Movies
[BD Review] ‘The ABCs of Death’ A Short Film Festival With Mixed Results
Having been to dozens of film festival shorts programs I know just how excruciating they can be. This was my only reservation heading into Magnet’s The ABCs of Death, which premiered at the Midnight Madness portion of the Toronto International Film Festival. When the 2+hour “event” concluded, that’s when my brain really started to hurt. How the hell do I review this? Do I review it based on the overall experience, the ratio of good to bad shorts, or do I review each short individually? Ultimately, I feel that since it’s presented as a film experience, it should be reviewed as one.
The concept behind ABCs is brilliant: 26 directors were each given $5,000 (according to “Q is for Quack”) and had to deliver a short film about death. The result is an eclectic variety of horror that range from sex-fueled murder to rape revenge. It may sound delectable, but it’s not. It’s hard to know exactly where the problem festers, but I’d like to speculate that it was the intense creative freedom given to the directors. The overall problem is a lack of cohesion, meaning, there’s nothing to connect all of the shorts.* I wonder what kind of small guidelines may have been implemented that would have strung all 26 shorts together a little bit? I don’t blame the producers at Drafthouse (as the idea is brilliant), but nobody could have speculated what the final result of the experiment would feel like… It was tedious.
Part of the problem is that, like any other shorts program, a lot of the shorts weren’t very good. Furthermore, nobody could have guessed that most of the directors would take a dark and/or artistic path. The few comedic moments presented such a wonderful breath of fresh air in a 2-hour project jam-packed with intense depression. It’s even more frustrating that the producers were able to land such high caliber directors who mostly took the perspective of a film student – meaning, instead of really showing what they could do with $5k, they did only what they could with $5k (the bare minimum). That’s not much to work with, and the challenge is great, but the competition was fierce. Wouldn’t you want to show up the other directors? And while a few of the shorts went big, they still managed to bore; albeit, it’s HARD to tell a compelling story, without shocks, in under 5 minutes.
Even through the film’s best shorts – directed by Marcel Sarmiento, Timo Tjahjanto, Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett, Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani, Jason Eisner and Ben Wheatley – the project just felt overtly long and fragmented. The problem reviewing such a film is that, while some of the shorts warranted a perfect score, others deserved much less. How to you fairly grade the entirety of a project that’s a quarter brilliant, a quarter OK, and half incredibly weak? I’d suggest you ignore the below rating (it’s undeniably misleading) and focus on creating some sort of party atmosphere to watch ABCs of Death. The only thing that can kick-start some energy into this anthology is you, and a group of screaming and laughing friends. There’s plenty here worth seeing.
*Editor’s Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I produced V/H/S, another anthology released by Magnet. My opinions may be construed as biased.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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