Horror fans want it all. Why just have zombies when you can have zombies, ghosts, vampires and serial killers all in one smorgasbord of terror? Thats the beauty of horror anthologies: theres something for everyone.
Twenty years ago, writer-director Rusty Cundieff took that mentality and delivered it to an audience whod previously been malnourished genre-wise, let alone anthology-wise: black horror lovers. Unabashedly inspired by E.C. Comics and movies like Creepshow, Cundieffs Tales from the Hoodreleased on May 24, 1995adapted the usual omnibus themes (various forms of revenge) for a very specific audience. Theres the story about a zombie hell-bent on punishing the shady cops who wrongfully caused his death; a cautionary tale about domestic violence told with childs fantastic POV; the racial bigot whos terrorized by a legion of murderous slave dolls; and the Clockwork-Orange-like tale of a gang members experimental rehabilitation process. Theres even a classical framing device, with three hoodlums arriving at a funeral home to buy drugs and being given a tour of the corpse-ridden premises by the flamboyant owner (Clarence Williams III).
Rarely ever mentioned within talks about horrors best anthologies, Tales from the Hood is an underappreciated film thats been waiting for its revival long enough. And one compliment you could give it is that Cundieffs film works best as a whole, with its segments connective threads and overarching sensibilities nicely congealing into an anthology whose sum is better than its parts.
The same cant be said, however, for most other horror omnibuses. Some, like Creepshow, are end-to-end great, but the majority of the genres anthology movies are remembered more for housing individual moments of supremacy than for being uniformly supreme. With that in mind, and in honor of the storytelling format that inspired Rusty Cundieff to make the now-two-decades-old Tales from the Hood, here are 20 must-see horror anthology segmentswith, thats right, something for everyone.
Note: NSFW images follow
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Matt Barone is a film-obsessed writer and editor of TribecaFilm.com. When hes not contributing to outlets like The Dissolve and Birth.Movies.Death, he endlessly weighs in on all things horror on Twitter.
Anthology Segments
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Anthology Segments #1
Dead of Night, “Ventriloquist’s Dummy Sequence” (1945)
Director: Alberto Cavalcanti
All horror anthologies trace back to Dead of Night, the seminal British omnibus that, 70 years after its release, still has the best wraparound coda of all. It’s also home to one of the most influential segments ever, which, like the rest of the shorts, is untitled. But if you’ve ever seen the Twilight Zone episode “The Dummy,” you’ve also seen this knockout segment, just the inferior version, since it’s an unsubtle rip. Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who’s losing his marbles and thinks his dummy is a living, manipulating thing; an inanimate boss. Frankly, Dead of Night’s other segments, save its excellent framing device, aren’t that memorable, but Redgrave’s deranged puppeteer is the granddaddy of all portmanteau horror.
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Anthology Segments #2
Black Sabbath, “The Drop of Water” (1963)
Director: Mario Bava
You know who’s a big fan of this bone-cooling segment from Italian horror master Mario Bava’s brilliant Black Sabbath? Jennifer Kent, the writer-director behind The Babadook—she actually paid out of her own pocket to secure the rights to show a clip from “The Drop of Water,” because, well, it’s that goddamn terrifying and first-rate. The set-up is pure EC Comics vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave goodness: A scoundrel of a woman snatches a ring from a dead woman’s finger. She begins seeing visions of the departed, and gradually falls apart. And once you’ve seen that dead lady’s clown-meets-skeleton-meets-Robert-Blake-in-Lost-Highway smile, you, too, won’t be able to shake it off.
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Anthology Segments #3
Tales from the Crypt, “…And All Through the House” (1972)
Director: Freddie Francis
Christmas and horror have long been good friends, but let’s be real here: There are only two Yuletide horror works that are genuinely frightening. One is, of course, Bob Clark’s formative slasher Black Christmas, and the other is this, the first segment in Amicus Productions’ all-time best anthology. Joan Crawford stars as a gold-digger who kills her husband on Christmas Night, the same night in which a psycho escapes from a nearby loony bin dressed as a Jugular-Crushing Ol’ Saint Nick. Once their paths cross, “…And All Through the House” settles into its home invasion groove, leading up to a vintage EC Comics twist that’s bleak and, in true EC form, the blackest of comedy gold.
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Anthology Segments #4
Tales from the Crypt, “Poetic Justice” (1972)
Director: Freddie Francis
If “…And All Through the House” is Tales from the Crypt’s gut-punch of an opening, “Poetic Justice” is the dark heart at the film’s center. It’s perhaps the horror anthology subgenre’s most heartbreaking tale, but, thankfully, it’s also the most cathartic. The heart destruction comes from Peter Cushing’s tender performance as Arthur Grimsdyke, a kind and loving old man who lives to make the neighborhood kids smile, yet who’s seen as a pox on the street’s otherwise affluent disposition by rich son-of-a-bitch James Elliot (Robin Phillips). James systematically decimates Grimsdyke’s life until the elder man kills himself on Valentine’s Day. He doesn’t stay dead, unsurprisingly, and “Poetic Justice” culminates with a greeting card for the ages.
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Anthology Segments #5
Tales from the Crypt, “Blind Alleys” (1972)
Director: Freddie Francis
If there were a Louvre for horror anthology films, “Blind Alleys” would deserve its own guarded room—it’s the Mona Lisa of anthology segments. Set in a retirement home for blind elders, it’s a nasty shot of elegant storytelling in which the home’s new director, a stodgy military man named Rogers (Nigel Patrick), starts penny-pinching by lessening the patients’ meals and the building’s heat, while he eats big steak dinners and cozies up with his beloved German Shepherd pooch, Shane. The inmates eventually take over the asylum, so to speak, but how they make Rogers pay for his cold-heartedness is so absurd, yet also so beautifully constructed, and its pay-off has such narrative might, that even ruining its details here for Tales from the Crypt virgins would be crueler than Rogers’ own insensivity.
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Anthology Segments #6
The Vault of Horror, “Drawn and Quartered” (1973)
Director: Roy Ward Baker
Amicus’ Tales from the Crypt is the British production company’s best movie, but it’s far from their only great one. The Vault of Horror is almost as good as Tales, sticking so closely to its predecessor’s formula that it’s easy to confuse the two, or mix and match segments to the wrong film. And “Drawn and Quartered” is so excellent that it’s completely understandable to assume it’s part of the masterful predecessor, although it’s really Vault’s crowning achievement. A down-on-his-luck painter living in Haiti gets a voodoo priestess to give him a sick talent: when he paints someone’s portrait, something terrible will happen to them if he damages the painting. He uses this newfound gift on three bastards who’ve ruined him, but in his payback tour, neglects to remember that he’d started a self-portrait before he met with the priestess. And, well, you don’t need to be the Cryptkeeper to figure out the rest.
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Anthology Segments #7
Asylum, “Mannikins of Horror” (1972)
Director: Roy Ward Baker
If Tales from the Crypt is Amicus’ best and Vault of Horror is the film most people argue as its competition, Asylum is the company’s most slept-on. Written by the great Robert Bloch (Psycho), Asylum unfolds as a doctor is interviewing for a job at a mental institution, with each segment proceeding to reveal a different patient’s nightmarish backstory. In a clever little tweak to the anthology format, Asylum’s final segment, “Mannikins of Horror,” bleeds directly into the wraparound’s climax. One of the facility’s in-house doctors has been hard at work on a small automaton that looks like him and, if all goes as planned, will soon house the doc’s own soul and be used to bump off his least-liked colleagues. And, not to mention, looks like it could be the forefather of the Puppet Master franchise.
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Anthology Segments #8
Trilogy of Terror, “Amelia” (1975)
Director: Dan Curtis
Short horror story writers don’t get much better than the late Richard Matheson, a master of the form whose tales have been touchstones in everything from The Twilight Zone to Steven Spielberg’s filmography (Duel). One of the best-ever adaptations of a Matheson short is “Amelia,” a flawless narrative uppercut trapped inside an otherwise mediocre anthology. The great Karen Black, who stars in all three of the made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror’s segments, plays a woman who’s fighting for survival against an action-figure-sized Zuni fetish doll that’s basically Major League’s Joe Boo but with a spear. “Amelia” is claustrophobic, violent, and capped off by a feral-looking shot of Black that alone should’ve won her an Emmy.
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Anthology Segments #9
Dead of Night, “Bobby” (1977)
Director: Dan Curtis
Back in the ’70s, Dan Curtis was to American made-for-TV horror anthologies what Freddie Francis and Roy Ward Baker were to England’s Amicus Productions. Looking to one-up himself after Trilogy of Terror’s “Amelia” closer, Curtis once again saved the best for last with “Bobby,” the third and final segment in the altogether spotty Dead of Night. Considering how effective “Bobby” is, the two weaker tales can be forgiven. A mother (Joan Hackett) is in deep mourning over the death of her little boy, and when she’s given a second chance of sorts with him, some dark truths are revealed. When the big revelation hits, it comes in the form of one of those creepy-as-hell ghoul faces that you’ll never be able to un-see.
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Anthology Segments #10
Creepshow, “The Crate” (1982)
Director: George A. Romero
Asking someone to choose his or her favorite segment in George A. Romero and Stephen King’s tremendous 1982 anthology Creepshow is akin to making Nola Carveth pick the little Brood monster she loves the most: they’re all violent, special and deserve praise. But with expanded running time and wonderfully badass central monster, “The Crate” is tough to argue against. Hal Holbrook delivers a superb performance as a college professor whose nagging and emotionally assaultive wife (the equally great Adrienne Barbeau) turns life into a neverending Hell. He sees a way out from her abusive ways, though, when a 148-year-old crate is discovered in the university’s basement. If you think Gone Girl paints a cynical portrait of marriage, you’ll be ready to join the nearest convent or monastery after watching “The Crate.”
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Anthology Segments #11
Creepshow, “They’re Creeping Up On You” (1982)
Director: George A. Romero
Even if you’re not ready to call this one Creepshow’s best segment, you’re undoubtedly not about to debate this opinion: it’s the toughest to watch. E.G. Marshall plays a mean-spirited businessman who suffers from mysophobia, meaning he’s an extreme germaphobe. He never leaves his hermetically sealed apartment, but, since he lives in New York City, his pad is still vulnerable to cockroaches. And, thank the EC gods and George “A is for Awesome” Romero, those damn roaches show up as a small country’s worth of invaders. Romero filmed with actual cockroaches shipped in from Guatemala, and he doesn’t let the viewer lose sight of that. The roaches are front, center, and, in the segment’s gag-inducing final shot, basically in every frame of the screen.
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Anthology Segments #12
Twilight Zone: The Movie, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (1983)
Director: George Miller
A friendly reminder that Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller has always been the man, and that he’s made some super-cool movies outside of the Mad Max universe. Like this, the best segment in producers Steven Spielberg and John Landis’ altogether lovable big-screen extension of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Once again based on Richard Matheson’s short story of the same name, Miller’s totally gonzo segment, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” puts the original William-Shatner-led episode to shame. John Lithgow is madness personified as a guy who has a nervous breakdown while flying because he’s deathly petrified of airplanes. But there’s an additional factor intensifying his paranoia: a gnarly-looking gremlin that makes its counterpart from Shatner’s episode even more like a chubby guy clad in shaggy carpeting. Miller infuses the segment with the same bonkers attitude that’s evident throughout Fury Road.
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Anthology Segments #13
Creepshow 2, “The Raft” (1987)
Director: Michael Gornick
Although Creepshow’s George A. Romero and Stephen King were back, as screenwriter and story generator, respectively, Creepshow 2 couldn’t live up to the original’s. It suffers from the common anthology dilemma of unevenness, with one whopper of a segment surrounded by two weaker shorts and a throwaway framing device. But, man, is that whopper something special. Titled “The Raft,” it’s a claustrophobic chiller set in the most wide-open of spaces, a lake in which some young, pretty people are swimming. They flee to the raft in the middle of the water when a strange black floating circle of tar begins stalking them—consider it The Blob’s aquatic cousin. “The Raft” is visceral and brutal, namely in one specific death where an unlikely bro becomes a human pretzel.
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Anthology Segments #14
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, “Cat From Hell” (1990)
Director: John Harrison
As Shock recently pointed out, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is a much better anthology than people give it credit for. It’s a star-studded affair that, at the very least, should be seen as Creepshow Lite. Though all three of its segments are memorable, the George A. Romero-scripted “Cat from Hell,” based on a Stephen King short story, is Tales from the Darkside’s weirdest and most blackly comedic short, and on this list of mostly mood-killing segments, why not have some fun? An old crotchety man (William Hickey) in a wheelchair hires an assassin (David Johansen) to take out a rather unlikely target: the elder gent’s black cat, presumed to be a Satan’s feline spawn by the wheelchair-bound senior. Johansen is no Richard Kuklinski, though; Romero and director John Harrison, on the other hand, are generous enough to show you what it’d look like if a cat jumped into a man’s throat.
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Anthology Segments #15
Three Extremes, “Box” (2004)
Director: Takashi Miike
Naturally, this East Asian horror anthology featuring the directorial talents of masters Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook and Takashi Miike is next-level icky. But it’s also A-level stellar. You’d think it’d be tough to include a segment in which people eat dumplings stuffed with dead human fetuses and have that not be the sickest one, but, alas, that’s not the Three Extremes short directed by Mr. Miike. With “Box,” the film’s closing segment, Miike forgoes any cheap shocks in favor of an overpowering sense of reality distortion. An introverted young woman keeps dreaming that she’s been buried in a box that’s placed deep beneath the snow, which leads to an explosion of visual surrealism, including a stained-in-your-brain image of a hunchbacked woman with four arms and two heads.
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Anthology Segments #16
Little Deaths, “Bitch” (2011)
Director: Simon Rumley
An alternate title for this nasty British anthology could be All Killer, No Filler, since there’s no framing device whatsoever. Another title option: What. The. Fuck. The first two segments, directed by Sean Hogan and Andrew Parkinson, deal with turning a homeless woman into a sex slave and Nazis’ experiments with tree-trunk-sized penises, respectively, but the third and final segment is Little Deaths’ true bravura moment of amazing depravity. The ever-taboo-strangling writer-director Simon Rumley (Red, White & Blue) addresses romantic dysfunction via a domineering woman who’s afraid of dogs and copes with that fear by making her pushover boyfriend act like a canine in humiliating BDSM sessions. After she cheats on him, her emotionally abused lover devies revenge that’d make the Baha Men proud, and Rumley stages the film’s horrific climax with a perverse sense of calmness that makes it all the more gruesome.
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Anthology Segments #17
V/H/S, “Amateur Night” (2012)
Director: David Bruckner
Horror’s most divisive anthology series, the V/H/S trilogy, remains as debatable as the found-footage technique through which it functions. Still, it’s tough to deny that the franchise got off to a dynamite start with the first film’s opening segment, written and directed by David Bruckner (one-third of the team behind 2007’s The Signal). “Amateur Night” is the ultimate dude-bro nightmare, showing how three douchey frat guys’ night out on the town—captured via camera hidden in one kid’s glasses—devolves into a monster mash after they bring a strange girl back to their hotel room. Hannah Fierman, whose big eyes and pale skin tone are naturally freaky, kills it, both literally and figuratively, as the girl with a wickedly demonic secret.
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Anthology Segments #18
V/H/S, “10/31/98” (2012)
Directors: Radio Silence
Another undeniable thing about the first V/H/S: Radio Silence’s segment is awesomely insane. The film’s concluding blast of energy, “10/31/98” is a marvel of technical innovation on a string-and-duct-tape budget. A bunch of well-meaning dudes in costumes head to a stranger’s house for some Halloween night shenanigans. They search through the empty home, hear noises in the attic and then head up there to find what looks like an attempted exorcism of a witch. Then, arms start grabbing at them from beneath the floorboards, and silverware inexplicably flies through the air, and doorknobs disappear inwards. And it all looks incredibly legit, thanks to the Radio Silence team’s ability to manufacture A-grade effects on a tiny price tag.
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Anthology Segments #19
The ABCs of Death, “L is for Libido” (2013)
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
When news surfaced earlier this year about the schoolteacher who’s facing legal action for showing The ABCs of Death to her students, anyone who’d seen the film couldn’t help but immediately think about Indonesian filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto’s “L is for Libido.” Because, holy crap, those kids must’ve aged a good five years after watching what’s easily both the most sexually vile and endearingly disgusting horror anthology segment of all time. Two guys are strapped down to chairs and forced to watch awful sexual scenarios performed on a stage to see who can finish masturbating first, and whoever blows their load second is abruptly executed. If that’s enough to pique your interest, sickos, know this much: Tjahjanto shows everything.
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Anthology Segments #20
V/H/S/2, “Safe Haven” (2013)
Directors: Gareth Huw Evans, Timo Tjahjanto
Earlier in this list, Tales from the Crypt’s “Blind Alleys” was called the horror anthology genre’s Mona Lisa, which would make V/H/S/2’s “Safe Haven” its Sistine Chapel. Clocking in at over 40 minutes long, co-directors Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid movies) and Timo Tjahjanto’s mini movie is modern horror’s occultism peak, following a group of documentarians who venture into a cult leader’s private compound for an interview and quickly realize they’ve arrived on the day of reckoning. The first 10 minutes or so are dedicated to character and story build-ups, but once the first drop of blood spills, “Safe Haven” erupts into a continuous succession of horror that obliterates the word “breathless” out of Webster’s little book. There are zombies, demons, mass suicides, inhuman sex, exploding bellies, and more, all presented as a DOOM-like survival simulator thanks to V/H/S/2’s found-footage mandate.
