The found footage horror movie short “Stowaway”, directed by Kate Siegel and written by Mike Flanagan, is one of numerous scary segments featured in 2024’s horror anthology V/H/S/Beyond, and it is continuing to draw praise as one of the film’s big highlights. The popularity of “Stowaway” can be seen on the official Shudder subreddit, with user JobeGilChrist describing the short as “absolute class”, with the segment also praised for being “bleak as hell” by user sincewedidthedo. With many other users also praising “Stowaway” along with the generally positive reception to V/H/S/Beyond, Siegel and Flanagan’s horror short has evidently left quite an impression.
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In “Stowaway”, an woman named Halley (Alanah Pearce) is on a search for proof of extraterrestrial life when she comes across an alien spacecraft in the Mojave desert. After entering the ship, Halley cuts herself only for a cluster of nanites on the ship to heal her injury. Unfortunately, the ship shuts its door and departs from Earth before Halley can leave. Worse still, the nanites keep healing Halley’s subsequent injuries, causing her to horrifically mutate into an unrecognizable form as she is taken light years away from Earth.
“Stowaway” most certainly lives up to the praise of being extremely bleak as a found footage horror movie short, especially when the factor of time dilation in space travel is weighed into Halley’s predicament. “Stowaway” opens with Halley laying out the differences in the passage of time for an individual traveling at light-speed across the universe, with a trip from Earth to Andromeda at light speed taking 28 years for the traveler while 2.5 million years would pass on Earth. Considering the vast scope of space and the undoubtedly long journey back to the ship’s home world, Halley’s predicament is indeed horrifying to contemplate in terms of the sheer duration of her endless mutations by the nanites.
V/H/S Beyond is the seventh installment of the popular V/H/S franchise, which combines the found footage and horror anthology sub-genres for a double dose of Halloween season fright. Each V/H/S movie consists of several short horror films presented as newly discovered VHS cassettes, with a larger framing story also captured on VHS encapsulating the discovery and presentation of the tapes. While the first three V/H/S movies were instrumental in launching Bloody Disgusting as a horror movie studio, the V/H/S franchise’s life since 2021 has been where it has reached its greatest heights of popularity.
After the series went dormant following the initial V/H/S trilogy, the franchise returned as an annual Halloween release on the horror-themed streaming platform Shudder in 2021 with V/H/S/94, with Bloody Disgusting still on-board to produce the series. V/H/S has since become one of the signature franchises of Shudder, with the series bringing aboard acclaimed horror directors and writers for each new installment, such as Siegel and Flanagan in their work on “Stowaway”.
With the upcoming release of the V/H/S franchise’s eighth installment, V/H/S Halloween, the franchise seems likely to be a Halloween tradition on Shudder for the foreseeable future. That also lends itself to individual segments of each V/H/S movie developing a larger audience and reputation over time. That seems to be exactly how events have played out for “Stowaway” in V/H/S/Beyond, a genuinely terrifying found footage sci-fi horror short whose popularity only seems to be growing since its 2024 debut.
V/H/S/Beyond is available to stream on Shudder, and V/H/S Halloween will be released on Shudder on October 3rd.
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