The ABCs of Death
The ABCs of Death, an anthology of 26 short films about people being killed in spectacularly gruesome, farcical, and universally disgusting ways, is scary in a way its makers may not have anticipated: it shows how deeply uninspired and visionless horror-movie filmmaking has become.
Ever since the genre stopped caring about bottling the sensation of fear in favor of shock and gore, it's gotten away from true horror, a format that works best when deeply invested in the psychology of fear. Movies like the Saw franchise and its various torture-porn imitators have become less and less interested in messing with their audience's brains than moving the goalpost of the grotesque ever further, an objective that ensures obsolescence. There are only so many severed limbs and plucked eyeballs you can see before you're irrevocably desensitized. What haven't we seen that could still shock us? The list of possibilities grows smaller and smaller. Tom Six actually managed to horrify us in a whole new way with The Human Centipede, but even that nightmare concept became commercialized, sequelized, and stale.
Twenty-seven directors, all supposedly luminaries in the horror movie world, were brought in to film two-to-four minute segments for The ABCs of Death, in an attempt to show the diversity the genre still posseses. Sadly, rather than expand the parameters of horror, these twenty-seven filmmakers mostly converge on the same tropes. There are three conditions for each short: they must begin and end on an image of red (guaranteeing that at least half of the shorts begin and end with a shot of blood), there must be one death, and they must correspond to a letter of the alphabet — meaning we get titles like "F is for Fart," "L is for Libido," and "W is for WTF." That ensures the audience will experience acute B for Boredom on account of L for Laziness.
Anyone who's made short films can tell you that cinematic storytelling in under 10 minutes tends toward heightened emotions, with narrative twists that seek to compress a feature's worth of sensation into a tiny window. Add a requisite horror element and you get a succession of Jack in the Box effects. "D is for Dogfight" is transgressive, I suppose, in its depiction of a man graphically biting a dog, but it's diminished because, in the end, that short is entirely about how transgressive it is. And most of these films are just wafer-thin hooks for startling images. The opening salvo of a segment, "A is for Apocalypse," about a wife taking care of her bedridden husband who reaches a drastic decision regarding his care, should play like a more gruesome version of Michael Haneke's Amour. Instead it is robbed of any resonance because director Nacho Vigolondo provides no context to the couple's relationship.
However, the filmmakers here who successfully answer the question "What can still scare us?" locate that answer where great artists before them did: in real-world fears. Eli Roth's Hostel movies stand as credible horror unlike the Saw flicks because they tap a uniquely insular (and uniquely American) fear of the rest of the world beyond the United States. In The ABCs of Death Hobo with a Shotgun auteur Jason Eisener does just that in "Y is for Youngbuck," which translates a very real fear of childhood sexual abuse into cathartic revenge.
Similarly Simon Rumley's "Pressure" taps a mother's uncertainty about how to provide for her children, and shows just how far she is willing to go to support them. Lee Hardcastle's "T is for Toilet" finds horror in what used to be an old standby in the heyday of Polanski: plumbing, and its function of keeping us blissfully unaware of where excrement goes. Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), possibly the most original American horror maestro of the last decade, dives deep into the realm of body horror with "M is for Miscarriage," as do Amer masterminds Bruno Forzani and Héléne Cattet with the ode to David Cronenberg "O is for Orgasm."
These shorts are the ones that actually get inside our heads. If our brains are our biggest erogenous zone, so is it also the nexus of our fears. Not our stomachs, nor our adrenal glands. That's why you need story to fuel and contextualize the greatest scares. Without story giving context to sex, you've got YouPorn. Without story giving context to horror, you've got much of The ABCs of Death.
1.5/5
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[Photo Credit: Drafthouse Films]