The ABCs of DeathMovies like The ABCs of Death
- Key Features:
- Anthology, Vignette film, Black comedy, Violence-high, Gore-high, Dark humor, Satire, Indie film, Cult classic, Independent film
- Tone:
- serious, cynical, gritty
- Target Audience:
- Genre enthusiasts, Horror fans, Cult film aficionados
- Emotional Arc:
- Disgust → Unease
The ABCs of Death

An ambitious anthology film featuring segments directed by over two dozen of the world's leading talents in contemporary genre film. Inspired by children's educational ABC books, the film comprises 26 individual chapters, each helmed by a different director assigned a letter of the alphabet. The directors were then given free reign in choosing a word to create a story involving death.
The ABCs of Death
Taking all that was great from the first instalment, the movie aims to be a wilder, leaner, faster-paced and even more entertaining anthology this time around, with a new crop of award-winning, visionary filmmakers from around the globe.

An anthology of 26 fan entries submitted for inclusion in ABCs of Death 2, each offering various takes on the letter "M".

A series of interconnected short films are the backdrop for a maniac screenwriter who pitches insane storylines featuring some of Hollywood's biggest and brightest.

Composed of three disturbingly sensual and terrifying short narratives, unified by the twin themes of sex and death.

Advent – a time of joyful anticipation. You will surely remember the feeling you had as a child, waking up on the first December morning. Rising early, ready to open a new door for 24 consecutive days.

A feature-length anthology film. They are known as myths, lore, and folktales. Created to give logic to mankind’s darkest fears, these stories laid the foundation for what we now know as the horror genre.

A collection of Halloween-themed videotapes unleashes a series of twisted, blood-soaked tales, turning trick-or-treat into a struggle for survival.

An anthology of five macabre short stories about hungry ghosts, comatose brain dead, a group of bright-eyed actors, an unscrupulous car salesman, and careless backpack tourists.

Ten stories from horror's top directors. Ghosts, ghouls, monsters, and the devil delight in terrorizing unsuspecting residents of a suburban neighborhood on Halloween night. This creepy anthology combines classic Halloween tales with the stuff of nightmares.

An anthology feature film that puts a uniquely dark and original spin on some of the most iconic and beloved holidays of all time by challenging our folklore, traditions and assumptions.

This all-female horror anthology features four dark tales from four fiercely talented women.

In the phantasmagorical town of Raven's End, a misguided young girl takes refuge in a decrepit old mortuary. The eccentric undertaker chronicles the strange history of the town through a series of twisted tales, each more terrifying than the last, but the young girl's world is unhinged when she discovers that the final story... is her own.

As midnight falls, all manner of terror invades the Earth. Demons, cannibals, killers, ghosts and monsters swarm the world in these tales of the supernatural, the fantastic, and the just plain horrific. Featuring nine stories of horror.

An anthology of short films inspired by the events of the September 11 World Trade Center attacks.

Three stories adapted from the work of Edgar Allen Poe: 1) A man and his daughter are reunited, but the blame for the death of his wife hangs over them, unresolved. 2) A derelict challenges the local wine-tasting champion to a competition, but finds the man's attention to his wife worthy of more dramatic action. 3) A man dying and in great pain agrees to be hypnotized at the moment of death, with unexpected consequences.

Seven episodes, each taking place on a different day of the week, on the theme of suicide and violent death.

Inside a darkened house looms a column of TVs littered with VHS tapes, a pagan shrine to forgotten analog gods. The screens crackle and pop endlessly with monochrome vistas of static white noise permeating the brain and fogging concentration. But you must fight the urge to relax: this is no mere movie night. Those obsolete spools contain more than just magnetic tape. They are imprinted with the very soul of evil.

As the streets of Los Angeles overflow with camera-wielding gawkers seeking to capture images of a bizarre police pursuit, the same people who sought to exploit the suffering of others for amusement on the Internet become the stars of a gruesome viral video from which no one gets out alive.

Anthology film from three European directors based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe: a cruel countess haunted by a ghostly horse, a sadistic young man haunted by his double, and an alcoholic actor haunted by the Devil.

Three tales of terror: in "The Graveyard Rats" lovers murder the woman's older husband and encounter horror when they attempt to rob his grave; "Bobby" is the story of a woman who summons her son back from the dead; and in "He Who Kills" an African doll goes on a murderous rampage.

The infinite playground of forbidden worlds and dangerous lifeforms offered by the sci-fi horror genre will lead to the biggest, maddest, bloodiest V/H/S ever.

Four stories... one city. A dark comedy about crime in the big city: EL TORZON - two friends are smoking grass in their car, when they're caught by a corrupt Judicial Police Officer; VIDA EXPRESS - a wealthy businesswoman is kidnapped and her deadbeat husband has to come up with the money; BARBACOA DE CHIVO - an angry mob mistakes a college professor with a burglar and decide to lynch him in front of the church; COMIDA PARA PERROS - a bumbling thief tries to rob a restaurant

After the discovery of a mysterious VHS tape, a brutish police SWAT team launches a high-intensity raid on a remote warehouse, only to discover a sinister cult compound whose collection of pre-recorded material uncovers a nightmarish conspiracy.

When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire one rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they had bargained for.

H.P. Lovecraft anthology is divided into four segments: "The Library" which is the wraparound segment involving Lovecraft's research into the Book of The Dead and his unwitting release of a monster and his writing of the following horror segments "The Drowned", "The Cold", and "Whispers".

In medical school of an elite university, campus starts sown with corpses. The police have no clue who is responsible for the carnage. Nobody suspected Barbara, a beautiful young innocent looking whose only concern seems to be the fashion. However, under the facade of frivolity, hides the most lethal and unforgiving of the killer: Barbykiller…

Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.

Horror anthology consisting of three episodes directed by Jörg Buttgereit, Andreas Marschall and Michal Kosakowski.

Chad Buckley is super crazy about horror movies, but also very lonely. He mostly spends his days in his small movie shop having wild discussions with his only returning customer, Sam.

Four horror tales revolve around an accident victim, a bullied youth, ghost stories and a deceased princess.

Features an anthology centred on the experiences of a witch doctor, a film-maker and a disgruntled extra determined to take revenge on him, and a novelist as well as her twin sister.

Things go badly for a small film crew shooting a low-budget zombie movie when they are attacked by real zombies.

A genre-defying mixture of horror, sci-fi, myth, mystery and thrills told as four interlocking tales in one intelligent anthology. Ghosts, spirits, creatures, demons and more from the paranormal world collide with rational curiosity.

Tragedy meets comedy in seven stories about how our entire world can collapse at any given moment.

An anthology in which the erotic and horrific combine to create multiple ghoulish tales of bloodlust, murder, the occult and the forbidden.

The sequel to Tales from the Crypt. Five strangers trapped in a basement vault converse about their recurring nightmares. Their stories include vampires, bodily dismemberment, east Indian mysticism, an insurance scam, and an artist who kills by painting his victims' deaths.

Unveiled through a made-for-TV documentary, five chilling tales of found footage horror emerge to take viewers on a gore-filled journey through the grim underbelly of the forgotten 1980s.

A reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendor and banality, guided by a Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments have the same significance as historical events. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.

A troubled group of children living on the same block are haunted by a talking dog named Labby who brings them on surreal hell-rides between different dimensions and time periods.

When a cynical journalist accepts a wager that he won't survive the night in a haunted castle, it unlocks an odyssey of sexual torment, undead vengeance, and a dark seductress who surrenders the gravest of pleasures.

A strange mortician tells four horrific tales to three drug dealers that he traps in their local funeral parlor.

Seven short films - each one focused on the plight of a different child protagonist.

Camilla is a successful attorney in her forties who accidentally causes the death of an undocumented migrant. At first, she is only interested in exonerating herself, but soon a feeling of responsibility starts nagging her: the dead body of a young man is lying in the morgue because their destinies fatally crossed. Camilla is used to shielding herself from pain, and she is incapable of really caring, even for her own daughter. In the midst of discovering the victim’s identity, she meets Bruno, the head of the morgue, who seems to be the only one who can truly understand her. The investigation she pursues will take her far from her surroundings until she will be forced to question herself, her unresolved past, and the life she really wants to live.

Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.

Four interwoven stories that occur on Halloween: an everyday high school principal has a secret life as a serial killer; a college virgin might have just met the one guy for her; a group of teenagers pull a mean prank, and a bitter old recluse receives an uninvited guest.

Five grisly tales from a 1950s-style comic, including a murdered father rising from beyond, a bizarre meteor, a vengeful husband, a mysterious crate's occupant, and a plague of cockroaches.

While watching two children on Halloween night, a babysitter finds an old VHS tape in the kids' trick or treat bag. The tape features three tales of terror, all linked together by a murderous clown.

Several scary black-and-white animated segments in different styles appeal to our fear(s) of the dark.

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

A group of college friends discover a 15th century coffin that allows them to experience the world as ghosts. While their first adventures in the spirit world are playful and innocent, the "Box of Shadows" soon brings out the group's most dangerous impulses and desires. The friends find themselves pulled into a world of evil where they learn the line between life and death is there for a reason.

Trapped in a house of horror, seven people discover that the only way they'll get out alive is to tell their scariest stories.

Following a terrible car crash, a woman awakes to find an enigmatic mortician preparing her for burial.

Five tales by Edgar Allan Poe come to life thanks to a pictorical style animation, five tales that exude madness, pestilence, murder and torture.

Bruno is a former paper mill worker who has been unemployed for three years. Concluding that there is too much competition in his line of work, he decides to eliminate his competition permanently.

A couple on holiday on a remote South Pacific island awaken one morning with a hang over and no recollection of what transpired. When playing back a video of the previous night, they see they participated in a local ritual that somehow ends with him murdering her.

A surrealistic anthology of horror films; four segments structured as an intense fever dream...

An anthology consisting of three horror shorts from different Asian directors: Memories by Kim Jee-woon, The Wheel by Nonzee Nimibutr, and Going Home by Peter Chan.

A woman finds a VHS tape on her doorstep that shows a series of gruesome tales that could be real. But the true danger is the pumpkin-faced killer that's using the tape to find his next victim.

A babysitting uncle tells his charges three horror stories: about a killer witch; Little Red Riding Hood and a werewolf; and Goldi Lox and the three bears.

A second-class horror movie has to be shown at Cannes Film Festival, but, before each screening, the projectionist is killed by a mysterious fellow, with hammer and sickle, just as it happens in the film to be shown.

40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes.

A lesbian, an aspiring actor, an aspiring singer, a low-class marriage, a neighborhood community and 2 renowned directors have memorable less-than-24-hour-long experiences while living in/visiting the capital of Cuba.

Dr. Tremayne is an enigmatic psychiatrist running an asylum that houses four very special cases. Visited by his colleague Nicholas, Tremayne explains his amazing and controversial theories as to why each of the four patients went mad.

The film contains five stories set on desolate stretches of a desert highway. Two men on the run from their past, a band on its way to a gig, a man struggling to get home, a brother in search of his long-lost sister and a family on vacation are forced to confront their worst fears and darkest secrets in these interwoven tales.

A series of down-on-their-luck individuals enter the decrepit and spine-chilling Rialto theater, only to have their deepest and darkest fears brought to life on the silver screen by The Projectionist – a mysterious, ghostly figure who holds the nightmarish futures of all who attend his screenings.

A group of friends must confront their fears in a terrifying game. They must sit by the other players in a circle made of a hundred candles, take one of them and tell a horror story. As stories are told and candles blown out, strange events will start to happen. They will feel strange presences around them, lurking in the shadows. But they MUST NOT leave the game or else a terrible curse will fall upon them...

The uncle of an executed murderess relates four stories of his hometown, Oldfield, to a reporter. In the first, an elderly man pursues a romance with a younger woman, even to the grave and beyond. In the second, a wounded man on the run from creditors is rescued by a backwoods hermit who holds the secret to eternal life. In the third, a glass-eating carny pays the ultimate price for looking for love on the outside. And in the fourth, a group of Civil War soldiers are held captive by a household of orphans with strange intentions for them.

Su, a woman whose friends are only men, finds herself forced to follow a series of absurd instructions to overcome the unexpected death of her fiancé.

This comedic retrospective mixes archival footage and scripted sketches as it revisits all the dread — and occasional delight — that 2021 had to offer.

The Topalović family has been in the burial business for generations. When the 150-year-old Pantelija dies, five generations of his heirs start to fight for the inheritance.

Unable to process the death of his daughter, Detective Boyd embarks on a hunt for a serial killer who murders according to a brutal tribal ritual: Muti. The only person who can help Boyd is Professor Mackles, an anthropologist who hides an unspeakable secret. The line between sanity and madness thins as Boyd goes deeper into the killer’s world.

Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy, peace and goodwill. But for some folks in the small town of Bailey Downs, it turns into something much less festive.

A journey into uncharted and forbidden territory through three tales tangled in space and time.

Five strangers board a train and are joined by a mysterious fortune teller who offers to read their Tarot cards. Five separate stories unfold: An architect returns to his ancestoral home to find a werewolf out for revenge; a doctor discovers his new wife is a vampire; a huge plant takes over a house; a musician gets involved with voodoo; an art critic is pursued by a disembodied hand.

A horror anthology containing three stories: a female college student working a graveyard shift is terrorized by a serial killer; a hair transplant goes horribly wrong; and a baseball player loses an eye and gets a new one from a recently executed murderer.

A collection of death scenes, ranging from TV-material to home-made super-8 movies. The common factor is death by some means.

Five stories, five maestros, five styles and one common denominator: maximum creativity. Studio 4°C, the coolest label on the planet, invites us for the second time to an exclusive reunion of a talents with a group film, full of freedom and ingenuity, that goes from Mahiro Maeda's classic anime, to Kazuto Nakazawa's intricate urban sketches, Shinya Ohira's bedlam of color and Tatsuyuki Tanaka's animated cyberpunk. And as if that wasn't enough, Koji Morimoto, the studio big boss, is charge of putting the icing on the cake with fantafabulous piece of abstract poetry that would make a VJ die of ecstasy. The party of the year.

As a couple goes on a trip to find their way back to each other, a sideshow artist and his shady entourage emerge from the woods, terrorizing them, luring them deeper into a maelstrom of psychological terror and humiliating slapstick.

Four episodes – Christmas, May 1st (Labour Day), August 15th (Ferragosto), Halloween – to tell four stories that delve into the human soul.

A one-time (and now one-handed) master film editor toiling in the cinematic sweatshops of 1970s Italy becomes the prime suspect in a series of brutal murders.

A group of filmmakers sets out to make the first 3D found footage horror movie, but find themselves IN the first 3D found footage horror movie when the evil entity from their film escapes into their behind-the-scenes footage.

Bullied by his boss, worked around the clock, he's nothing more than a corporate drone. All it takes is a zombie outbreak for him to finally feel alive!

Set against the backdrop of Iran's strict and oppressive legal system, this anthology film tells the stories of four men who each face a moral crisis when having to deal with death penalties.

A 40-year-old loser named Isidoro at the request of his brother drives from Italy to mountainous Carpathian village in Ukraine with a coffin of a diseased Ukrainian worker, who died at a construction site in Italy.

A group visits Saipan to search for locations for their company's newest resort. As they find what they think is the perfect spot, they discover a hidden bunker on the property which they decide to explore. However, they soon find out that curiosity can kill. As each member faces their most private secrets and the secrets of the bunker itself, the results lead to a most shocking conclusion.

A trilogy of separate stories. In "Labyrinth labyrinthos", a girl and her cat enter a strange world. In "Running Man", a racer takes on the ultimate opponent. In "Construction Cancellation Order", a man must shut down worker robots.

This follow-up to the George Romero/Stephen King-launched anthology series features five new tales of horror and a wraparound. The main stories deal with alternative realities ("Alice"), possessed communication devices ("The Radio"), vampires and serial killers in lust ("Call Girl"), mad inventors ("The Professor's Wife"), and hauntings from beyond the grave ("Haunted Dog").

A duo of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations about a greedy wife's attempt to embezzle her dying husband's fortune, and a sleazy reporter's adoption of a strange black cat.

Professor Philip Goodman devotes his life to exposing phony psychics and fraudulent supernatural shenanigans. His skepticism soon gets put to the test when he receives news of three chilling and inexplicable cases -- disturbing visions in an abandoned asylum, a car accident deep in the woods and the spirit of an unborn child. Even scarier -- each of the macabre stories seems to have a sinister connection to the professor's own life.

A quiet, epileptic taxidermist plans the perfect crime. All he needs is the right opportunity. An accident, perhaps…

The world of dance can be brutal. The rehearsals are grueling. The competition is fierce. At the Arts for Living Centre in New York City, the best of the best are dying for a part in a major production. But only a select few will be chosen. The selection process seems to be at the hands of mysterious killer who pierces women's bare breasts with a hatpin, puncturing their hearts. Ambition and jealousy appear to be the motive, which makes everybody a suspect!

Thirty-year old adulteen Vincent babysits animals and children for a living, and his latest job is 9-year old Bart, who just moved into the building with his overworked and single mom. At his new school, Bart is anxious to develop a cool reputation, so when everyone assumes that laid back, eccentric Vincent is his dad, he begs him to play along, especially when his “dad’s” fun, immature behavior delights all the kids in his class! Initially reluctant, Vincent changes his mind after falling in love with his “son’s” attractive young teacher. And in order to spend as much time with her as possible, he does his best to make sense of the mysterious codes and expectations of his weird new tribe: the Parent-Teacher Association. But Vincent soon faces a bigger issue: How to backtrack on the huge “tiny little lie” he’s gotten himself into.

Based on the wraparound story penned by Clive Barker in the author's "Books of Blood" collection, the story centers on a paranormal expert who, while investigating a gruesome slaying, finds a house that is at the intersection of "highways" transporting souls to the afterlife.

After a car accident that caused the loss of her baby, Jane experiences an increasing amount of nightmares that shake her to her core. After seeking professional help, her haunting visions turn into an even more frightening reality, one full of black magic, blood orgies, and murder.

A college professor teaching a course called "The Psychology of Fear" brings his students (including a psychic) to his home, one dark and stormy night to tell scary stories. The first involves a young couple whose car breaks down by an old, abandoned house. The second has four trendy teenage girls getting lost in a bad part of town and chased by a pack of vicious dogs. Last, a woman on crutches confronting a stalker at the answering service where she works the night shift.

In order to save her siblings, a young woman takes on her father and the powerful entity known as Gamemaster, who ensnares humans into diabolical plots while her species gambles on the outcome.

Eight contestants compete in eight deadly, classic children's games. They seek fame beyond their wildest dreams, competing for the chance to take over the YouTube channel of the famous yet elusive masked content creator known only as "JaxPro".


