Chris Miller
With every new installment, the V/H/S franchise continues to push the boundaries of found-footage horror—experimenting with format, tone, and the blurred line between amateur chaos and cinematic precision. In V/H/S Halloween, cinematographer Powell Robinson helps redefine that balance in “Coochie Coochie Coo”, a nightmarish DV-era fever dream that captures terror through authenticity and imperfection.
Working with director Anna Zlokovic, Robinson leaned into the analog grit of 2000s digital video to craft something both nostalgic and unnervingly real. Shooting on modern sensors but processing through a tapeless DV transfer workflow, the team recreated the blown-out texture and auto-balanced color quirks of early handheld horror—where every flicker of flashlight and shadowed corner feels dangerously alive.
In the below interview, Robinson breaks down how he built a naturalistic atmosphere with practical light sources, embraced low-light chaos without sacrificing visibility, and found beauty in the unpolished. The result is a segment that doesn’t just imitate found footage—it resurrects it, grime and all.
V/H/S Halloween is now streaming on Shudder.
What excited you about contributing to a franchise like V/H/S, which has such a cult following in the horror community?
It’s always evolving! The style of the shorts, the tone of the franchise, and of course, each year’s new theme. Plus, the roster of filmmakers who’ve been involved in the past, and in our year as well, includes so many horror legends, it’s an honor to have our name among theirs. I’ve watched Paco Plaza’s REC so many times since I first discovered it. I’ve used it as a reference for past work as well as our Coochie Coochie Coo segment itself, so it’s pretty surreal to be in a lineup with him.
Found footage often avoids obvious “film lighting.” How did you create atmosphere while keeping sources motivated and naturalistic?
Constant internal reminders to keep the cinematography ego in check. From the beginning, Anna and I wanted to give the short a sort of effortless feeling to watch, like the locations, and lighting, and characters have always existed and nothing stands out as designed or artificial. Everything needed practical motivation, which is particularly tough on a night exterior where you need to forgo movie moonlight or fake ambience. Streetlights, house lights, and Halloween string lights were our best friends. We kept the dynamic range of the lighting color tones more compressed as well—no teal/orange found here. DV cameras in that era were constantly auto-white balancing so a lot of amateur images from that era felt pretty neutral / balanced. Or conversely, extremely imbalanced and orange when the camera got it wrong. So we tried to stay true to light sources and colors that would do that for us too.
Were there any low-light challenges, and how did you balance realism with the need for the audience to still see the horror?
The freeing part about found footage, and doing what we called our tapeless tape-out, analog transfer in post, was that I knew I could crank the ISO as needed on set because the grain would either disappear or turn to mush after hitting the DV cam sensor transfer later, or just look accurate for the kind of low light gain you’d get shooting on those kinds of cameras. So it just became more about creating depth and atmosphere in the space, freed from technical constraints, which was a blast. I think the biggest misconception about horror is that dark = scary. If you can’t see anything, it’ll never be scary. It’s about seeing things only when you’re supposed to see them. Or barely being able to see something and when you really want to, then losing sight of it so your mind starts to play tricks on you and you get stressed out.
Once the girls got in the house, we relied solely on the “built-in flashlight” in our pretend DV camera. We shot the majority of the film on Sony FX9 with an Astera Pixel Brick mounted directly above, and in line with, the lens. Production Designer, Danny Erb, fabricated a 3D-printed spotlight mount that we could swap rings and diffusion on to get differently sized pockets of light depending on the lens we were using, that also enabled us to essentially decide “spot or flood” light for different scare sequences. Some of them we wanted Mommy to be far away and barely visible, to almost fuse with the backdrop, and others we wanted to highlight her and pop her out with a practical vignette. We always made sure the spot or flood aligned with the lens length we were using so it didn’t feel like the light source was un-realistically changing shot to shot.
Did you coordinate with other V/H/S Halloween cinematographers to ensure consistency across the anthology, or were you given freedom to push the look?
Since each segment is so independently director-driven, and all set in different eras, we all did our own thing for the most part. (My gaffer Nate Thomson did get to work on Fun Size after we wrapped ours, though).
Did you design the cinematography with post-processing in mind—like noise, glitches, or VHS degradation layers?
Definitely, from the beginning. It needed to be accurate for the time period, meaning DV cam, not VHS since our segment is set in 2009, and we wanted to avoid glitches as often as possible. The only moments in the final edit that use glitches were to help cut some time out for pacing – but we did shoot the whole thing to work as a singular oner when the girls enter the house.
We’d originally looked at doing a tapeless Canon XL2 shooting workflow, where we would use a converter cable to record directly from the XL2 to an Odyssey monitor/recorder. But the logistics and stability of the cable connections were going to be too limiting for all of the running around and bumping into stuff we had planned, as well as the resolution being too hard to work around for all of our VFX.
After some testing we decided to film with the FX9, and then run it all through a tapeless tape-out with the XL2 in post instead. This gave us far more control over the final look of the film.
How involved were you in crafting the final “found footage” look during color grading?
Very! Jared Rosenthal who colored this film, also worked with me on the VHS sections of my last film, Mr. Crocket, so we’ve gotten our digital-to-tape workflow down pretty smoothly. We’ll do a pre-grade to balance the film’s black levels and white balance, transfer, and then do a post-transfer finishing grade. This VHS process was a little more complex though. Our transfer process didn’t just send an image to tape and then get ingested back. We actually filmed an OLED monitor with the XL2 with the video feed from the sensor running to an Odyssey recorder (hence the tapeless). This gave us all the fun distressing from the old CCD sensor and color space without having to deal with log-and-capturing from tape.
Because of the difference in dynamic range and color science with that old sensor, we chose to stream from Davinci Resolve to that OLED screen so I could make grading adjustments to Jared’s balanced pass as we went. Adjusting for scenes that weren’t translating as well to the sensor. Alex Familian, our editor and lead-VFX artist, stitched all the pieces from our favorite transfers (since each transfer has it’s own unique analog funk due to weirdness with the old sensor and image processing) back into one seamless timeline, and then sent back to Jared for a final touch-up grade.
Last minute, Jared actually added a specific type of sharpening to match the look of the original Blair Witch’s image texture, which I think really ties the whole thing together.
How does working in the V/H/S anthology format challenge or free you as a cinematographer compared to a feature-length project?
Honestly, I think Anna and I both approached it the same way we would developing a look for a feature—we just shot for fewer days. It was nice, however, to only worry about one week’s worth of setups, and we got to hyper focus on getting the look of this one location really dialed in.
If you had to describe the segment’s visual language in three technical words, what would they be?
Visceral, naturalistic, gritty.
Do you see found-footage cinematography as an exercise in restraint, or in carefully controlled chaos?
As I sort of hinted at earlier, it feels more like an exercise in ego-death. All the ways you’ve learned to polish an image, operate on something in a smooth and cinematic way, and create crafted filmic lighting, you’ve got to unlearn all of that. And then apply your skills in the least noticeable way possible. If anything you do distracts from the immersion and realism, you messed up.
