We’ve been infiltrated by imposters. Our entertainment industry is facing an invasion of non-people with striking similarities to real and recognizable people. The digitization of A-listers is spreading in Hollywood productions, allowing for lifelike simulations of actors and other notables to creep in and undermine everything we once took for granted about performing. And we can’t say we weren’t warned.

The digitization rush was presaged as recently as 2013 in The Congress, Ari Folman’s loose adaptation of a Polish science fiction novel from writer Stanisław Lem. His liberal reworking of the text imagines a fictionalized version of actress Robin Wright who sells her likeness to the sinister Miramount Studios so she’ll have more time and money to spend on her ailing young son. The suits stick her in a large cage that takes a zillion simultaneous photos from every conceivable angle, creating a virtual Robin Wright that can be made to do or say whatever her string-pullers wish. Of course, this leads to troubles, many of which fall on the fanciful side. Folman’s loony grand vision involves fleets of zeppelins, a drug that turns people into Steamboat Willie cartoon versions of themselves, and a Matrix-ish illusory reality.

The Congress also raised some broadly existential concerns, anxieties about the commodification of identity and the degradation of the real. Swarms of airships have yet to descend on Tinseltown, but otherwise, we’ve barreled headfirst into Folman’s future of fake faces and synthetic voices. As technology that mimics human expression strings a rope bridge over the Uncanny Valley, our understanding of concepts like acting, personhood, and realism will have to be rejiggered to account for a new state of the art. At a time when Disney can insistently bill an almost entirely computer-generated Africa as “live action,” as deepfakes become increasingly elaborate, as Ang Lee’s Gemini Man pairs Will Smith with his 1990s-era self, the integrity of images has become more tenuous than ever. “Seeing is believing” is no longer a truism.

In showbiz, where image is everything, actors have to be protective of their likenesses and the brand they represent. That’s led to friction between stars and the studios making money off of them since time immemorial, but more recent advances have complicated a long-standing debate. In 1990, Crispin Glover landed in the middle of a hot-button issue when he sued Back to the Future II for replacing him as George McFly with an actor styled to look just like him. He claimed that pairing done-up substitute Jeffrey Weissman with previously shot footage from the first film constituted infringement on his “rights of publicity,” and Universal settled to the rumored tune of $760,000. A Hollywood Reporter article from a few years ago included a portentous soundbite from Glover’s lawyer Doug Kari: “What I said to the judge was, ‘Things may happen in the future that will make this important.’ We need to draw a line.”

That line was redrawn over and over again in the years that followed, as actors stood their ground against ersatz versions of themselves. Vanna White hauled Samsung into court in 1993 over an ad featuring a robot gussied up with a glamorous gown and a blonde updo to host a Wheel of Fortune-type game show. In late 2009, Gwen Stefani and the other members of No Doubt slapped Activision with a lawsuit for letting players use the band’s in-game avatars featured in Band Hero to play any of the available songs, instead of the agreed-upon three from their own catalog. (The same issue was raised with the Kurt Cobain avatar in Guitar Hero 5, an attempt to capitalize on his image that Courtney Love took none too kindly.) In both cases, the talent won massive payouts and gained an important advantage in the unending tug-of-war between institutions and individuals.

These early cases established that if corporations want to profit off noteworthy figures, they’ll have to pay up for the association. With that much settled, plenty of stars have lined up to lend their appearances in exchange for relatively low-effort paydays. In 2014, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare succeeded in making Kevin Spacey even more off-putting with a coarsely pixelated likeness of the actor. The upcoming game Death Stranding motion-captures a stacked cast, including Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, and Guillermo del Toro. 

This fall’s multiplex offerings plumb the final frontier of digital mimicry with extensive digital performances spanning the length of a feature. Robert De Niro gives a life-spanning tour de force in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Irishman, though his late-20s self does suffer from “video game eyes.” It’s not that he looks like a ghastly inhuman abomination in the tradition of Tom Hanks in The Polar Express. It’s just that the veneer of ones and zeroes over a real face can rob a performance of its minuscule grace notes. 

Ang Lee continues to reach for the stratosphere in terms of what his movies can accomplish. In addition to his mad-scientist experiments with 120 frames-per-second exhibition — reactions have varied, to put it gently — Lee has used Gemini Man as a launching board for cutting-edge de-aging technology. Will Smith does double duty as an aging assassin and his clone, 20 years his junior. With the marked exception of a final scene shot in daylight, which bares the limits of younger Will’s facial design, the digital facsimile cuts the mustard. There isn’t any unsettling polished sheen to his skin. His eyes flit around to match his body language. The animators have mastered a naturalistic beading of sweat. 

That final scene is clumsily integrated and executed, but it underscores the script’s emphasis on a human element over cold, rational action. (A video titled “How They Made Me Look 23 in Gemini Man” joins Smith as he breaks down the nitty-gritty of the process, explaining how a grid of black dots on his face captures every nuance of his expression. In footage from a press conference with Lee, Smith jokes about having made it to easy street. “Now there’s a completely digital 23-year-old version of myself that I can make movies with! I’m goin’ butt-and-gut on ’em! I’m getting really fat and overweight while I use my Gemini Junior!” His sentiments echo those of the fictitious Robin Wright in The Congress: getting paid to essentially do your job without the “working” part sounds pretty good.

But Gemini Man touches on some of the same thematic worries as The Congress. The two works are connected by a core belief in the sanctity of sentience. “Robin Wright” comes to the same conclusion as the duplicate Will Smiths: something with a soul cannot and should not be transmuted into a product at the beck and call of large corporations. Because that does seem to be the dystopian endgame: a shift of power away from artists, and toward the conglomerate behemoths that are capable of harnessing the machines that make the next generation of movie stars go.

That’s expressed itself in the way recent studio doctrine has seen the reframing of star power toward IP characters and away from the actors bringing them to life. The hope is that the crowds will continue showing up when Chris Evans has been disposed of and the Captain America mantle has been passed to Anthony Mackie. The logical endpoint of all this would be the eventual fading-out of the breathing, acting middlemen entirely. Smith provided a physical basis for both halves of the Gemini Man performance, but there could come a day when he signs a three-picture deal with Paramount, using the digital likeness of him that they’ll keep on file. 30 Rock’s demented dream of SeinfeldVision may not be so far away.

One line — perhaps not the line, but a line nonetheless — has already been crossed. The recent Star Wars sequels and spinoffs disturbed the slumber of the late Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher to digitally paste their faces on different actors’ heads. This was all done with the express permission of the respective actors’ estates, but the fundamental fact stands that acting not done by Cushing and Fisher will be credited to them, despite their having no hand in the process and being responsible for what’s on-screen in no meaningful sense. Were they with us today, they could pass judgment on whether this bothers them. The sly thing about these leaps forward in digitization, however, lies in how they can allow for conversations deciding people’s fates without having to get them involved.

Nobody wants to be the Luddite in the tinfoil chapeau, but it’s crucial to provide checks of healthy skepticism to the unbridled potential of the shiniest new tools. The Screen Actors Guild can ensure everyone gets compensated fairly when holograms come to take their jobs, but even so, digital replacements of actors are going to permanently alter the principles of the acting craft. Ang Lee and other cinema scientists have been so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should. Now, they’ve created their own beast beyond control. Whether it’s the next phase of evolution has yet to be seen.

In the spirit of fairness, nobody expected Stephen King to pop up in the Dark Tower movie.

He’s certainly there in the original novels. King’s psychopathically ambitious fantasy series, now condensed into a big-screen adaptation directed by Nikolaj Arcel, shows up in person to confront his characters in the series’ final book. Heroes Roland Deschain and Jake Chambers (who previously died, but also kind of didn’t, but now he’s fine, so don’t worry about it) travel to our world and save King from the real-life fatal van accident that nearly killed him in 1999. Their intervention ensures King can live on to write the Dark Tower novels, and they can continue their fictional quest to defend the Tower, the nexus of all realities.

As the culmination of a work that frequently jumped genres and storytelling modes over its two decades, seven primary books, and more than 4,200 pages, this insane narrative pretzel almost makes sense. But plugging it in at the close of a 90-minute film adaptation would feel unearned and uncalled-for. With so much material to adapt, and such a short movie, the Dark Tower series’ far-reaching fanbase knew they’d have to temper their expectations for the new take, at least within reason.

But even for a film tasked with making sense of a brain-busting, convoluted, fourth-wall-shattering epic, Arcel’s take on the material is far, far worse than it had to be. The troubles with the limp new Idris Elba/Matthew McConaughey vehicle go deeper than the elision of the colorful details that endeared the series to a few generations of readers. (Sorry, no android bears, vampires, or mentally splintered civil-rights activists to be found.) The methods by which the screenwriting brain trust of Arcel, Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, and Anders Thomas Jensen reinterpret and compress several universes’ worth of mythology into 95 slim minutes don’t let any of the original text’s adherence to the Western, fantasy, science-fiction, and horror-literature traditions shine through. The Dark Tower is a genre movie that’s afraid of its own genres, a would-be cult classic intent on instead failing as a straight-up-the-middle blockbuster.

 

The Dark Tower review: a film working against itself on every level

The script cherry-picks characters and scenes from various chapters. The Dutch Hill Mansion demon that attempts to swallow protagonist Jake Chambers comes from Book III: The Waste Lands. The shadowy demon that attacks Jake in a Mid-World forest resembles a giant version of the pincer-armed “lobstrosities” from Book II: The Drawing of the Three. But the film mostly draws from the first installment, The Gunslinger. In keeping with the title, the story revolves around Roland and his personal quest to take revenge on the ominous Man in Black. Through his perspective, the Dark Tower series’ relationship to the Western takes shape.

The film clearly modeled Roland’s design after that of a frontier-era pistol ace. Roland’s clothing and strong-silent-type routine hark back to one of King’s professed influences on the series, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. But the first novel’s deep, intuitive understanding of what makes Westerns work has been lost in translation.

Shifting the protagonist spotlight to Jake means losing sight of the world-weariness that comes from Roland’s rambling sojourn through the desert. The cowboy archetype’s fundamental inner conflict is the friction between the duty to protect a lawless land, and the brutal emotional cost of that duty. A lifetime of reading paperbacks has taught King this well; the opening chapters of The Gunslinger see Roland roving through a barren landscape and recalling his unfortunate stint in the town of Tull. He developed a slowly mounting attachment to the community, and even took a lover, but had to gun them all down following an impromptu demon abortion. (A lot of the books didn’t make it to the screen.) What might seem like a digression provides valuable emotional context for Roland’s pain. This primal scene makes sense to readers who are familiar with the Western genre. Like so many Western gunslingers, Roland doesn’t want to wield the power of life and death over everyone he meets, but he lives in a world that needs someone with that power — and his judgment.

The film places more of its eggs in the fantasy basket, using Jake’s perspective to refashion the story into a hero’s-journey narrative. But even then, the writing shies away from the more transportive aspects of King’s lovingly crafted universe. The man has put more thought into the outlay and cultural makeup of Mid-World and its adjacent dimensions than the film puts into anything. Within the greater arc of good and evil’s unending clash, King lays out a cult of psychics attempting to destabilize the Dark Tower, a completely original language made from bastardized Latin, a suicidally insane, artificially intelligent monorail, and pastiches paying homage to The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, and Star Wars, to name only a few references. His sprawling world teems with messy, often paradoxical life. The film adaptation could be seamlessly spliced in with footage from Eragon or Ender’s Game.

The Dark Tower novels are often brought up in conversations about so-called so-called “unfilmable novels,” and Arcel’s efforts won’t do much to change that perception. But I’m firm in my conviction that there’s a worthy movie or seven to be carved out of King’s gargantuan tangle of styles and genres. This should’ve been a producer’s dream, a franchise with the elasticity to be every kind of geek-bait at once, both a gritty post-apocalyptic John Ford riff in the vein of Fury Road, and a worthy successor to Lord of the Rings’ standard-bearing fantasizing. But the filmmakers chose to sand off all the edges, and leave something palatable and inoffensive. That also made the film’s success impossible. You’ve got to be at least a little weird to commit to thousands of pages that loop-de-loop through time, space, and literary heritages. It’s only fitting that a film adaptation should accept, and channel, a little of the books’ weirdness as well.

Everyone has their preferred approach when it comes to parsing David Lynch’s enigmatic work. The miraculous new 2017 revival of his landmark 1990 TV series Twin Peaks has seen critics studying each hour from every conceivable angle. Plenty of writers take the traditional road and attempt to divine a plot from what can feel like arbitrarily arranged scenes. Others prefer a formal, more academic analysis. Some read the show through the context of Lynch’s career. And I’m sure someone, somewhere believes they’ve cracked the show’s code though tea leaves. I’ve found it most natural to interpret Twin Peaks on a conceptual level, tracking Lynch’s pet themes as nebulously defined forces that he’s constantly reconfiguring and evolving.

Through this lens, the revival series — ominously dubbed Twin Peaks: The Return — begins to take shape as a chronicle of one Big Concept in particular. The first 10 episodes of the series’s planned 18-episode run have contained the goriest sequences of Lynch’s work, but now, he’s engaging with the notion of savagery on a deeper, almost spiritual level. Through his signature dreamy conflation of images and feelings, Lynch has constructed a monument to the terrible power of violence, chronicling its genesis and revealing its harsh consequences.

Twin Peaks began as a story oriented around a single atrocity, the murder of small-town homecoming queen Laura Palmer. The series’s original two-season run in the early 1990s focused closely on the impact of that unthinkable act on a small logging town in the Pacific Northwest, to the point where memes have been made out of Laura’s hysterically weeping friends. Other critics have expertly laid out arguments for the show — and especially its spinoff film, 1992’s Fire Walk With Me — as an elegy for Laura and a lamentation for everything wasted by her murder. The Return continues that vein of empathy for those touched by tragedy. In a recent sequence, William Hastings (Matthew Lillard) sobs hysterically over his mistress’s death during a police interrogation. Lynch allows his grief to be unruly and melodramatic, toeing the line of comedy without crossing it. He understands that mourning is messy, and gives his characters (and actors) the latitude to express that.

But violence has assumed chilling new forms in Twin Peaks: The Return, and the show’s treatment of it has accordingly grown more complex. In episode 10, Lynch observes two assaults, shown through diametrically opposed methods: in the first, Lynch holds on an unbroken shot of a trailer as the occupant is murdered. The sounds of her fighting and screaming are chilling, but the static shot leaves an impression of frosty indifference. The second feels far more intimate, operating with close-ups and dialogue that makes the audience privy to the attacker’s white-hot hatred. Even for a filmmaker who’s essentially staked out the nexus of the uncanny and the disturbing as his personal fiefdom, Lynch has doubled down on his experimentalism and overall inscrutability. And that’s granted him access to an elevated sort of cinematic plane, where he can communicate through methods that are less lucid and more primally affecting than ever.

A nightmare-inducing scene from early in The Return attaches Lynch’s newfound taste for bloodletting to the more off-kilter sensory horror he’s mastered. In a move straight out of Halloween’s playbook, a pair of young lovers get frisky while they’re supposed to be monitoring a mysterious glass cube. A Slender Man-ish figure appears and tears them limb from limb, the dyed corn syrup flowing up the walls as their faces disintegrate. But the truly harrowing aspect of the scene isn’t the gristle, or even the unidentified creature’s inhuman, putty-looking visage. Lynch’s technique of shaking the bejesus out of the camera is what clinches the scene. The thing looks like it’s liable to break out of your screen at any moment.

Lynch has weaponized the TV frame itself, using color, motion, light, and sound to create a physical aggression in his images, and shock his audience. Through the showbiz magic known as “pressuring Showtime into giving him final-cut authority,” Lynch recently pulled off the single most avant-garde hour of TV in the medium’s history. Episode 8 of the series sees Lynch pulling every formal trick out of his sleeve to establish an atmosphere of violence located in another dimension. Through double exposure, stroboscopic lights, and jarring hyperactive cuts, he destabilizes viewers and leaves them with no way to get their bearings. He’s attacking people on a subconscious level, manipulating white noise on the audio mix so it continuously fades in and out of awareness. It’s an alien sort of violence, a distinct variety that promotes a feeling of insecurity and threat, rather than immediate danger.

Keeping with its unsettlingly intense focus on the aesthetics and mechanics of hostility, episode 8 also functioned as a dark origin story for the presence of evil itself on Earth. The sight of a detonating atom bomb has lurked around the periphery of the show, wallpapering the office of FBI agent Gordon Cole (Lynch himself), but the image dominates episode 8. The story revolves around that symbolic loss of innocence for humanity, the moment that compelled nuclear physicist Kenneth Bainbridge to declare he and his colleagues to be “sons of bitches.” It’s the birth of a bloodless, incinerating, indifferent instrument of destruction. It inspires fear not for what it is, but for what it represents: a pure expression of man’s will to do harm. The knife was conceived as a multipurpose outdoor tool, the gun ostensibly for hunting or protection. But the atomic bomb was created with the express purpose of reducing human populations to dust.

Even when Lynch is illustrating mankind’s potential for destruction, he maintains a trembling reverence for the violence they create. There’s a horrible beauty to the way Lynch looks at the mushroom cloud, examining it in slow motion, far removed, like a tornado seen from space. He regards the impulse to mangle or otherwise destroy as an elemental force in the universe.

That theme extends to his characters as well. The clear dichotomy between baffled protagonist Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in his current unaware incarnation as Dougie Jones, and the seemingly unkillable, possessed Evil Dale reinforces Lynch’s essential interplay between negative and positive energy. Neither one can exist without the other, and they’re inexorably drawn together. They obey the same cosmic laws as Einstein’s entangled atoms. Violence is inescapable, in the air or inside the characters’ brains. And in Twin Peaks, it always has a touch of the unnatural and otherworldly. A scene where Evil Dale gets shot comes off as weirdly pedestrian — and then the ghostly homeless cannibal zombies arrive. Violence is returned to its proper pedestal, as an intensely personal act that’s impossible to fully understand.

Twin Peaks initially sold itself as a murder mystery, but Lynch and his co-showrunner Mark Frost had more compelling questions on the brain than the identity of Laura’s killer. MacLachlan himself asked the right questions, but in another role for Lynch, playing a compromised innocent facing a sadistic thug in 1986’s Blue Velvet. “Why are there people like Frank?” MacLachlan’s character asks. “Why is there so much trouble in the world?” The Return has continued the original series’s shamanic investigation into the true nature of that trouble. But while the show submits to that omnipresent violence, it doesn’t share Jeffrey’s tone of panic. Lynch hasn’t made peace with the permanent existence of evil, by any means. He’s just endlessly interested in the battle to keep it at bay.

Twin Peaks: The Return airs on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on Showtime.

The most thrilling scene in Luc Besson’s stupefyingly ambitious new science fiction opus Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets takes place inside a giant metaphor. Protagonists Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) have been tasked with retrieving a McGuffin from an alien junk dealer whose storefront happens to be located in an alternate dimension. Through the use of virtual reality-style gear and miniportals resembling old-school boomboxes, they’re able to reach through the membrane of reality and into the world layered on top of their own. The ensuing chase straddles the line between thrilling and silly, cross-cutting between Valerian hustling through a bustling marketplace in the mirror-plane, and dodging invisible bullets through a vast desert back in his own dimension. 

It’s easy to imagine Besson staging this sequence as an analogue in defense of Valerian’s CGI-heavy digital filmmaking. At the interdimensional bazaar, Laureline and Valerian move just like actors in a greenscreened world, physically existing in a real space while simultaneously projected into a manufactured one. And while Besson good-naturedly jokes about the limits of the mediating equipment — wondrous as these portals are, they’re still prone to go on the fritz like any other gizmo — he reinforces its awe-inspiring potential over everything else. Like his characters, Besson was on a mission that couldn’t be accomplished without leaving the physical world. Inside and outside the movie, the transportive magic of technology makes previously impossible things possible.

Valerian has its faults (stilted dialogue, bafflingly spotty chemistry between the leads, third-act troubles), but it still makes the ultimate argument in favor of CGI’s unique utility in blockbuster filmmaking. VFX supervisor Scott Stokdyk recently told Polygon that Besson had dreamed of making Valerian for years, but had to patiently wait for the digital innovations to catch up with the insane scope of his vision before he could even try. It took the full-immersion fakery of Avatar in 2009 to embolden him into following through. Valerian conjures a universe no less dazzling than that of James Cameron’s colossally successful space opera, but it pushes its creative limits even further. Where Avatar synthesized a cherry-picked handful of indigenous cultures to create an aesthetically plausible new civilization, Besson’s throws together a hectic mashup of styles that play like the United States of Pop with science fiction imagery. I enjoy picturing Stokdyk sitting the director down before production began and laying out all the VFX options at his disposal, with Besson simply responding, “Yes.”

Besson has emerged as a shameless champion of CGI at a time when practical effects are being sold and perceived as truer, more labor-intensive, but more honorable. The split between the two casts a more flattering light on handmade work. Plenty of critics, myself included, have mounted the argument that an over-reliance on virtual techniques has made big-league directors lazy, and their films coldly impersonal. For example, there’s been a fair bit of derision aimed at the CGI used to save money, like the copy-pasted crowds of Gladiator and the Star Wars prequels, which fill the frame with all the presence of TV static. More recently, the incoherent sound and fury of the recent Transformers films has promoted the idea of digital effects as pricey but lifeless.

And the public has praised films willing to go the extra mile to stick with real, physical sets, props, and stunts. During the press tour for The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams loved mentioning how much of the new universe was built with blood, sweat, and tears. Likewise, George Miller scored an Oscar nod for how much he was able to pull off with Mad Max: Fury Road; those gonzo polecats were live stuntmen strapped into real cars in the actual Namib Desert. But while CGI isn’t a substitute for reality, Besson proudly reminds us that neither form is inherently superior to the other, and that CGI has its own separate value.

Valerian’s chief virtue is its muchness, the staggering volume of bustle Besson crams into every frame. One review astutely compared the film to “an entire decade’s worth of sci-fi space epics [projected] on the same screen, at the same time.” It doesn’t matter if Besson is only visiting a given world for two minutes, he fully and logically develops the style of each one — from a beachside enclave living in giant conch shells to a desert zone with rainbow-colored cotton candy clouds. For no other reason than because he can, Besson walks the audience through the outlay of the massive space station Alpha, fleetingly showing the underwater energy-harvesting district and the skyscraper-sized motherboards containing all the universe’s knowledge that is tended to by tiny maintenance-bots.

These two shots serve no narrative purpose. They improve the film only by expanding its scale. That sense of bigness is the feeling on which so much good science fiction has been founded. It doesn’t seem likely, given Valerian’s poor box office showing, that it’ll spawn 10 sequels. But its closest ancestor is still Star Wars, and the big, messy universe that series has created.

Nobody would claim Valerian looks “realistic,” but that isn’t Besson’s goal. He likes the aesthetic of artifice, and he recognizes how it enables and suits his teeming space metropolis. Alpha is supposed to be the pinnacle of intelligent development, a peaceful space where all life forms have gathered to share their knowledge and wares. He uses his full arsenal of effects to clutter Alpha with little signifiers of the melting-pot ethos that precipitated its creation, and the high-gloss sheen of digital cinema leaves it looking a touch more futuristic, another step removed from our present.

 

Director Luc Besson on designing his wild space opera Valerian, and why he’s tired of superhero movies

Besson’s exuberant, overflowing imagination is the decisive factor that separates Valerian from its automated digital brethren. So many directors have seen CGI as a shortcut that lets them create fire-hurricanes and mega-explosions, and handle all the tough work in post-production. Besson saw an opportunity to create more work for himself. Like any tool in the movie craftsman’s belt, CGI depends entirely on the skills and intentions of the artist wielding it, and Besson uses it to push the capabilities of the medium to their farthest limits.

He’s always harbored stratospheric, unruly ambition in his work. For example, 2014’s Lucy began as “Limitless, but with Scarlett Johansson” and ended as a theoretical philosophy lecture featuring Johansson reconfigured as a black cloud of swarming nano-droids. In that case, Besson used CGI to visualize an advanced form of consciousness, giving shape to conceptual wisps. With Valerian, he’s once again ventured into territory unattainable through traditional means, plumbing the deepest reaches of space with the same determined originality he brought to the contours of human perception.

Anthology fever is sweeping the nation. Ryan Murphy has flooded TV with shows like American Horror Story and Feud, which switch up premises and casts from season to season. Black Mirror gave the digital generation our Twilight Zone. And cinema is currently experiencing a deluge of horror anthologies from the indie set. The past few years have seen groups of simpatico filmmakers off the mainstream radar come together for eclectic short-film collections, often united under an overarching theme or premise. As opposed to films comprised of vignettes from a single director (Italian master Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath is a fine example; Freddie Francis’ kooky Tales from the Crypt is another), newer anthologies like the V/H/S trilogy, Southbound, Holidays, and the ABCs of Death films offer a tasting menu of subjects and styles, as well as a survey of the most exciting emerging talents in horror.

The newest entry in the series is XX, a quartet of horror shorts made by female directors, all featuring female protagonists. A clear rebuttal to the disproportionately male makeup of most anthologies, this project speaks to what’s made the form so popular as of late. As director / producer Jovanka Vuckovic explained in an interview with Scream Horror Magazine, “I had noticed all these women being passed over for jobs on all the anthologies that were coming out. Women were virtually absent from these contemporary anthologies so I was thinking about crowdfunding one.” Anthologies let small-time or first-time filmmakers get valuable exposure, and the studio doesn’t have to sweat the cost and risk of a full-length feature. It’s a low-stakes way to break in fresh talent and scout out the James Wans and Adam Wingards of tomorrow.

XX suffers from the same affliction as other contemporary compilations: some of the segments are good, and others are decidedly weaker. Inconsistency is pretty much unavoidable for producers corralling as many as two dozen filmmakers for a single project. But every horror-shorts collection has standouts among the duds. We decided to play Dr. Frankenstein and ransack this new wave of horror anthologies for parts, stitching together an abominable creation from the best of the best. Below, we’ve culled enough diamonds in the rough to fill out a standard feature-film runtime. Consider it your viewer’s digest from hell.

“The Birthday Party” — Annie Clark, XX

Better known as art-rock goddess St. Vincent, Clark tried her hand behind the camera for this deadpan, morbidly amusing re-creation of one girl’s traumatic childhood memory. Melanie Lynskey, looking perfectly haggard in a nightgown and robe, plays an upscale mother scrambling to stash her husband’s freshly overdosed corpse before guests start arriving for her daughter’s birthday party. Clark turns the character’s specific rich-mom anxieties — making sure the decorations are just-so, placating catty neighbors, emotionally nurturing a child in need — into a marvelously twisted joke with a punch line involving a panda costume and a vanilla cake. And the pulsating score is as well-composed as you’d expect from St. Vincent, who’s essentially the second coming of David Byrne.

“O Is for Orgasm” — Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, The ABCs of Death

Drawing from the Italian tradition of highly stylized slasher pictures known as giallo, the French husband and wife directorial team created this sensuous, sensual wisp of a film. Expressionistic footage of a couple engaged in passionate lovemaking cross-cuts with such suggestive imagery as a popping bubble, a burning cigarette, and a black glove. They don’t need a linear plot to generate terror — instead, they create ambient fear with manipulations of color and sound, turning the elements of cinema against the audience. Extreme close-ups get uncomfortably intimate and keep viewers on edge from the first frame; juxtaposing the sound of stretching leather with a shot of the individual folds of skin on a pair of quivering lips is the stuff of nightmares, made all the more unsettling because it never coheres into sense.

“Mother’s Day” — Sarah Adina Smith, Holidays

This slyly feminist yarn begins with a young woman visiting her doctor with some lady troubles — specifically, she gets pregnant without fail every single time she has sex. After upward of 20 abortions, she’s at her wit’s end, and she agrees to look into some [dramatic pause] unorthodox birth control methods. A weekend sojourn out into the desert with a clan of witches and a flask of ayahuasca takes a turn for the Satanic in short order, and the ensuing ritual doubles as a commentary on the culture of compulsory womanhood in more old-fashioned regions. Smith sets up some sumptuous visual imagery as well, evoking old Tarot designs and other medieval-mystical detritus.

“D Is for Dogfight” — Marcel Sarmiento, The ABCs of Death

Think Marley and Me, as rewritten by the screenwriters handling the Saw movies. In a wordless pas de deux with only driving industrial music for a score, a prizefighter squares off against a feral dog for a crowd of cash-waving degenerates. Over a series of slow-motion shots that are simultaneously majestic and sickeningly brutal, man and canine go at each other with all their rabid might, bared teeth and droplets of blood soaring through the air. The divisions between human and beast break down as the man taps into his animal side to muster the strength required to get the drop on the pooch, until an unexpected turn changes the dynamic. Call it a music video if you like, but the average music video would be lucky to have a tenth of Sarmiento’s pure stylistic verve.

“Amateur Night” — David Bruckner, V/H/S

Three dirtbags concoct the perfect formula for a night of partying: hit up the nearest watering hole, bring home the most suggestible bimbo in the joint, and surreptitiously shoot a little amateur porno using a camera concealed in a pair of glasses. They couldn’t have picked a worse target than Emily, an eerily reserved woman who charms them with little more than a dead-eyed expression and the words “I like you.” It’s no surprise that this plan leads to gruesome places, but the novel POV from the pervert’s-eye view makes every sudden scare come out of nowhere.

“H Is for Head Games” — Bill Plympton, The ABCs of Death 2

The cult animator’s two-minute submission straddles the line between gore and whimsy with a simple sketch of a man and woman locking lips, and locked in a violent battle for dominance. Her eyebrows become spidery legs clawing at his eyes, his ears turn into UFOs raining down a hail of laser beams, they shoot eyeballs at each other like bombs and gatling-gun bullets. The back-and-forth gets more hectic until it verges on the avant-garde, ending with both their faces reduced to smoking craters. The surreal elements are made even more vivid by Plympton’s distinctive style of animation, characterized by scribbles that uncomfortably wiggle in place even as the characters stay still.

“Siren” — Roxanne Benjamin, Southbound

As a producer on the V/H/S films and a contributor to XX, Benjamin has positioned herself at the heart of the indie horror scene, and she made her biggest splash with this chilling directorial debut. An all-girl rock trio touring through the desert gets a flat tire and hitches a ride with an odd-mannered couple, who invite them to spend the night. Are they weird in the way anyone picking up a hitchhiker would have to be weird, or is something up with the sinister meatloaf they serve their young women? Even on her first outing in the director’s chair, Benjamin builds tension with the steady hand of a seasoned pro, and the film engages with Southbound’s unifying elements of guilt and grief in a thoughtful, organic way.

“Her Only Living Son” — Karyn Kusama, XX

The Rosemary’s Teenager joke pretty much makes itself: a single mother’s adolescent son begins acting out, as high schoolers do, but his surly demands to get out of his room have an unnerving dark undertone. When she notices him eating the curdled blood out of an egg he’s just cracked, she fears the worst, and before you can say “Polanski redux,” she’s locked in a hallucinatory custody battle with Lucifer himself. Kusama wowed audiences with her lo-fi thriller The Invitation last year, and the same slow-burning suspense that made her feature a critical darling invigorates this briefer work. Most importantly, she doesn’t overstay her welcome. She excuses herself just as the homage starts to play itself out.

“D Is for Deloused” — Robert Morgan, The ABCs of Death 2

This nasty little stop-motion curio makes full use of its medium to convey icky textures in a way conventional film can’t. After a death-row inmate undergoes a lethal injection, a fantasy sequence reincarnates him in the form of a giant, gleaming grub and lets him take bloody revenge on his executioners. It’s a simple two-beat premise, so Morgan instead derives all of his fear-factor power from the revolting appearance of his figurines, all greasy and deformed like demonically possessed melted candles. This skin-crawling sketch picks up where the great Polish animator Jan Svankmajer left off, grabbing the wheel and veering into stomach-churning territory.

“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” — Joe Swanberg, V/H/S

DIY horror stalwart Swanberg tweaked the found-footage fad by shooting this short through a series of video chat sessions, presaging the desktop cyberhorror of Unfriended a few years later. A med student keeps up his long-distance relationship while he’s at college, and grows concerned about a bump on his girlfriend’s arm and other strange symptoms. The cause of her strange maladies is too shocking to spoil, but suffice to say that the detached perspective Swanberg creates for the big reveal makes the whole situation even more horrifying. The internet, already a pretty upsetting place as is, offers plenty of potential for fear, and Swanberg breaks long-awaited ground with this freak-out.

“Y Is for Youngbuck” — Jason Eisener, The ABCs of Death

This isn’t the most sensitive depiction of pedophilia out there, but then again, Eisener couldn’t care less about trying. He’s more interested in indulging his nostalgia for the John Carpenter-directed gems of the ‘80s, complete with all the lurid neons and synth soundtracks. A po-faced kid takes violent revenge on his rapist after getting abused during a hunting excursion, and Eisener works the sight of the deer (its lifeless black eyes, the mighty arch of its antlers) for all it’s worth. But even as he cross-cuts between flashes of the repulsive, he remains dedicated to his throwback aesthetic, assembling pleasing swirls of light and color. It’s a potent combination, even when it flips viewers’ stomachs.

“The Way Out/The Way In” — Radio Silence, Southbound

This twinned pair of shorts begins and concludes Southbound, but it’s more of a Möbius strip than a set of bookends. While both films share the theme of regret over a lost soul the protagonist couldn’t save (as well as a more literal connection), the former has mystical concerns, and the latter is a home-invasion thriller. In “The Way Out,” two men tear a swath down a nameless highway, with eerie floating creatures in close pursuit. “The Way In” finds a family on vacation senselessly assailed by masked intruders, and Dad appears to know why. Unified by the surgical precision of the Radio Silence brain trust (aka Tyler Gillett, Chad Villella, and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) in how they dole out frights, the two shorts make a fitting end to this hodgepodge of the macabre.