the short film seems to be one of the harder formats to pull off successfully. impressive short films have to show incredible control over the visuals or narrative, often both, to pull off their intended effect. so, what happens when you give 26 horror filmmakers a small amount of money to pull off a short film intended to shock, entertain, scare, and engage the viewers? exactly what happens with almost every other anthology, a mixed bag of results. the high points of this anthology are actually really excellent. there are some very inventive, weird and overall engaging shorts that really hooked my attention. i want to emphasize the weirdness of some of the shorts here. as a western viewer, some of this stuff is just bonkers, even though i think that in their country of origin they might not be so crazy. all that stuff is incredibly fun. and mixed in there with those are some really effectively told stories that do get to me on a more traditional horror level. the bigger problem is that there are just too many that i couldn't really connect to on any level. not visually, not thematically, not narratively. in fact, i don't even remember them at all. while there is some top notch filmmaking here, there is some really bad ones too. most of them fail because they can't leverage the format of the short film to service their story or film in any way. in fact, they let it become a hindrance to do something interesting or engaging. you might be better off just finding the good ones online and trying to find them on youtube instead because the film never really becomes a cohesive whole either. the thematic thread doesn't compel you to the next short and isn't enough to pull together the films from being just another collection of shorts. if you can stomach some of the shorts that are just no good at all, there is some good filmmaking in here and it's worth checking out. but, be warned, it is going to bore you at many different points. some standouts include: the letters f, h, k, l and n just go watch f is for fart if you haven't seen it yet. i have no words to describe that short.