It’s Friday night at the offices of the cash-strapped Click Clique website, where the employees have been summoned to a pitch meeting. For Halloween, with layoffs looming, they’ll run a clickbait listicle on the 13 most frightening viral videos, so the staffers take turns passing the wireless keyboard around the conference table to queue up their ideas, and What Happens Next Will Scare You.
In this unique anthology of caught-on-camera moments, “influencer” claptrap and other streaming bits of ephemera, those clips include a ghost ruining a little girl’s birthday party, a DUI traffic stop gone very wrong, a vinyl recording of Native American death song, a clown’s video dating profile, a cryptozoological interruption of a local-yokel fishing show and something that may be the worst fetish ever.
Other videos are longer and more complex, for reasons eventually apparent. In this category fall an Italian Catholic priest reviewing the rites of exorcism, a 911 call from a panicked funeral home director reporting resurrected corpses, a speculative paranormal show on a stuffed teddy bear named Scraps and, in a four-parter broken up across the running time, a mean-girl teen vlogger detailing her encounters with a “troll bitch” at school.
Because What Happens Next comes from Chris LaMartina, director of the immortal WNUF Halloween Special, it’s an incredibly creative mix of horror and comedy. As with WNUF, “story” is less important than structure, and early details gain meaning as the movie progresses. Transitions are often ingenious, and the more attention you pay, the greater your rewards. That refers not only to spotting direct ties to the WNUF world — performers and characters — but the grains of throwaway background gags, such as a screen thumbnail labeled “2 Screwdrivers. 1 Urethra.” —Rod Lott