Starring: Kim Sønderholm, Pontus Olgrim, Jarrod Crooks
Written & Directed By: Kim Sønderholm, Henric Brandt, Ben Wydeven, Guy Pearson, Lars Gustavsson, Oscar Malm
Release: 2009
Grade: B-

 The Horror Vault 2 is the second volume in the series of horror short films. Kim Sønderholm is the only returning director from the first anthology. I wish more of the directors from the first would have come back for this one. There was a great dynamic between the content, themes, and style of those shorts. It had great themes of deceit and dimension, not seeing the truth until its too late. In The Horror Vault 2, I really didn’t see one powerful theme that connected these shorts together. As there are less shorts here, it seemed like there wasn’t the same range that we got in the first one either. That is not to say that these aren’t worthwhile films as they are fun horror driven shorts. It is interesting to see what another group of directors had to offer its audience. Majority of these seem to be much less thematically based and more genre based. None of the shorts are that much like any other so we get variation.

 The opening, and one of the better segments, is “Invasion of Privacy”, written, directed, and starring Kim Sønderholm. It begins with Dennis who traumatizes a victim of his. When he is done with his fun he finishes her off. The next day a young woman moves in to his building. He helps her move in and plants a camera, giving him a live feed inside of her apartment from his room. He watches her most intimate moments constantly. It is only a matter of time before he takes this to the next step. However, his neighbor might not be the naive victim that she has been pinned as. “Invasion of Privacy” ends on a strong note, turning the tables on us. Sønderholm upholds his powerfully driven themes of horror, taking victims by surprise through deception and false appearances.

 Henric Brandt‘s “The Dead Chick in The Closet” was the most entertaining short as the one designated as the horror comedy. It begins when John wakes up hung over after a night of partying. He finds a naked girl lying next to him who he doesn’t recognize. He decides to take advantage of this by having sex with her while she’s still asleep. Of course though, she’s not really asleep; she’s dead. John panics when he discovers this and calls his friend to come over to help him deal with this. They try to get rid of the body, but not everyone feels that they can hide this and want to call the police. Fear of getting caught takes over their senses and brings out a more brutal nature in them. His fiancé is on her way home and the house has dead bodies and blood everywhere, including the naked girl he had sex with, both when alive and dead. He manages to cover things up enough until his guilt builds up and the ghosts of these dead bodies threaten his sanity. There’s comedy throughout the deaths since most of them are actually accidental, but still bloody. Also, the task of cleaning the bloody mess is quite funny as well how John sweats under the prospect of getting caught. He really isn’t a likeable character. He cheats on his fiance, has sex with a dead corpse, and really if she would have been asleep this still could have been considered rape, which really isn’t much better. Pontum Olgrim really did wonders with the part, using a certain off beat-ness to make him fun even if we realize he isn’t the best guy. The ending is almost cartoonish and sitcomy, which actually works very well.

 “The Medium” by Ben Wydeven is based on the rumored haunting of the Rogers Theater. Raven, a spiritual medium, sees the ghost of a woman in this theater. He then pushes the owner to let him in and to make contact with the ghost. Raven gets him to admit that he knows the existence of this ghost and that she in fact has been haunting him. Soon things turn around and he is stuck here with vengeful spirits, forced to make things right for the owner or face death. “The Medium” was decent, but it ended up feeling somewhat bland. It really fell in to the generic formula of ghost stories and didn’t really seem to go anywhere. Guy Pearson’s “Mr. Happy Sunshine” has a similar quality to it. In the short, a television newscaster is kidnapped, locked away in a box, and only taken out to put a cardboard TV on his head and deliver the news to his kidnapper, reading from the newspaper. The transformation in taking him out of his normal environment and adapting the depriving environment to almost mock this was pretty interesting. This is really the only idea hinted at and it doesn’t really go far enough to make an impact.

 My least favorite was definitely “Restroom” by Lars Gustavsson and Oscar Malm. It takes place in a public restroom and that is about the only thing that is clear. There is no cohesive narrative here and it is hard to make any sense of it. It is very art house like and the visuals look great. Most of it’s shown in this heavily shaded black and white lighting. Then we are given an extreme close up of the main character’s eye, which is a bright blue. There is a good amount of blood here that looks pretty realistic. This is where the red is introduced as well, violent deep reds come exploding on the screen opposite the black and white. Still, no matter how good it looks, we can’t really put any value on this. There is hardly any dialogue aside from the brief ranting of an old man and talking feces, which actually seems to be the antagonist in some strange way. There is either some supernatural force here or this guy is going crazy. The main action consists of him getting sick over and over again, going in and out of the stall and there is supposed to be some horrific basis in this. Needless to say, aside from admiration of the look of this segment, I didn’t get much out of it. Overall, The Horror Vault 2, isn’t quite as intertwined and thematically based in horror as the first one was. Still we are given several shorts that hit on different villain types that they show through the execution of murder. They are all pretty well shot and have something different to offer the viewer. For fans of independent horror films or those who enjoyed the first volume of The Horror Vault this is worth seeing. The Horror Vault 2 gives you a handful of blood wrenching horror in one DVD. It doesn’t stop here as The Horror Vault 3 is in the works now.