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The V/H/S franchise has spent years finding increasingly inventive ways to make audiences regret pressing play, but V/H/S/Mixtape takes the concept somewhere particularly twisted: What if the soundtrack itself could kill you? The latest installment in the found-footage horror series, streaming on Shudder, recruits four filmmakers with wildly different backgrounds to explore the uglier possibilities of music and sound. Wu-Tang Clan mastermind RZA, Ernest Dickerson (Juice, Bones), French filmmaker David Moreau (Them, Seuls), and animator Renee Zhan (O Black Hole!, Soft Animals) spoke with Kyle Meredith about their contributions to the anthology, which range from murderous puppets and extraterrestrial musical warfare to a recording studio where the ultimate sample requires an actual body count. With GWAR providing the connective tissue between segments in a demented approximation of late-night MTV, the whole thing plays like a particularly disturbed video-store discovery. Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
For RZA, whose segment “Deaf Tone” follows a young sound engineer attempting to create the ultimate recording by sampling human death, the assignment offered an opportunity to revisit his horrorcore roots while pushing his production philosophy into considerably more gruesome territory. “For me as a producer, I always incorporated police sirens, trains, thunder, lightning, like the sound of New York is all in my music,” he explains. But his fictional engineer “thought that the best thing to sample is to sample life itself, sample death itself.” RZA spent roughly four months developing the concept, initially considering instruments constructed from human skin before settling on the idea of extracting musical tones from dying bodies.
Meanwhile, Dickerson’s “The Music of Mr. Sze” approaches sound as a weapon against cosmic horror, with an earthly viola battling something decidedly less terrestrial. To create the otherworldly score, he enlisted Flying Lotus, who conveniently lives about five minutes away. “I felt [he was] somebody [who] could really give me an alien sound,” Dickerson says of working with the acclaimed musician.
Moreau and Zhan find their nightmares at opposite ends of the volume knob. Moreau’s “Heartbeat” traps two urban-exploration influencers inside a military facility containing an anechoic chamber, where the absence of outside noise becomes its own psychological assault. “After 15 minutes, you start hearing your heartbeats. You start hearing the blood in your veins. You start hearing your stomach, your jaw,” he explains. “Because it’s a silence, perfect silence, you hear the sound of yourself. And it’s really fucking disturbing.” The filmmaker rescued the concept from an abandoned feature project, finding a new home for an idea he’d wanted to explore for years.
Zhan’s “Dance Dance Dance Dance,” on the other hand, turns the aggressively cheerful world of children’s television into a blood-soaked revenge story, complete with creations from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The plot involves a studio attempting to resurrect a canceled puppet series using computer-generated replacements, effectively disposing of the original performers. “They feel like they’re stealing the soul of the show and trying to profit from it,” Zhan explains, adding a pointed contemporary relevance to the carnage. She also suspects the puppeteers were delighted to finally embrace their darker instincts. “I think puppeteers have sort of a secret dark soul inside each of them,” she laughs. “So often they are making stuff for kids, so I think for them this was a really nice, fun opportunity to do something a bit darker.”
Listen to RZA, Ernest Dickerson, David Moreau, and Renee Zhan talk about V/H/S/Mixtape, their approaches to musical horror, and more in the new episode above or by watching the video below. Keep up on all the latest episodes by following Kyle Meredith With… on your favorite podcast platform; plus, check out all the series on the Consequence Podcast Network.