Sometime in 2011/12, Bloody Disgusting founder Brad Miska had the brilliant idea to gather a group of filmmakers to make a found footage anthology film. Now, 12 years later, the V/H/S franchise would boast five more entries and two spin-off films. The seventh installment, V/H/S/Beyond, will include prominent genre names like Mike Flanagan, Katie Siegal, and Justin Long. Three years after the creation of V/H/S, Brad Miska and Roxanne Benjamin would jump back into the producer’s chair with the inception of Southbound. Like V/H/S, Southbound would tell an anthology story with a wraparound story to tie it all together. Unlike V/H/S, the wraparound story for Southbound would find itself more easily explained and palatable.
Southbound follows five stories, each connecting to the larger whole. Two murderers are on the run from floating, reaper-like creatures. A rock band finds themselves in the company of weird cult members. A distracted driver must do surgery via directions from a 911 operator. Someone will enter a world of horrors to save his sister’s life. And a family plans one last getaway before their daughter heads to college. What could go wrong?
The filmmaking team Radio Silence (Ready or Not, Scream V) will tackle the opening and ending vignette. While Roxanne Benjamin (Pretty Little Liars: Summer School, Body at Brighton Rock), Patrick Hovarth (The Pact 2), and David Bruckner (The Ritual, The Night House) would do the heavy lifting by filling in the pieces. And Larry Fessenden is the Cine Film Cement that holds the celluloid together. Interestingly, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin would be the only Radio Silence member to handle the writing for their two segments
This is a second time watch for me, and part of my overall enjoyment was pointing out bits and bobs from each story that tied together the overall story. A singular watch of this film can tell you the whole story, but a film like Southbound is a film that’s more enjoyable after a second watch. (Who knows, maybe even a third!) Anthology films usually have a segment that isn’t great or doesn’t work, but that’s a conversation for another time. Southbound is one of the few anthology films that doesn’t have a bad segment. Moreover, each segment acts as its own entity set to exist in this hellscape, rather than being about this horrible town. You could pick any one of the segments out of Southbound and thoroughly enjoy it as its own short film.
The biggest issue of Southbound is an overreliance on digital effects. Throughout the film, we get some pretty gnarly and fun practical kills. When it comes to the floating reapers, on the other hand, that’s when things get a bit unfortunate. The floating reapers look decent when they’re in the distance, but when they get close to the characters, it just looks hokey. A kill toward the end of the film with the reapers just looks plain bad. If it’s a budget or time issue, I get it, I just wish it had been handled more practically.
Take the surgery scene. When Lucas (Mather Zickel) attempts surgery [spoiler alert], you get one of the most intense and visually disturbing scenes in ANY anthology film. Writer/director David Bruckner pulled out all the stops with his segment “The Accident.” Maybe Bruckner ate up all the practical effect money with the surgery scene.
The majority of anthology films quickly lose their luster. Anthology films like Southbound make rewatches a rewarding experience. The scenes of horror and gore still worked on a second watch. Honestly, it just felt good to rewatch Southbound. It’s the perfect film to pair with something like V/H/S. It could also be the perfect film to recommend to a friend who couldn’t get into the camera style of the V/H/S films but still wanted to see something in the vein of those films.