Anthology horror is having a moment right now. This happens every other decade or so; like the numbnut denizens of The Purge expunging the violence from their systems by perennially slaughtering unlucky bystanders (usually of the lower-class variety), filmmakers resurrect the anthology format every so often, when their well of ideas has run dry. This year we’re privy to V/H/S Viral and The ABCs of Death 2, mediocre sequels to mediocre horror anthologies that make one yearn for Mario Bava’s Karloff-tastic Black Sabbath or George A. Romero’s Creepshow. But let’s be honest here: anthology horror films have always been considered, and treated as, second-tier movies. And since horror is already considered subpar by genre detractors, that makes anthologies the second tier of the second tier. Anthologies channel all of the low-brow mediums of pop-culture—comics, pulps and penny dreadfuls, dime novels, Grand Guignol, and that harbinger of brain-degradation we call television—and offer nothing of societal value.
But anthology horror has a pretty fascinating history, for those willing to sift through the schlock (or perhaps wade in it, since Romero has shown us that schlock can be wonderful). Anthology horror, like pretty much all forms of genre fiction, has roots in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. His first medley of gothic tales, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), set the standard for horror collections, and harbors some of his best deep-cuts (“Berenice” and “Morella”), as well as “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe was quite vocal in opining that the short story was a superior form of art than the novel because the short has an alliance of all details leading to one singular aesthetic, a unity of impression. The individual segments of anthologies follow a similar notion. Take, for instance, “The Drop of Water” from Bava’s Black Sabbath. Every detail pertains to the stolen ring and the thief’s inevitable demise, and in less than 30 minutes Bava tells a spine-tingling tale in his inimitable, histrionic way.
The anthology found its initial footing on television. Modern shows like American Horror Story are the long-gestating bastard offspring of revue shows, which birthed the anthology show in the late-1940s. Before The Lone Ranger and I Love Lucy spurred the industry to move to the west coast and swap out old kinescopes for vivid celluloid, TV shows were produced in the Big Apple and retained a certain level of grace. Kraft TV (1947-1958) and Studio One (1948-1958) crafted the template for weekly anthology programs. Genre anthologies soon followed: The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965) were hits, and The Outer Limits (1963-1965) found cult appeal. But anthologies hit a 20-year slump starting in the mid-1960s. Rod Serling, architect of The Twilight Zone, created a minor cult favorite with Night Gallery starting at the end of that decade, but it fared poorly with viewers and only lasted three seasons. The reason American Horror Story has become so successful in our contemporary, Golden Era of television, is because the show treats each season as an entry, rather than each episode, a luxury not afforded to past anthologies.
In the 1960s, Bava unveiled Black Sabbath, and Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi nabbed the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, as well as an Oscar nomination, for his brilliant Kwaidan, a stylish and often petrifying 3-hour amalgam of ghost stories. Deeply rooted in Japanese folklore, Kobayashi’s film eschews the camp favored by its American contemporaries. There’s something delicious in the fact that Italian and Japanese filmmakers mastered a genre considered to be innately American while American filmmakers struggled. And British studio Amicus Productions was churning out some stunning and grisly anthologies, like The House That Dripped Blood, Tales From the Crypt (which later inspired the HBO series), and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. Meanwhile, American anthologies lurked in quietude until the 1980s, when filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George A. Romero turned to television to reanimate the anthology series. Romero’s Tales from the Darkside (1983-1988) and Spielberg’s Amazing Stories (1985-1987) landed major filmmakers like Martin Scorsese to helm episodes, but the lack of characters in whom viewers could invest once again lead to diminishing ratings. Viewers didn’t want to tune in for a different cast and aesthetic every week.
Romero’s return to form, Creepshow (1982), written by Stephen King, could be seen as the progenitor of the anthology revitalization in the 1980s. It’s the most technically and aesthetically assured film of Romero’s career, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. But Spielberg fared less well: The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) was stricken by tragedy as Vic Morrow and two children actors died in a freak helicopter crash while shooting John Landis’ segment (Landis broke child labor laws and weathered a decade-long trial, eventually being exonerated). Creepshow 2 (1987) underperformed, Creepshow 3 became Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), and anthologies slumped again.
Anthology horror slacked off in the 1990s, spending most of the decade in the crypts of HBO (Tales from the Crypt, an inexplicable hit) and the hood (Tales from the Hood and Hood of Horror, both of which tried to target black moviegoers; the former ill-advisedly used a trio of drug dealers as a framing device, and unsurprisingly failed to find an audience). But anthology horror is now enjoying another, likely brief moment in the proverbial sun. The best recent anthology, Trick ’r Treat, which had a hell of a time even getting to home media despite considerable acclaim, was ahead of the curve, and paid for its inventiveness by going straight-to-DVD in 2009. Too bad, since it’s way better than ABCs and V/H/S, despite the fact that Bill Plympton has a stellar segment in ABCs 2. It remains to be seen how well anthology horror will fare at the box office and VOD, but one can safely assume that it might lapse into dormancy again if these movies fail to perform financially. And that’s unfortunate, since anthology horror is so rife with unique possibilities, as Trick ‘r Treat shows. But history tells us that, eventually, inevitably, this fleeting moment will pass.
