I’ve always wanted to make horror movies. When I was in middle school, my friend and I had this great tragically idealistic and misguided idea to make a stop-motion Godzilla movie using 6-inch rubber dinosaurs and a Super 8 camera. Nothing ever came of that, but filmmaking remains something I’d love to try. Maybe some day. I mean, Tangerine was shot on 3 iPhone 5S’s so what’s my excuse?

If ever I do become a director when/if I grow up (or when/if I grow up and become a director, one of those two), one of the things I’d love to do is make my contribution to one of my favorite subgenres: the anthology. I’ve accumulated a number of ideas for this in my head over the years, so here is my first Horror Anthology Movie Idea.

A Collapse Of Horses, Brian Evenson

An anthology movie has to have a framing device, so here’s mine. It’s about a guy who may or may not be insane. He may or may not have had an unspecified accident that may or may not be the cause of his altered perceptions: his house changes size and layout, rooms appear and disappear, he sometimes has 3 children and sometimes 4, etc. These may or may not be hallucinations and delusions. The story has a vaguely Roald Dahl, Twilight Zoney feel to it. I’d open with part of this, and each segment of the anthology would be something the narrator thinks he sees or remembers. The movie would close with the end of this story.

Fat Face, Michael Shea

Patti, a sex worker, becomes fascinated by a man she only recognizes by his face as he looks out the window. She refers to him as Fat Face, but with a weird and sincere sort of affection. It’s not long before her affection and curiosity become obsession, and she finally has to enter the building from which Fat Face gazes 4 floor up. There are all kinds of Lovecraftian touches that would make for great visuals–tentacle-shaped door handles, weird decor, odd patterns. The final reveal even has just a little Hellraiser resonance to it.

Flash Frame, Sylvia Moreno-Garcia

There’s nothin’ like the good ol’ “movie in a movie” bit, but this time, the film, Nero’s Last Days, is cursed. There’s a number of “cursed film” ideas floating around out there in the Cthulhu mythos. It’s a cool twist in the sense we more often see some kind of cursed information in book form. Anyway, the 2016 movie Fury Of The Demon plays around with a very similar idea. In both cases, screenings of the film erupt in disaster, violence, and insanity. There is sexual imagery that involves a yellow woman, but the sexuality becomes a source of horror and revulsion than arousal. All of this plague’s the narrator’s dreams until there is no choice but to attempt destroying the film by burning down the theater that’s showing it.

Death Of A Right Fielder, Stuart Dybek

I’m sure those scholars who breathe that rarefied academic air would be appalled that I would consider something “literary” to also be a fine example of something as trashy as genre fiction. And that’s major reason why I don’t go to academic conferences anymore. I first read this a long time ago, but it’s always stayed with me. A bunch of kids playing pick-up baseball suddenly realize they haven’t noticed any activity from the kid playing right field for a bit. When they go investigate, they find him dead. The horror of this story lies not so much in the right fielder himself, but is the utterly calm, matter-of-fact narration about the utterly calm, matter-of-fact reaction and solution on the part of the other kids. I’m confident that most people won’t see the end of this come coming, and I find it absolutely chilling.

And that would be my anthology movie. Not sure what I’d call it though. If you have any ideas, let me know in the Comments.