ABSTRACT
The ABCs of Death is an anthology that offers 26 short films, each named for a letter of the alphabet, and each exploring a different way to die. While the filmmakers had ostensibly been offered complete artistic freedom, this seemed to result in many of them giving in to the impulse to use the short film format as a vehicle for the cinematic equivalent of quick, dirty punchlines involving toilet humour, ultraviolence and sex. Importantly, the film shows that the horror genre can, and should, do interesting things with women, sex and reproduction in a manner that enriches, reveals and provokes rather than belittles and reduces. Gynaehorror does not have to be something implicitly misogynistic. Instead, it can be monstrous in its most generative, provocative sense: a zygote that indicates new life, new congruities and new possibilities, rather than the miscarried leavings of a thoughtless representation.
