One sub-category of scary movie is the horror anthology. Representative films include Black Sabbath (1963), Creepshow (1982) and Tales from the Hood (1995). Instead of telling one long story, as a novel does, you get several tales, like a collection of short stories.
The more ambitious of these movies have an overarching story that ties everything together cohesively, usually with a twist ending or a shocking reveal. For example, five passengers on a train are each told their future; then it turns out they’re all dead.
The first horror anthology is probably the silent film Unheimliche Geschichten (Eerie Tales), from 1919. Its director, the Vienna-born Richard Oswald, did another horror anthology under the same name in 1932, which even repeated some of the same stories.
Director Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod (Destiny), from 1921, isn’t really horror, but does have supernatural elements.
Waxworks (1924), may be the first horror anthology that ties everything around a central core: a collection of figures in a wax museum. It was directed by Paul Leni, a key figure in German Expressionist filmmaking, who later moved to America and directed The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928) for Universal Studios.
I think that makes Flesh and Fantasy (1943), from the makers of the anthology film Tales of Manhattan, the first American horror anthology. In 1949, France offered Histoires extraordinaires a faire peur ou a faire rire (Unusual Tales).
But of all these movies, the one that is most influential on contemporary horror anthologies is the 1945 British release Dead of Night. It tells five solid tales of the supernatural (although one is weak as horror, it does serve a dramatic purpose) and includes a wraparound tale that actually elevates the whole thing.
The concept of a group of people meeting at a single location & telling each other stories has been a commonplace structure in literature, such as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Dead of Night begins with Architect Walter Craig arriving for a stay at a country house. He is haunted by the sense that he has been through these events, that he knows that something terrible is going to happen. Dr. van Straaten, a psychiatrist and another guest, tries to dissuade him from this feeling.
In a very natural, organic fashion, this leads to some of those present telling a story about something extraordinary that has happened to them. (The stories are “The Hearse Conductor,” “The Christmas Party,” “The Haunted Mirror,” “The Golfing Story,” and “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy.”) Craig is able to predict events at the house, lending credence to his claim that something horrible will happen. After the final tale is completed, Craig and the doctor have a confrontation. The horrible thing happens. And then it turns out that the man is stuck in a larger nightmare, from which he can’t escape.
The film as a whole has a very strong structure, but each individual story is effective as well. To the modern viewer, the stories might not seem terribly original, but I can assure you that the way they are told strikes through to the primal heart of what scares us.
The first story (“The Hearse Conductor”) may seem familiar, as it is almost identical to The Twilight Zone‘s episode “Twenty Two” (“Room for one more, honey.”). Both versions are based on E. F. Benson’s 1906 short story “The Bus-Conductor.” Even so, it’s told well. A wounded pilot opens the curtains at night, but suddenly sees a horse-drawn hearse outside in broad daylight. This vision helps him avoid death, echoing the experience that our central character is going through.
“The Christmas Party” also has a very familiar premise, as someone sees another person and later finds out it was a ghost. But the setting of a children’s Christmas party at a large manor house helps lend a fairy tale tone to the story. In addition, the events are shown in a matter-of-fact fashion.
A young boy, Jimmy, trying to impress Sally O’Hara, tells her of a brutal murder that had been committed in the house year before: “The girl who did it must have been crackers, I suppose, really. Strangled him and then half cut his head off.” In fact, Constance Kent, the murderer, was a real person, a 16-year-old girl who murdered her 3-year old half-brother in 1860. The case had also been an inspiration for portions of Wilkie Collins’ classic The Moonstone (1868) & Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), so it might have been familiar to British audiences seeing the film for the first time.
Once you know that the boy that the Sally encounters has been killed in such a horrible fashion, it makes their encounter particularly haunting. (You can see the scene here.)
“The Haunted Mirror” is, once again, a story that has been told elsewhere (For example, in an episode of the TV series Thriller, starring William Shatner), but it’s probably never been told better. The supernatural phenomenon is so simple, but so startling: When the man looks into the antique mirror his wife purchased for him, he doesn’t see himself standing in his own house, but in another room. In time, you learn that the previous owner of the mirror lived in that other place. It’s where he murdered his wife.
The next segment is universally considered the weakest, and with good reason. It’s a droll comic tale of golf, based on an H.G. Wells story. It’s a ghost story that’s neither particularly funny nor scary. But as part of the overarching narrative, one of the guests tries to break up the spookiness by throwing in his own tale; this turns out to be just his attempt to lighten the mood by telling a joke. It does help set us up for the final segment, so no harm is done.
One interesting thing to note is that the golf-obsessed characters are played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who appeared on a number of occasions as the characters Charters and Caldicott. The duo first appears as a couple of classic cricket-obsessed Englishmen in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (which coincidentally starred Michael Redgrave, who appears in the next segment of Dead of Night). The two characters were so popular that they appeared in other movies and eventually their own series on BBC Radio. The characters were later revived for the 1985 BBC television series Charters and Caldicott, with Michael Aldridge and Robin Bailey.
Finally, we get one of the most bizarre story, “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy.” Some folks argue which segment is the scariest, but this one is certainly the most famous from the film. As the title indicates, it’s about a ventriloquist’s dummy. Those dummies are spooky things. They’re lifelike, but they’re also clearly just dolls.
What makes this story so effective is that it’s open to interpretation. It can be seen as a story of madness. It can also be seen as a story of haunting and possession. Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist, Maxwell Frere, may be crazy for thinking his dummy Hugo is alive, but there are a couple instances where the dummy seem to act even when Maxwell isn’t in the room. For example, watch this segment, where Maxwell runs into a performer he considers a rival. The later scene where Maxwell kills Hugo is still shocking, even on a second viewing. It’s ironic that the psychiatrist, the one skeptic in the room, tells the story that’s the hardest to shake off.
One further piece of context to consider is that horror films were banned in Britain during World War II. Dead of Night was one of the first to be released after the conflict ended. Its various segments were directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer.
One of it is biggest influences can be seen in the series of British horror anthologies that started in the mid Sixties, often from Amicus Productions: Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Asylum (1972), Tales from the Crypt (1972). None of them lived up to the continuing power of the original.
One Response
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Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey Says:
I know of a few horror anthology films (and you have named others I hadn’t heard of), but I am hard-pressed to think of anthology films in any other genres. Is there something special about horror in this regard? Are there gangster anthologies or war anthologies or cowboy anthologies?