Renowned editor and short horror fiction anthologist Ellen Datlow argues that the short story is the paramount format for horror tales. She writes in the introduction to her anthology Inferno (via writer Johann Thorrson’s blog):
I think that fiction of the supernatural works better in the shorter forms for the simple reason that the short form lends itself with great ease and flexibility to an enormous variety of narrative styles and strategies. Novels, while they can be quite chillingly effective, are an entirely different matter. Very few longer works truly carry the power to force the reader to sustain the suspension of disbelief necessary for the kind of stunning, chilling, or flat-out terrifying effect of a great short work.
Whether or not the short form is truly superior to longer works is a matter of opinion, but her overall observation on the power of the short story is unequivocally true.
We can see this same power on full display in the horror anthology film. Instead of a feature-length narrative, these films offer anywhere from three to five (rarely more) horror shorts as bite-sized as Halloween candy and just as sweet, but often with a bitter aftertaste—not because horror shorts suffer in quality (though that is the case with some), but because they need not always wrap things up nicely and neatly, forcing the audience to sit with their effectively quick bursts of terror without offering much by way of catharsis.
Anthology films—also called horror omnibuses—are about as old as the film industry itself, and despite dips and dives in popularity, they have endured well into the 21st century. BFI writer Neil Mitchell identifies Unheimliche Geschichten, or Eerie Tales (1919), as perhaps the first horror anthology. IMDb contributor Judy Shoaf describes the film as such:
After the old-books shop closes, portraits of the Strumpet, Death, and the Devil come to life and amuse themselves by reading stories—about themselves, of course, in various guises and eras. Four of the stories are literary horror stories (one by Poe, one by R. L. Stevenson), and the last one is a comedy involving a fake haunting.
This use of a framing narrative to tell individual stories would be echoed in numerous other anthology films to come, but as Jeremy Dyson, co-writer/director of the 2018 horror omnibus Ghost Stories, notes in his article for The Guardian, this narrative approach harkens back to “something older, something primal,”
a connection to our most ancient form of storytelling. There’s an atavistic yearning deep inside us to be back round that flickering fire, keeping the terrors of the night at bay, as the yarn-spinner holds us bewitched: ‘You liked that one? Well, I’ve got another for you—but be warned, this one is really scary…’
While Dyson’s comments evoke images of the dawn of humanity in caves, this habit of telling stories to one another as a past time carried on into the Victorian era. Indeed, it was this practice that led to a group of young artists—Mary Shelley and John Polidori among them—to attempt to “out-scare” each other with original tales of terror that ultimately birthed two of the most important works of horror fiction: Frankenstein and “The Vampyre,” respectively. It seems appropriate, then, that one of the most important films in the horror anthology lineage, Dead of Night (1945), also utilized the framing device of people gathered in a house, telling each other stories of the supernatural. The film is perhaps most famous for popularizing the subgenre of the inanimate humanoid figure that comes to life and torments a living person—a ventriloquist dummy in this case, which would inspire other dummies in horror (like in the 1964 British film Devil Doll, and Magic from 1978, written by William Goldman and based on his novel), as well as pave the way for the likes of Talky Tina from “The Twilight Zone” and Chucky from the Child’s Play series, among others.
The next two decades saw a bit of a horror anthology drought, though fans did receive Three Cases of Murder in 1955, featuring Orson Welles taking on W. Somerset Maugham’s “Lord Mountdrago,” a paranormal yarn about dreams as a landscape for revenge. Tales of Terror appeared in 1962, an early entry in the series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations from director Roger Corman and actor Vincent Price. Richard Matheson wrote the screenplay for this film; the writer had already penned numerous classic episodes of The Twilight Zone and he would become an important figure in horror omnibus history—but more on that in a minute. Two international stand-outs from the 1960s were the Italian/American picture Black Sabbath (1963), directed by Mario Bava and featuring Boris Karloff as the horror host (and yes, the film gave that famous band its name); and Kwaidan (1964), featuring four stories derived from Japanese folklore.
The release of Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors in 1965 gave the format a much-needed jolt. Starring Peter Cushing as a mad doctor showing a group of train passengers potential, nightmarish futures, the film also features Christopher Lee and Donald Sutherland, and was a career-launcher of sorts for director Freddie Francis. According to BFI’s Neil Mitchell, this film was first conceived by Amicus producer Milton Subotsky as a TV series in 1945; his hope was to replicate the success of Dead of Night, but it would take Subotsky twenty years to actualize the project. Despite this long gestation period, the film was a hit, and it set the stage for Amicus to produce several more omnibus horrors for over a decade, many of them featuring Francis in the directing chair and Cushing in front of the camera. Highlights include Torture Garden (1967), with Burgess Meredith as the devilish owner of a terror attraction; The House That Dripped Blood (1971), in which a Scotland Yard investigator learns the horrible history of a haunted abode via a series of horrifying tales told to him by those connected with the place; the first screen adaptation of Tales From The Crypt (1972), which paved away for the beloved series of the 1990s; Asylum (also 1972), featuring chilling stories from mental institution inmates; and From Beyond the Grave (1974), where the stories stem from items purchased at an evil curio shop, which anticipated Stephen King’s Needful Things by about seventeen years. Torture Garden, The House That Dripped Blood, and Asylum were all written by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho.
One of the format’s most beloved entries actually appeared on the small screen in 1975: Dan Curtis’s Trilogy of Terror, written by the aforementioned Richard Matheson and based on his short fiction. Starring Karen Black in three (or rather, four) separate rolls, the most memorable segment is, “Amelia,” featuring a Zuni fetish doll that comes to life and wreaks havoc in the titular character’s posh apartment—bringing Dead of Night‘s evil ventriloquist dummy full circle. Matheson and Curtis reunited two years later and produced another trio of creepy tales, also coincidentally titled Dead of Night. While not as effective overall as Trilogy, its final installment, “Bobby,” features a truly chilling climactic sting that is not to be missed.
From Beyond the Grave was Amicus’s final horror anthology film, and the studio folded in 1977. Subotsky separately produced The Monster Club in 1981, enlisting Vincent Price to star and Roy Ward Baker, another Amicus veteran, to direct. But this film failed to capture the spirit of the previous decade’s output and marked the unofficial end to Amicus’s run. But in 1982, the horror omnibus would receive yet another boost thanks to the aforementioned Stephen King and George A. Romero, who teamed up with effects wizard Tom Savini for one of the most popular horror anthologies of all time, Creepshow. Inspired by the original EC Comics from the 1950s and 1960s (which also gave audiences Tales From The Crypt), the film is a gory, morbid, and often hilarious trip through the eyes of a rather wicked little boy (Joe Hill, King’s son and future fellow horror novelist), who escapes into a world of violent comic books. King himself appears as an inept farm boy bedeviled by a mossy alien parasite; the cast also includes Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, E.G. Marshall, Ed Harris, Adrienne Barbeau, and Hal Holbrook. Romero and cinematographer Michael Gornick recreate the vibrant, almost hallucinatory color scheme of old comics to great effect.
Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin Entertainment and studio Warner Bros. gave audiences Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983. An on-set helicopter accident resulted in the death of actor Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese children, forever tainting the production’s legacy; apart from this, however, the film failed to truly recapture the spirit of Rod Sterling’s seminal television series. Still, there are some quality moments, including a rather creepy introductory segment featuring Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd, and an update of Richard Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” directed by George Miller of Mad Max fame and starring John Lithgow.
Other notable titles from the 1980s: Nightmares (1983), featuring Emilio Estevez playing a sinister video game; Cat’s Eye (1985), another Stephen King omnibus, including an adaptation of his rather dark short story “The Ledge”; Night Train to Terror (1985), a poor man’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors with a super cheesy rock band filming a music video on a doomed locomotive; and From a Whisper to a Scream (1987), starring Vincent Price in one of his last roles (and his final horror anthology film). The trend continued on into the 1990s, with George Romero pairing up with Dario Argento for Two Evil Eyes (1990); Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (also 1990), a big screen adaptation of the TV series; Body Bags (1993), featuring installments directed by John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, and Larry Sulkis; Necronomicon: Book of the Dead (1993), a Lovecraft-inspired anthology film; and Tales from the Hood (1995), an unsung entry to the subgenre featuring horror vignettes from an African-American perspective.
The early ’00s saw two incredible anthology films enter into the lexicon—Three…Extremes, from directors Fruit Chan, Takashi Miike, and Chan-wook Park, and the delightful, Halloween-themed Trick ‘r Treat, which utilizes the comic book-inspired flair and expert melding of humor and horror made famous with Creepshow. We follow the spirit of Samhain himself (we can just call him Sam) as he encounters—and possibly even influences—revelers of all ages on All Hallows Eve. Every individual story included in the film is a winner, but its penultimate segment, involving an elderly bus driver (Brian Cox) tormented by the souls of kids he damned decades earlier, is decidedly the film’s best. Even though there was an actual Creepshow 2 released in 1987, Trick ‘r Treat is Creepshow‘s true, spiritual sequel.
In the 2010s, some of the best horror films came out of the independent film scene, and the omnibus horror is no exception, with filmmakers experimenting with fresh approaches and framing devices to the format. Found footage met horror anthology with V/H/S (2012) and its two sequels, V/H/S 2 (2013) and V/H/S Viral. The three films included segments from big “indie horror” names like Ti West, Adam Wingard, Gareth Evans, Aaron Moorhead, and Nacho Vigalondo, among others. Drafthouse Films also tapped the indie well with their 2012 anthology The ABCs of Death, as well as its 2013 sequel and the 2016 release The ABCs of Death 2 1/2. The conceit with these films is simple: for every letter of the alphabet, filmmakers create a micro-short (so “A is for Apocalypse,” “B is for Bigfoot,” “C is for Cycle,” and so on). Tale of Tales (2015) is a bigger budget anthology film, but with a decidedly indie spirit, evoking the artistry and fairytale-infusion last seen in Kwaidan. XX (2017) gives audiences four tales directed by and starring women, including works from Karyn Kusama and Annie Clark, AKA musician St. Vincent in her first filmmaking venture. It also features a stellar adaptation of the late Jack Ketchum’s story “The Box,” written and directed by Jovanka Vuckovic.
But as experimental as these entries to the subgenre became, there is still room for a more classic handling of the format. Southbound (2015) features weary travelers regaling each other with tales of the supernatural, and the aforementioned Ghost Stories, written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, follows a professor researching paranormal phenomena, whereby several people tell them their own ghostly experiences. The filmmakers were directly inspired by the Amicus omnibus films from the 1960s and ’70s, which in turn found their inspiration from Dead of Night, a film that relied heavily on the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories, a practice born out of much older storytelling inclinations, as discussed by Dyson above.
With Ghost Stories, the horror anthology film has indeed come full circle, but this does not mean it has reached its conclusion, the end of its journey. Just as the format has evolved from our most primal instincts, it will continue to evolve and expand, ensuring future generations will not only have all the old stories to experience and re-experience in perpetuity, but also brand new tales of terror to keep them suitably chilled.
