With the impossibly fun Tales of Halloween now in wide release, it seems like as good a time as any to dig deep into one of my favorite subgenres of horror: the anthology film. From Tales from the Crypt to Tales from the Darkside to Tales from the Hood, the horror anthology offers something for everyone. And apparently that something is “tales.”
In speaking with most of the directors from Tales of Halloween, there was consensus in their feelings about what makes for a great anthology film: singularity of vision and consistency of quality. Both can be difficult to achieve, as the format practically dictates that some segments be stronger than others or express a different voice. But when an anthology can achieve even one of those things, there’s the potential for real horror movie magic.
There are great anthologies made by one filmmaker, among them Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, George A. Romero’s Creepshow, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror, Michael Dougherty’s Trick ’r Treat and British anthologies of the ’70s produced by Amicus. While not every segment in each of these anthologies is as good as every other, they still feel like they’re of the same piece, filtered as they are through one consistent authorial voice. An anthology like From a Whisper to a Scream (aka The Offspring) can be comprised of segments from multiple screenwriters, but director Jeff Burr is the ultimate conduit for all pitch-black nastiness that film has to offer.
Then there’s a second kind of anthology, which combines efforts from several directors, each helming an individual segment (or segments): Dead of Night (1945), Necronomicon: Book of the Dead, Body Bags and, more recently, Three… Extremes, Chillerama and both the ABCs of Death and V/H/S franchises are but a few examples. This approach can be trickier, as it doesn’t always require all of the filmmakers to be on the same page; as a result, the anthology can feel disjointed. But it has its benefits, too, as it offers the viewer exposure to several directors—or, in the case of The ABCs of Death, 26 directors—in the span of two hours and offer a sample of his or her work. Seeing “Dumplings” for the first time might inspire someone to go further down the rabbit hole of Fruit Chan’s work… even if I have concerns about such a person. The opportunity to absorb a bunch of short-form offerings from various directors is rare, and nothing provides that opportunity better than the anthology film.
The fun of anthologies is that they offer variety; as long as we, the audience, feel like the segments exist within the same universe, we’ll agree to follow an anthology wherever the filmmakers take us. This is one of my issues with the ABCs of Death films: they don’t exist in the same universe. Yes, they offer variety, but getting tonally jerked around 26 times makes it impossible to ever settle into a movie’s groove. On the other hand, something like “Morella,” the opening segment of the 1962 Edgar Allan Poe anthology, Tales of Terror, is dripping with gothic atmosphere and tragic gravitas, but that doesn’t stop director Roger Corman from completely shifting gears in the second segment with the comically silly “The Black Cat.” Because both are based on Poe (one more loosely than the other), because Vincent Price stars in both and because both feature the same lush gothic castle setting, the two segments feel of the same piece despite being wildly different tonally.
Which brings me back to Tales of Halloween, one of the best anthologies in years and one of my favorite horror films of 2015. The 11 directors behind the movie have found a way to have the best of both worlds, offering ten different filmmaking voices across ten different shorts but maintaining a consistency of quality and spirit—the shorts always exist in the same universe. Like Tales of Terror, Tales of Halloween is able to veer from the darkness of Adam Gierasch’s “Trick” to the atmospheric chills of Axelle Carolyn’s “Grimm Grinning Ghost” to the broad comedy of John Skipp and Andrew Kasch’s “This Means War” without ever giving the audience whiplash. Uniting the segments around a single theme—Halloween night in the same town—gives the anthology a “hook” that connects the pieces without the need of a traditional wraparound story in much the same way as Trick ’r Treat did almost a decade ago. And because all the filmmakers collaborated and shot the movie together, everyone keeps each other honest and on his or her best game—there’s a high standard of quality for each contribution.
The truth is that Tales of Halloween doesn’t even need to be as good as it is, because even a bad anthology goes down easy. It’s like binge watching a show on Netflix that you only sort of enjoy—even if one installment sucks, the next one is right around the corner to wash the taste out of your mouth. That all the directors involved refused to let a lesser segment or two slip by knowing that it would probably be forgiven is further proof of what a special movie Tales of Halloween is. It’s a movie with all the fun of Creepshow, the variety of Dead of Night, the Halloween spirit of Trick ’r Treat. As both a fan and a student of horror anthologies, this one does it all right.
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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