But that’s a big part of the appeal of the next installment, Accident, directed by David Bruckner. The biggest problem with Siren is its ending, which gets sidetracked before it really goes anywhere. But the overall effect is striking, and the best segment is so inspired that it lifts the rest of the film up with it. Directed by David Bruckner (the V/H/S segment Amateur Night), Radio Silence (the V/H/S short 10/31/98), Roxanne Benjamin (who produced V/H/S), and Patrick Horvath (who didn’t work on V/H/S), the film suffers the uneven fate of many horror anthologies: its segments vary in quality, and sometimes wildly.
Isolation and dusty highways are recurring themes in Southbound, but otherwise these scary stories usually have little or no connection to each other besides a passing glimpse of a fellow protagonist. It doesn’t matter where they’re all going, since they may as well already be in Hell. It is on one of these lonely stretches of road that Southbound takes place, a patch of land where five tales of terror whizz past each other. The further we travel between one town and the next, the more tenuous our connection to each society becomes, and the more vulnerable we tend to feel. We sometimes forget, sitting pretty in our safe little homes, that every civilization on Earth is connected via lonely stretches of highway.
