Weird And Ridiculous Horror Anthology Movies

Creating a horror anthology is easy, right? Round up some scary stories, stitch them together with a framing device of some kind — a creepy storyteller will do — and watch the money roll in. But, as many creative types will tell you, it can be as hard to frighten people with a short film or story than it is with a full-length film or novel. Pacing is crucial — stories need to be almost immediately compelling and pack their time with enough shocks to rival a horror feature. The history of horror anthology movies has more than a few films that managed that balancing act: 1945's Dead of Night, George Romero and Stephen King's 1982 collaboration Creepshow, and more recently, the V/H/S and ABCs of Death franchises.

But there are also many horror anthologies that weren't able to pull off big scares in a short amount of time, and streaming services have plenty of well-intentioned but totally inert collections of short chillers. Some simply aimed for something different or bizarre within the art of the anthology. While far from good (or, in some cases, even coherent), this sub-cellar of horror anthologies achieve their own unique takes on the format. One thing is for sure: the films included in this list are in many cases weird or ridiculous (or both), but they're never dull.

Please note that spoilers will follow.

In the years that followed Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, Rod Serling lent his distinctive voice to all manner of projects, from Phantom of the Paradise and TV spots for Ford to the curious 1973 supernatural anthology Encounter with the Unknown, which was lensed in Arkansas and featured stories reportedly based in fact. The latter part is most likely baloney, as are the stories themselves, which concern curses, ghostly passengers, and a mysterious hole in the ground that drives a man insane. 

Director and co-writer Harry Thomason –- who later co-created Evening Shade and Designing Women with his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason -– most likely based two of the stories on the popular urban legends about the Vanishing Hitchhiker and Well to Hell, but isn't able to turn the pulpy shivers behind those stories into anything substantial onscreen (though he does get an unintentionally hilarious performance out of the actor who is lowered into the infernal hole). Serling's narration is professional, if perfunctory; he would offer equally world-weary voice-over for the 1974 documentary, UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, and three made-for-TV paranormal documentaries that inspired the cult series In Search Of...

The 1978 anthology The House of the Dead (also known as Alien Zone) was directed by Sharron Miller, an Emmy and Peabody Award winner for her work on TV in the '70s and '80s. House of the Dead isn't on par with her small screen efforts, but it is a very weird anthology all the same. Writer and fellow TV vet David O'Malley (The Boogens) concocts a framing device involving sinister small town mortician Ivor Francis, who informs unexpected guest (or is he?) John Ericson about the fate of four newly embalmed corpses. 

There's a schoolteacher whose dislike for her students proves fatal, a psychopath who films his murders, a pair of top sleuths from America and Britain who challenge each other to solve a bizarre mystery, and a jerk whose disdain for the homeless gets a Twilight Zone-style comeuppance. Shot in a static style that betrays its low budget -– it was filmed in Oklahoma using broadcast students from the state college as crew – House still surprises by occasionally rising above its amateur night aesthetic with creepy scenarios and capable acting from Hollywood vets Charles Aidman and Bernard Fox (Bewitched) as the warring crime solvers.

The 1983 British horror anthology feature Screamtime is actually a compilation of three theatrically released shorts made by producer Stanley A. Long –- best known for an endless string of '70s-era adults-only comedies like Adventures of a Plumber's Mate –- and writer-director Michael Armstrong, whose gruesome 1970 film Mark of the Devil is forever enshrined in exploitation history for its use of airline vomit bags as a promotional gimmick. Nothing in Screamtime quite lives up to that high-water mark of nastiness, but it's still a surprisingly effective low-budget scare film with some amusing eccentricities.

 Armstrong and Long link the three shorts through a framing story featuring a couple of deadbeats who steal VHS horror titles from the real-life Video Shack in Deuce-era Manhattan before schlepping to a friend's apartment to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Their haul offers up supernatural revenge in the form of a homicidal puppet that gets revenge on the goons who tried to ruin their owner's Punch and Judy show, a new house owner plagued by bloody visions of a serial killer's crimes, and a desperate type (played by UK pop singer David Van Day) learning the hard way that his seemingly senile employers' stories of treasure protected by gnomes are true. The second story, "Dreamhouse," was expanded to feature length for the 2010 film Psychosis, starring Charisma Carpenter.

Chicago-based filmmaker Chester Novell Turner's first film, 1984's Black Devil Doll from Hell, was a mind-blistering, no-budget supernatural thriller about a demonically possessed doll that upends the life of a church-going young woman (Shirley L. Jones). Made for about $10,000 and featuring an aesthetic somewhere south of backyard creature feature, Doll became a cult hit on the VHS circuit; Turner, who made no money on the film thanks to his deal with the distributor, returned with 1987's Tales from the QuadeaD Zone, a 62-minute anthology film soaked in his uniquely ham-fisted directorial and writing style. 

Jones returned to star in Zone's linking device –- a woman reading the titular book to the ghost of her dead son -– while the stories themselves seem to be very weird riffs on sibling rivalry (a hillbilly family has a grisly but direct way of solving a food shortage problem, and two brother carry out a bizarre feud even after one of them dies). While it's true that Turner is barely capable of even the most rudimentary filmmaking technique, the lack of self-referential humor seems to indicate QuadeaD is serious business for him, and as such, deserves at least a nod of respect. Oh, and if you're wondering what in the world "Quadead" means, Turner said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune that quad means four, and the dead part is self-evident. Got that?

Writer-producer-director Mick Garris has been involved in a tremendous amount of horror content for films and television, some of which has been fairly good (the Masters of Horror and Monsterland series, not to mention Hocus Pocus) and some not so good (Sleepwalkers). He's also written or directed a lot of Stephen King material for both mediums, including miniseries takes on The Stand in 1994 and The Shining in 1997, as well as 1996's Desperation and 2011's Bag of Bones. 

Somewhere between all of these efforts was Quicksilver Highway, a two-part anthology intended as a pilot for an ABC series. Garris, who wrote the script for the pilot, also stepped in as director for its two episodes: King's comic horror vignette "Chattery Teeth" and Clive Barker's more unsettling "The Body Politic," about our hands rebelling against us. Christopher Lloyd, tricked out in quasi-bondage gear and an ill-fitting wig, handles host duties as a mysterious traveler who shares creepy stories with those he encounters on the road. 

Lloyd is fine and the cast, which includes Matt Frewer and Alien's Veronica Cartwright (plus Barker, Garris, and John Landis all turning up in cameos), is game, but ultimately it's too lighthearted and lightweight in the scares department to make any sort of an impression. Needless to say, the pilot never went to series.

An in-name-only sequel to 1982's Romero/King horror comics tribute Creepshow and its 1988 sequel, 2006's Creepshow 3 dispenses with any connection to comic books after a desultory animated sequence and a last-minute appearance by the Creep (sort of), and dives into five absurd and ill-conceived horror vignettes. The best of the lot is probably "The Radio," with indie horror vet A.J. Bowen (the only recognizable name in the film, save for a brief appearance by Eileen Dietz of The Exorcist fame) as a schlub of a security guard whose new radio gradually pushes him to commit crimes, including murder. 

The others involve a jerk of a doctor who is haunted by a homeless man who died after eating his discarded hot dog (yes, really), a pair of dopes who come to believe that the new wife of their college professor is a robot, and a psychopathic escort who discovers that her latest date is not an easy mark. The filmmakers get a nod for attempting to link the episodes by carrying over characters in each story, but that isn't enough to save Creepshow 3 from the bottom of the horror anthology pile (a fact borne out by its 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).