The Amicus Portmanteau Canon

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 14:00:00 +0000

For a decade Hammer owned the British horror map, and everyone assumes the rival studio down the road was chasing it. Amicus Productions was doing something stranger. Founded by two Americans in London, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, Amicus shot on the same Shepperton stages, hired the same faces — Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Freddie Francis behind the camera — and then pointed them at a completely different shape of film. Hammer built lush single-narrative Gothics in corseted period dress; Amicus specialised in the portmanteau: three, four, five short shockers threaded together by a framing device, set squarely in the present day. It is the omnibus form perfected, and for a run of films between 1965 and 1974 nobody did it better.

The Anthology-Horror Canon

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Horror has always been most comfortable at short length. The genre runs on a single unbearable idea sustained just long enough to land, and a feature-length film often has to pad that idea out or bury it in plot. The anthology solves the problem by stacking several perfect short shocks inside one running time, usually bound together by a framing device — a train carriage, an asylum, a crypt, a huckster reading the tarot — that supplies its own final twist. It is the campfire-story structure given a projector, and it keeps coming back precisely because the short horror tale is where the genre’s purest scares live. What follows is the canon of the portmanteau film, the anthologies that got the balance right, arranged so you can trace the form from an Ealing drawing room to a stack of haunted videotapes.

Anthology Horror - vo.rs

The Amicus Portmanteau Canon

The Anthology-Horror Canon