This horror anthology starts of with an opening card stating: The following feature film was created by 26 directors from around the world. Each director was given a letter of the alphabet and asked to choose a word. They then created a short tale of death that related to their chosen word. They had complete artistic freedom regarding the content of their segments.
Since the film, including opening and closing credits, has a duration of 129 minutes the directors off course only had a limited amount of time to tell their story. Another constriction appears to be that the beginning and ending of every segment had to be filled with something red.

An anthology or omnibus film is a feature film that consists of a series of short films usually directed by different directors with a common theme (Les Sept péchés capitaux, 1962 & 1992), location (New York Stories ,1989, Four Rooms, 1995, Paris je t’aime, 2006, Tokyo!, 2008) or story as a framing device (Dead of Night, 1945).  The very nature of this type of film is that the segments tend to vary in quality and the tone shifts do not make it easy for the viewer to experience the result as a single film.

Discussing all 26 short films would take forever + would ruin most films due to the fact that the premise in most cases makes up for 99% of the film. The film starts of great with Apocalypse that succesfully plays with the audience’s expectations. There’s an excellent animation Klutz (Anders Morgenthaler, known for Princess 2006) and a great clay animation Toilet. My other favourite segments were Dogfight, Orgasm (in the typical pure cinema style and soundtrack from the couple Cattet & Forzani) and -perhaps my favourite of the bunch, the most voilent and poignant one- XXL dealing with our obsession with the perfect body and the negative influence of commercials to this effect.
Theres were some great, rather extreme chapters from asian directors Libido and  Zetsumetsu (Extinction). The latter is an outrageous homage to the sexual innuendos in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

Below you can find the full list of titles and directors which includes some brilliant helmers such as Ben Wheatley (a.o. Sightseers, A Field in England) and Srđan Spasojević (known for the notorious Srpski film, a.k.a. A Serbian Film, 2010)

• A is for Apocalypse (directed and written by Nacho Vigaldo)
• B is for Bigfoot (directed and written by Adrian Garcia Bogliano)
• C is for Cycle (directed and written by Ernesto Diaz Espinoza)
• D is for Dogfight (directed and written by Marcel Sarmiento)
• E is for Exterminate (directed and written by Angela Bettis)
• F is for Fart (directed and written by Noboru Iguchi)
• G is for Gravity (directed and written by Andrew Traucki)
• H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion (directed and written by Thomas Malling)
• I is for Ingrown (directed and written by Jorge Michel Grau).
• J is for Jidai-geki (Samurai Movie) (directed and written by Yûdai Yamaguchi)
• K is for Klutz (directed and written by Anders Morgenthaler)
• L is for Libido (Directed and written by Timo Tjahjanto)
• M is for Miscarriage (directed and written by Ti West)
• N is for Nuptials (directed and written by Banjong Pisanthanakun)
• O is for Orgasm (directed and written by Bruno Forzani and Héléne Cattet)
• P is for Pressure (directed and written by Simon Rumley)
• Q is for Quack (directed and written by Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett)
• R is for Removed (directed and written by Srđan Spasojević)
• S is for Speed (directed and written by Jake West)
• T is for Toilet (directed and written by Lee Hardcastle)
• U is for Unearthed (directed and written by Ben Wheatley)
• V is for Vagitus (The Cry of a Newborn Baby) (directed and written by Kaare Andrews)
• W is for WTF! (directed and written by Jon Schnepp)
• X is for XXL (directed and written by Xavier Gens)
• Y is for Youngbuck (directed and written by  Jason Eisener)
• Z is for Zetsumetsu (Extinction) (directed and written by Yoshihiro Nishimura)

Jan Bollen