Anthology Horror: The Complete Guide to Portmanteau Frights

Rod Serling's series took the anthology format, a new story and new cast every week, and used it to smuggle sharp social commentary and existential dread past the censors under the cover of science fiction and horror. Its twist endings became a cultural shorthand, its best episodes are as unsettling now as ever, and every anthology series since, from Tales from the Crypt to Black Mirror, is walking through the door it opened. It is the template made perfect.

George A. Romero and Stephen King built Creepshow as a living EC Comics anthology, five garish, gleeful tales of comeuppance framed with comic-book panels, lurid lighting and a cackling animated ghoul. It is horror at its most purely fun, more interested in the shiver-and-a-grin of a good campfire story than in genuine terror, and it captures the anthology's greatest pleasure: the promise that the next tale is even nastier than the last.

Charlie Brooker took the Twilight Zone model and pointed it at technology, dread and modern life, delivering a new self-contained nightmare each episode about where our devices and appetites might lead. Its best episodes have entered the language as shorthand for a certain kind of near-future unease. It proved the anthology was not a relic but the perfect vessel for an era of constant, disposable, unsettling change.

Whether in the 1950s EC comics, the 1972 Amicus film or the beloved HBO series with its wisecracking Crypt Keeper, Tales from the Crypt is the anthology as pure ghoulish delight: ironic tales of greed and cruelty punished by grisly, poetic justice, delivered with a wink and a terrible pun. It understood that the horror anthology is, at heart, a joke told by a monster, and no one told it better.