Flickering Myth

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Countdown to Halloween – The ABCs of Death (2012)

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To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Next up; fan-favourite The ABCs of Death….

Working on a simple gimmick, The ABCs of Death gets together 26 different horror filmmakers and asks them to create 5-minute shorts based around a letter of the alphabet. With every director given seemingly complete free reign to put together whatever they want, The ABCs of Death is perhaps the most unbalanced and over-hyped horror anthology of all-time. At times it’s lazy, at other times it’s stupid and then, occassionaly, it’s not too bad.

Despite this writer’s utter hatred of V/H/S and ambivalent indifference to its sequel, it had least had some form of structure. For how messy and poorly made both movies were, there was a clear creative control over the project as a whole. Each director had to submit their script to the movie’s creator who then gave them feedback on how to improve it to meet his vision for the project. Whether this is true or not, it seems as though each filmmaker in The ABCs of Death just made a movie, sent it to the creator and he put it in regardless of whether it was crap or not.

It creates a massive sense of imbalance because there is no consistent tone. You’ll go from a harrowing short of men being forced to masturbate over horrific images (including children) to a cartoon of a woman fighting against a killer piece of poo. This is a movie which contains a segment called F is for Fart, a short about a student and her teacher orgasming over each other’s farts, and a segment in which a woman attacks herself with a coathanger called M is for Miscarriage. You can see why this film doesn’t really work.

But for how hard you try, it’s a simple fact in an anthology type show there will always be segments that peope like and sections that others don’t. Even the pinnacle of anthology horror, The Twilight Zone, had it’s fair share of naff episodes, but the balance of like and hate will more often than not swing to the “like” category. This is not the case with The ABCs of Death. There are perhaps a handful of good segements, but even that would be a stretch to claim. As soon as the movie is over, you’ll have forgotten all of tge good shorts becuse you’ll be so amazed at how rubbish the bad ones are. You’ll remember the boring segment with dog fighting, but will most likely forget the slightly clever C is for Cycle.
The ABCs of Death is perhaps less of a poor movie and more a wasted opportunity. The idea for the great anathology is in here somewhere and the gimmick is very intriguing, but the producers needed either better creative control or to make better choices. A sequel is currently in the works so there is hope for a better movie to come out at the end (even V/H/S/2 managed to get something watchable out of its ridiculous and annoying gimmick) but it needs to do something more than just editing together 26 shorts with an incredible sense of imbalance. The ABCs of Death is the pure definition of a great idea piss-poorly executed.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.

Originally published October 6, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.

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