore the unknown remains undefeated. After interviewing a few locals about the lights in the sky, Halley witnesses the same lights the following night and decides to follow after them to document their reality.
Thus, Halley finds herself in front of an actual UFO, which proves to be startlingly easy to walk into. Inside, she finds wondrous technology, including nanotech, that gets triggered anytime she acquires a cut. The tech instantly swarms around her and heals her wound with unbelievable precision. She also discovers that the ship’s inhabitants have been studying Earthlu fauna, such as spiders and octopuses. Eventually, in her enthusiastic fascination, she fails to notice the UFO come back to life as the aliens fly away into space.
As a result, Haley also flies out of Earth as unintended cargo. However, unlike the other living beings on the spacecraft, she isn’t strapped inside a status-inducing pod. For the same reason, her body goes through the adverse effects of experiencing light-speed travel. Nonetheless, rather than dying, her body regenerates increasingly grotesquely under the nanotech’s scrutiny. Therefore, she essentially gets trapped in Promethean horror, reliving her death and rebirth over and over again until she becomes something far from a human. Hence, her obsession with the unknown ends up spelling out her own doom.
Abduction/Adduction: The Overarching Documentary
Although the film focuses on one story at a time, an interspersed narrative persists between all stories. In this storyline, a group of experts discuss a video footage sent to one of the film’s directors, Jay Cheel, by a Reddit user. The footage belonged to a young second-generation Chinese immigrant whose parents bought a luxurious house in Toronto after their business took off in the 1950s. However, the house has always been rumored to be cursed. For the same reason, their son decided to sell it in the 1980s after their death.
During those last few days, the son begins experiencing intense night terrors that significantly affect him. As a result, he decides to record his last days in the house as proof to establish his sanity. The reality that awaits within his recorded footage is more than a little troubling. One night, a humanoid alien visits the son while he’s sleeping and attacks him. Years later, although the video footage has survived, the man has been lost for decades with no information about his predicament. The old VHS tape presents such a startling conclusion that even the experts who watch it can’t immediately debunk it as a hoax, leaving viewers to contemplate the horror of its reality.
Read More: All V/H/S/85 Endings, Explained
