Tuesday, October 21, 2014

A Celebration of the Horror Anthology (or Compilation)

First of all, let’s touch on the difference between a Compilation and an Anthology. I am not the expert on this, but for the sake of this article, an anthology is the collected works of a single group or artist, whereas a compilation is a collection of works by a variety of artists. Further, I would say that all anthologies are compilations, but not all compilations are anthologies. Like squares and rectangles.
I am not going to be exclusionary, as both anthologies and compilations have their strengths. The best thing about a horror anthology in particular is that when you have a good director, such as Lewis Teague who helmed “Cat’s Eye” (1985) or George A. Romero who directed “Creepshow” (1982), then you have a unique opportunity to let a talented storyteller take you on multiple rides for the price of one ticket. Not all stories need an hour and a half to be told. Basically any horror film that involves teenagers going camping is already wasting 15 minutes of precious “scare time” with the lame character setups as they all travel to wherever it is that they will eventually die bloody painful deaths. Why do we need to know which one is the slut, the jock, the nerd, or the good girl? We just came to see them die, and the sooner you get to the action, sex, or SFX, if not all three at once, the better.