The collective effort of several directors, including Adam Wingard, Joe Swanberg and Ti West, V/H/S (which possibly stands for Various Horror Stories) is a new take on the kinds of portmanteau horror features we seldom see any more – Asylum, The House That Dripped Blood or Tales From The Crypt are a few great examples. It helps, too, that the entire film is shot on grainy, lo-fi videotape. This not only gives V/H/S a visual coherence, but also lends the movie a sleazy sense of the forbidden you may remember from renting movies from a video library, or borrowing second-generation copies of banned horror flicks from friends. V/H/S looks and feels like something nasty you might find in a skip, and is all the better for it. The individual stories themselves are well executed. There are some decent special effects woven into Amateur Night, director David Bruckner’s opening short film, and the same can be said for the concluding chapter, 10/31/98, directed by the filmmaking Radio Silence, which ends the anthology in an explosion of paranormal activities. Ti West’s Second Honeymoon, about a couple’s misfortunes while travelling around the western region of America, has an ominous build-up leading to a disappointingly abrupt pay-off. This is something which also applies to Tuesday The 17th (director Glenn McQuaid’s knowing horror-in-the-woods tale) and The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger (Joe Swanberg) – a spooky story with an unusual twist, and one of the film’s few memorable and sympathetic performances courtesy of Helen Rogers. There’s a problem, too, with stuffing five stories into an anthology instead of, say, two or three; every time we cut to a different story, we’re starting a new narrative from scratch, which means setting another scene, introducing some new characters, and explaining how and why they’re filming everything. If you were to draw a curve of the tension, it would rise and fall rather than gradually build, because each story effectively resets our anxiety meter back to zero. In its most effective moments, though, V/H/S is gripping – quite rightly, its filmmakers have placed the best segments at the beginning and end. While we’ll let you discover their finer points for yourselves, they contain a few welcome twists on familiar horror settings and themes. V/H/S is out in UK cinemas now, and arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on the 28th January. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.