The omnibus horror concept has been something of a trend as of late, and for good reason. With relatively small budgets, these collaborative efforts are easy to produce because they farm out aspiring talent willing to work for exposure. By connecting various up-and-coming directors with eerie fetishes for making frightful cinema, the producers are able to yield some wholly original content. When forcing filmmakers to push their creativity and imagination, the limitation of only a few thousand dollars becomes more of a challenge in resourcefulness than a constraint. This has been the case with two recent Sundance midnight offerings V/H/S and S-VHS and they are only recent examples for this trend, as the practice has been used within the horror genre for quite some time (check out a personal favorite 3 Extremes, which brings together some of Asia’s best horror filmmakers). But in The ABCs of Death, producers may have set a world record for their collaborative effort, combining 26 filmmakers to make 26 different interpretations of people dying, each assigned a different letter of the alphabet as inspiration.
Produced and distributed by Texas-based Drafthouse Films, the beloved force behind the successful Drafthouse Theaters, and spanning across 15 countries, The ABCs of Death is perhaps the most ambitious omnibus film to date. That being said, the results are less than stellar, primarily because the consistency of quality short films is outweighed by a majority of juvenile and cliché horror tropes. There’s also so many shorts to soak in that it becomes somewhat of a chore to sit through all of them, especially when so many are lackluster. More frustrating is that by the end, it’s hard to cherish more than a handful of standout scenes or stories, because it’s been diluted by the overall effect of having watched so many separate shorts. But it’s not completely devoid of quality, and the few rare occasions where ABCs shines might be reason enough to watch, but only if you are an emphatic horror fan.
The standout and personal favorite from all the shorts has to be for the letter L, Libido, directed by Timo Tjahjanto. It’s also no surprise that the filmmaker delivered quality work when he teamed up with Gareth Evans for their joint S-VHS segment (our review from Sundance). The budding director is clearly a master of the genre and deserves recognition for his originality and unnerving ability to create scenarios that are difficult to forget. Another highlight comes from British filmmaker Ben Wheatly and his short for the letter U, Unearthed. It’s a first-person experience, similar to the zombie POV segment in S-VHS, the with main difference being placed inside a vampire’s head as opposed to the mindless undead. There’s also a highly entertaining no-dialogue battle between human and dog directed by Marcel Sarmiento in the style of the boxing scenes in Snatch, and a crafty animated stop-motion short about a killer toilet directed by Lee Hardcastle.
Still, these few highs do not offset the many, many lows of The ABCs of Death. Without calling out specific shorts, more than most rely on crude jokes, excessive amounts of unrealistic gore and unearned shock value. The V/H/S crew (TI West, Adam Wingard, Jason Eisner) have some of the weakest sections, including an almost unbearably self referential short, Q for Quack, directed by Adam Wingard. Japanese shock maestro Noboru Iguchi delivers perhaps the most comedic entry, a coming-of-age story about a young girl with killer farts, a perfect barometer for the level of maturity and sensibilities at play. Clearly designed for horror junkies and desperately suffering from a lack of quality ideas, The ABCs of Death is more interesting in concept than it is in execution.
The ABCs of Death is now in limited release and on VOD.