Released by Severin Films when they put out their horror anthology documentary Tales of the Uncanny, The Attic Expeditions was a revelation to me. I was knocked out by its Asylum-influenced story of Trevor Blackburn, a man who may or may not have lost his mind.

The problems begin when he and his girlfriend Faith purchase a home together and find a chest in the attic. Inside, they discover a book of black magic that gives them great power through a series of rituals. As they work on learning how to gain more power, a ritual that combines their consciousnesses leads to her death.

Now in an asylum, Dr. Ek (Jeffrey Combs) and Dr. Coffee (Ted Raimi) hope to use the book of black magic to cure all mental illness, but Trevor can barely remember his past and has no idea where it is. Dr. Ek then sends Trevor to be rehabilitated at The House of Love, a recovery facility seemingly in the command of Dr. Thalama (Wendy Robie, The People Under the Stairs) that is really Trevor’s old home. The goal is to make him find the book and use actors, their stories and fake murders to make him wake up and turn over the occult reference.

Dead people come back to life, drugs and surgery are used on our protagonist and all of these things make him go even deeper into fantasy until there are multiple versions of himself and Faith all working on finding the black book.

Originally intended to be the fourth film in the Witchcraft series, this film stands on its own, featuring really good performances — Seth Green is awesome in this — and the only downside is the alt rock soundtrack that was forced on the film by its producers. Sadly, this film — despite being picked up by Blockbuster — doesn’t get the kind of publicity other lesser horror anthologies get.

This movie is made even better by the fact that Alice Cooper shows up.

You can get this from Severin and watch this on Tubi.

A group of policemen is tracking down the criminals behind three murder cases. There’s a cutthroat killing young women, a madman that hid his deformed landlord’s corpse in the floor and a wine aficionado who has buried his friend alive.

If you read that and said, “Two of those stories sound like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” you’re right. One of the other stories is based on “Murder Considered as One of the FIne Arts” by Thomas De Quincey, whose book Suspiria de Profundi inspired, well, you can guess from the title, right? He also wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The other story comes from Baudelaire.

I like that this film doesn’t try to just be horror, but instead is a police film with the captain trying to frighten the new recruits with a series of stories.

I’ve watched more than a few Poe movies lately. This isn’t the best, nor is it the worst. Luckily, if you get Severin’s Tales of the Uncanny blu ray you can watch it and enjoy it along with a fun documentary and a few others movies.

Originally intended as an extra on The Theater Bizarre release, Tales of the Uncanny grew in scope over the lockdown that COVID-19 caused. Starting with Severin Films chief David Gregory and House Of Psychotic Women author Kier-La Janisse, there’s a huge cast of people ready to share their thoughts on the history of anthology horror, like Eli Roth, Joe Dante, Mark Hartley, Mick Garris, Ernest Dickerson, Joko Anwar, Brian Yuzna, Gary Sherman, Rebekah McKendry, Peter Strickland, Kim Newman, Jovanka Vuckovic, Luigi Cozzi, Tom Savini, Jenn Wexler, Larry Fessenden, Richard Stanley, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Ramsey Campbell and David DeCoteau.

The films covered are Eerie Tales, Waxworks, The Living Dead, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Flesh and Fantasy, Dead of Night, Three Cases of Murder, Tales of Terror, Black Sabbath, Twice-Told Tales, Kwaidan, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Torture Garden, Spirits of the Dead, The House That Dripped Blood, Tales from the Crypt, Asylum, The Vault of Horror, From Beyond the Grave, Trilogy of Terror, Dead of Night, The Uncanny, The Monster Club, Creepshow, Screamtime, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Nightmares, Tales from the Third Dimension, Cat’s Eye, Night Train to Terror, Escapes, Deadtime Stories, Creepshow 2, From a Whisper to a Scream, After Midnight, Two Evil Eyes, Tales from the Dark Side: The Movie, Grim Prairie Tales, Necronomicon, Tales from the Hood, Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America, Three…Extreme, Trick ‘r Treat, Fear (s) of the Dark, Little Deaths, The Theater Bizarre, Chillerama, V/H/S, The ABCs of Death, V/H/S/2, ABCs of Death 2, Barbarous Mexico, German Angst, Betamax, Southbound, Tales of Halloween, Holidays, Worst Fears, XX, The Field Guide to Evil and Nightmare Cinema.

Fans of anthology horror may not learn many new things, but it’s a great introduction to newcomers, particularly the Amicus section of the film. I’d advise watching this with subtitles, as some of the Skype interviews are a bit difficult to make out. Otherwise, a great package that comes complete with Eerie Tales and Unusual Tales. You can get it from Severin.

The first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman — Tracey Moffatt, who also made Lip, a mashup of black servants in Hollywood movies talking back to their bosses — BeDevil was inspired by the director’s childhood.

The first story “Mr. Chuck” is about an Australian boy haunted by the spirit of a drowned American soldier, with the experience seen through the eyes of the boy as a man looking back on his youth and a white woman whose family colonzied Australia. And it’s presented as a series of documentary interviews, heightening the strangeness of it all.

In “Choo Choo Choo Choo, Moffat plays a character who might even be herself as a train continues to haunt a family as it runs on invisible tracks through Queensland, even decades later.

The last story is “Lovin’ the Spin I’m In,” during which a doomed couple tries to leave their community behind to escape racism, their death ends up trapping them in an eternal dance.

beDevil has been compared to Kwaidan and that’s an apt comparison. It feels like it came from a darker world than our own to explain and help us get past the darkness in our own place. Please try and seek it out, as it’s an amazing film.

Man, this movie. I don’t know who it was made for, but it seems like the kind of person who would corner me at the drive-in or a horror convention and breathlessly inform me of its many virtues and slowly make me more and more uncomfortable.

I could tell you that this has stories, but they’re more like scenes, and they feel like Guinea Pig except they’re not well made nor do they approach art.

The first scene has a woman being killed with a voodoo doll, while the second has a goth dancer destroyed by a zombie who proceeds to slice open his own stomach. Finally, we watch a vampire girl dance — and audition the finger puppet* — to more than one Tina Turner song before jumping in a coffin with another bloodsucker.

I have to tell you, I hated the first two parts, but the end? A vampire stuck in a coffin watching a girl dance, dance, dance to “I Might Have Been Queen” and “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” That’s exactly what I wanted this movie to be.

Director Michel Ricaud mostly made adult films, which I am certain you’ll be absolutely shocked to learn after watching this. This slide of the Grand Guignol makes Bloodsucking Freaks look like Fellini, but hey, if you want to watch it and then talk it up to me in person, it’s your world.

*Also known as dialing the rotary phone, doing some finger painting with only the color pink, oiling the catcher’s mitt and pulling a Meg Ryan.

Made by filmmakers who worked together on V/H/S, Southbound doesn’t always work, but at least its stories have a thematic tie to one another and a vision, unlike so many modern horror anthologies.

Radio Silence — Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett and Chad Villella– who made Ready or Not, V/H/S, and Devil’s Due directed the first segment, in which two men are pursued by demons down a highway as well as the demons of their past failures. “The Way Out” starts the film on a high note.

“Siren” continues the strangeness, as the three members of The White Tights wreck their van and are accosted by both hospitality and odd behavior in the homes they find in the aftermath. This segment effectively uses comic actors like Susan Burke and Dana Gould while the direction by Roxanne Benjamin (who wrote this with Burke) keeps the story moving.

“The Accident,” directed by David Bruckner, is one dark tale, in which a man is brought to a facility where he’s instructed in how to operate on Sadie, the character from the last story, who he hits with his car. He cannot save her and their instructions lead to her death; he’s haunted by their voices on the phone. The creatures from “The Way Out” keep showing up and haunting the characters.

One of the voices on the phone is Sandy, who leads us to a bar called The Trap and the story called “Jailbreak,” which is directed by Patrick Horvath. Beyond David Yow from the band The Jesus Lizard, this one is filled with demonic violence. However, it stumbles compared to the other segments.

“The Way In” is also by Radio Silence and shows us where the two main characters came from in the first story but not in any way that you’d expect. This one flips the narrative, showing us that perhaps everyone in this story is trapped in the same purgatory and on the way to hell, as well as featuring Larry Fessenden as the DJ whose voice intones that these people might just be making the same mistakes for eternity.

It’s no accident that Carnival of Souls — well, maybe the public domain status has a little to do with it — is playing at the beginning of this movie.

I was really opposed to this movie the first time I saw it, but after a few years — and the quick erosion in quality of horror anthologies — I’ve come around to liking it a lot more than I did the first time I saw it. Perhaps I’m the one trapped on the highway to hell, watching this again and again until I absolutely adore it?

Jake has been trying to get into reporting by starting as a video editor. While editing a story on a routine traffic stop that resulted in the death of a police officer and a major political official, Jake is sent dashcam video evidence that tells a completely different story than the report he’s told to make.

Working alone from his small apartment in NYC — most of the film takes place on his computer screen — Jake studies the footage and figures out the truth behind what actually happened. But has he uncovered a conspiracy or is he seeing something where there’s nothing at all?

Shades of, well, the entire last year and some months of our lives.

Citing Blow-Up, The Conversation and Klute, this is director Christian Nilsson’s feature film debut. It’s an interesting take on the story as Jake keeps going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.

Your mileage may vary when it comes to the way the story is told, but I found this an intriguing journey.

16 gallons of blood went into making the last thing that Herschell Gordon Lewis would direct which would be this movie. His two tales — “Gory Story” and “The Night Hag” — aren’t great, but they have lots of blood and Lewis hosting them.

“Attack of Conscience” is completely unrelated to the feel of the movie, particularly when you contrast its tale of a woman dying over and over at the hands of her abuser with “GOREgeous” in which a man who can no longer get it up kills women with objects like high heels.

In the same way that many of Lewis’ films are celebrated because they’re the first of their kind, this is the last of its kind. That said, you won’t enjoy this anywhere near as much as his more well-known material such as Two-Thousand Maniacs! or Blood Feast.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Some people love holidays and decorate their homes based on them. Others, well, they pretty much hate the idea of celebrations that bring people together. My wife would be the former, I’d be the latter, but we both agreed that we didn’t enjoy this.

In the first story, Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer (who made the wonderful Starry Eyes and the not-so-wonderful Pet Sematary as a team) tell what feels like an unfinished story about Valentine’s Day, specifically one young lady’s love for her coach and hate of those that bully her. My major issue — well, one of many major issues, including an over-reliance on gore, a lack of a connective story and too many short films that should be on their own and not part of an overall portmanteau — with modern anthologies shows up here: this story could not exist on its own. Maybe so much of my love of these stories remains rooted in the EC Comics structure: someone is hurt, revenge occurs and the close is poetic justice (which is not just the name of a story in Amicus’ EC Comics masterwork Tales from the Crypt).

Gary Shore, who made Dracula Untold, directed the St. Patrick’s Day story, which is a pretty basic tale: girl gets strange gift from student, student’s dad has sex with knocked out girl, girl gives birth to a snake and loves it as if it were a human child. As the stories go in this movie, this is probably as good as it gets.

Nicholas McCarthy, the director of The Prodigy, made Easter, in which a young girl catches the bunny of said holiday, who ends up being a horrific crucified Christ figure. There’s not really anywhere else the story can go after that. If you’re into shocking visuals without much substance, by all means, enjoy.

Sarah Adina Smith made Mother’s Day, which has nearly every witches trying to get a woman pregnant cliche there is. Again, I’m sorry to be a broken record, but nearly every story in this has left me beyond cold.

Anthony Scott Burns made the film Come True recently and his Father’ Day segment gets close to what I demand from anthology horror: a story with a beginning, middle and end that doesn’t forget that it should build some tension and not just be all about gross out scenes or being transgressive (which trust me, has its place). Plus, Michael Gross is always great and Jocelin Donahue has been a favorite — and will always remain there — after The House of the Devil.

Kevin Smith made Mother’s Day and it has all the hallmarks of his oeuvre: female empowerment, offensive humor and strange situations. It is, however, not good at all. Would you cast your daughter in a story where a man is given a knife and told to make his penis into a vagina? If the answer is yes, thank you for reading our site, Mr. Smith. Chasing Amy should not be in the Criterion collection, but you seem like a nice enough fellow.

Scott Stewart directed Priest and Legion before making the Seth Green-starring Christmas segment, in which a father struggles to get his son virtual glasses that show what is really inside someone. A cute idea, somewhat well told.

Kölsch and Widmyer wrote the final New Year’s Eve segment, which was directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer (Daniel Isn’t Real). It’s a meet cute about two serial killers finding one another and only one surviving their first date.

Do yourself a favor and just watch the Father’s Day segment and don’t subject yourself to the rest. Life is short and if you’re just living for the next holiday — or to watch this — you’re wasting your time.

Imagine my surprise as I started putting together anthology week to learn that there weren’t just a few Yam Yueng Lo or Troublesome Night movies. From 1997 to 2003, they made 19 of these movies and a 20th edition to celebrate the 20th anniversary in 2017.

The streets of Hong Kong are haunted, as we learn from four loosely connected stories in this film. It starts when several young people decide to camp outside a cemetery, which is never a good idea when you really think about it. One of them, Ken (Louis Koo, who was in the Hong Kong remake of Cellular that was entitled Connected), meets a mysterious woman (Law Len, the spider demon from the Journey to the West movies) who changes his life in a supernatural way.

His friends return to the city without him as Mrs. To (Christy Chung, who was born in Montreal and ended up in Hong Kong where she won the Miss Chinese International Pageant without being able to speak the language before becoming an actress in movies like The Bride with White Hair 2) waits in vain for her husband (Sunny Chan, Hold You Tight) to arrive for their anniversary.

This leads to a ghost story where Jojo (Teresa Mak, who is also in the eleventh and seventeenth movies in this series) falls in love with a spectral entity. This segment might not be frightening, yet it is steamy and nearly approaches art. That said, I’ve never seen someone have passionate sex with a ghost as blood streams down the walls all over their Mission: Impossible poster.

Finally, we catch up with the survivors joining Peter Butt (Simon Lui, who was in nearly every one of these movies) for a movie, but the restless ghosts in the theater go all Demons and trap everyone in a 60s world of endless hallways.

While a few of these stories were directed by Victor Tam Long-Cheong and Steve Cheng, The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome director Herman Yau seems like the real force behind this. They made one or two of these movies every year, so some of the humor may be dated — and localized for Hong Kong, but when has that stopped us from enjoying their films — yet this movie is plenty of fun.