‘The ABCs of Death’: How Ant Timpson and Tim League Made a Midnight Masterclass With 26 Horror Shorts
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
This September, we’re celebrating Back to School Night with four midnight movies that aren’t just academically themed but also teach the lessons essential to understanding this school of cinema.
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First, read the spoiler-free bait — a weird and wonderful pick from any time in film and why we think it’s worth memorializing. After you’ve watched the movie, come back for the bite — a breakdown of all the spoiler-y moments you’d want to unpack when exiting a theater.
The Bait: A Lesson in Midnight Movies from Ant Timpson
Midnight movie-goers tend to be friendly, but Ant Timpson is more popular than most.
The New Zealand filmmaker, who pulled off a small miracle when producing “The ABCs of Death,” has been around the world’s festival circuit for decades. He’s smiley, sharp, and the kind of guy who serious genre fans describe as the one person “you just have to meet.”
That’s how the “Bookworm” and “Come to Daddy” director was able to pull together more than 26 short filmmakers on a shoestring budget and deliver a midnight movie masterclass at TIFF in 2012. The extreme horror anthology leaves room for improvement as an exercise in gender diversity — Timpson laments the credits as “a total sausage fest” today — but it’s also a testament to the role close relationships play in building film counterculture.
“I’m in the ass-end of the world,” Timpson told IndieWire, laughing over Zoom. “It’s hard to maintain connections and I had to travel a lot. Austin has become like a second home to me.”
Community is essential to indie filmmaking. As a programmer, director, and dude who has crashed on Tim League’s couch, Timpson knows that better than most. He credits much of his career’s early success and credibility to League, who helped produce “The ABCs of Death” for Drafthouse Films. League founded that company, the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, and Fantastic Fest, an annual genre event returning to Texas later this month.
“If I wasn’t partnered up with Tim, I doubt ‘ABCs’ would’ve got off the ground to be honest,” Timpson said. “But the idea was to capture a specific moment in the zeitgeist and to preserve the horror scene as it existed at that time. I think we did that.”
Timpson came up with the concept for “The ABCs of Death” while sleep-deprived and caring for his young children, but he found the very adult film’s talent mostly through networking. With League’s help, Timpson recruited enough buzzy genre directors to assign each artist a single letter from the English alphabet. That classic school-kid framework inspired a spectacular tome of unapologetic riffs on the murderous and macabre. Think “A is for Apocalypse” or “B is for Bigfoot” — each explored as a bite-sized, cinematic nightmare.
“The interesting thing from that is how much of an impact those filmmakers have gone on to make,” said Timpson. “There’s just no way you would be able to do this with them now. First off, the money was insulting. If they weren’t friends, I think they would’ve been right to spit in our face.”
For the original movie (“The ABCs of Death” was successful enough to inspire a sequel and a spin-off), the directors’ roster included then still up-and-coming voices like Ti West, Adam Wingard, Jason Eisener, and Ben Wheatley. Working on a microbudget of $5,000 U.S. dollars per short, that once-in-a-lifetime group floored Timpson with not only their semi-established talent but their commitment to making the outrageous practical.
“When we saw some of them coming in, I was absolutely shocked because they were delivering,” said Timpson. “Xavier Gens’ one [‘X is for XXL’], no shit, that looks like a $200,000 production — and Kaare Andrews’ [‘V is for Vagitus’] looked like a mega budget sci-fi film.”
The results were doubly impressive when it came to British animator Lee Hardcastle, who won a contest to become the film’s so-called 26th director with his claymation. (There are 28 filmmakers if you split up the teams.) Roughly 500 entries were culled down to a meager top 10 via an online voting system — one that was designed for “ABCs of Death” by eventual Letterboxd founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow. Hardcastle was ultimately chosen as the winner by a jury of his “ABCs” peers.
“He was such a sweetheart guy, literally a basement filmmaker,” Timpson said. “When he turned up at TIFF, you could tell it was just overwhelming to him. It was an amazing moment watching him start to hang out with these directors. I don’t know if he idolized them, but he definitely knew who they were and he was kind of in awe of the whole thing.”
“T is for Toilet” launched Hardcastle’s career — and slotted him into a human pyramid on the red carpet at the premiere. None of the directors were told anything about the segments bookending their own and the cascading surprises made for an especially raucous screening. From the notoriously tough-to-take “L is for Libido” to a foxy Nazi strip tease (that’s “H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion,” obviously?), “The ABCs of Death” uses the variety-style structure of a midnight shorts block to capture the essence of bonding at a film festival.
“I felt like at least then we had that kind of rock-and-roll film that was just perfect for Midnight Madness,” said Timpson. “Some shorts don’t work for some people, but they all have highs and lows. And the idea of it was to make that midnight movie experience.”
Ironically enough, the producer admits to liking “The ABCs of Death 2” a little better. As a programmer for plenty of festivals over the years — including his own Incredibly Strange Film Festival and the New Zealand International Film Festival — Timpson sees midnight as a somewhat floundering subculture. It’s hemmed in by a lack of originality from major studios, supersaturation in the streaming age, endless side effects brought on by social media, the American bias still skewing the international market, and plenty more.
But fringe filmmaking is far from dead, Timpson said, and there’s a “delicious irony” to the bonds we make as midnight movie fans. Repetition is key and teamwork can be crucial, but endlessly obsessing over the possibility of controversial art is also an act of L-O-V-E, love.
“It just needs that young blood, that hunger, that mad action,” Timpson said, emphasizing how grateful he is for these filmmakers. “With ‘The ABCs of Death,’ I’m still in touch with so many of those people. There’s just so much warmth and humanity behind something that’s…so disgusting and gross and offensive.”
Those brave enough to join in on the fun can stream “The ABCs of Death” on Tubi or Pluto TV.
The Bite: If You Don’t Know, Take a Guess
There’s a study in mathematical probability hidden somewhere in “The ABCs of Death,” but I’m too haunted by that kitten head squish to find it. I’ve seen this movie before (a few times in fact), and while its gore never gets easier to take, I’m always impressed by its dazzling collection of happy accidents.
Like many of the best midnight movies, this quietly legendary cult hit is made better by its Frankenstein-like edges. Some of these shorts pair like a clandestine one-two punch and others collide like comedic gunfire. (Two orgasm jokes? IN A ROW?!)
Most directors obsess over hiding their movies’ seams, but anthologies are impressive creations because they’re imperfect. To get the order that “The ABCs of Death” ended up with, Timpson and League aimed for a meritocracy — all filmmakers were told to put in for a handful of letters/words/stories they wanted to make — but also employed some “alchemy in Excel” to land on their final-final list.
“We improved all of this process on the sequel,” Timpson said in a follow-up email; “The ABCs of Death 2″ includes shorts from Jen and Sylvia Soska, Bill Plympton, and Vicenzo Natali among others. “There were some overlaps [with the original ‘ABCs’] — where Tim and I made the final calls,” he wrote.
It’s a testament to the pair’s lasting taste as familar festival faces that “The ABCs of Death” still feels as compelling and cohesive as it does. I wasn’t watching with this in mind, but there’s an argument to be made that this movie could do wonders as a subgenre sampler. There’s no denying that horror continues to thrive as a market and, with more scary movie fans looking for fresh ideas than ever before, it seems like an expeditious (if psychologically risky) way to figure out what is — and maybe isn’t — your thing.
Below are some thoughts I had while screening “The ABCs of Death” this time around, and a few more trivia tidbits from IndieWire After Dark’s interview with Ant Timpson:
This movie has a cool enough production history to warrant a nonfiction book (there’s already a “kids” version…technically), but as companion reading right now, look up the real court case associated with the film. A substitute in Ohio screened “The ABCs of Death” — unrated and reportedly available in public libraries — for classrooms full of students while filling in for a Spanish teacher at a high school in Columbus. She was sentenced to serve a 90-day prison term as a result.
That case became of national interest and several people associated with the film raised funds to support the woman. Timpson remembers thinking she seemed to find the gesture “strange.”
Nacho Vigalondo’s “A is for Apocalypse” makes for an ideal midnight opening, first grabbing hold with horror then subverting that tone with humor and finally throwing in a paradigm-shifting twist. That the first three films were all in Spanish, Timpson said, was unintentional.
Per Timpson, Simon Rumley’s title was changed from “P is for Paramaribo” (the capital of Suriname) to “P is for Pressure.” The producer said “B is for Bigfoot” also shifted: “Since it only had a reference to the abominable snowman and no Bigfoot in it — apologies to Adrian [Garcia Bogliano] for that terrible shoehorning.”
“The ABCs of Death” poster was designed by “V is for Vagitus” director Kaare Andrews, who is also a comic book writer and artist for Marvel. For the one-sheet, the filmmaker can be spotted portraying the character of Death. Andrews is holding his real baby, although the infant was removed from certain versions of the poster to meet different countries’ censorship laws.
For the title sequence, Timpson recruited the help of Aaron Becker who he described as “one of the kings of the title design world.” Becker has recent credits on “Longlegs” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
Per a letter from pre-production, each “ABCs of Death” shorts director was given just six months, six days, and six hours to complete their work. Asked if he would make a new “ABCs of Death” featuring only women filmmakers, Timpson said he’d love to, but joked, “They’re way smarter than that.”
The original title for the film was “The ABCs of Murder,” which sounds great with a New Zealand accent.
Marcel Sarmiento’s “D is for Dogfight” belongs on any list of horrifying canines worth its salt — but the parrot in Banjong Pisanthanakun’s “N is for Nuptials” is embodying an old dirty joke that works in any language. According to several studies, some birds don’t just mimic human sounds but actually understand what they say.
Timo Tjahjanto’s “L is for Libido” remains the hardest horror in “The ABCs of Death” more than a decade later. The version available on Prime Video at the time of writing this article makes frequent use of the subtitle… [flesh squeaking.]
Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s “Q is for Quack” is maybe the most quotable film in the bunch (“Let’s kill this fucking duck!“) — with easily its most heroic representation of a sound guy.
The decision to put the title cards at the end of each short was Timpson’s call. He said, “I just loved the idea that once it was setup with ‘A is for Apocalypse’ it was going to play as a game for folks trying to guess what the title was.” Not only does that make the film’s pacing stronger, but Timpson also intended the structure as a “playful reference” to its inspiration as “a childlike guessing game.”
IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations every Friday night at 9:30 p.m. ET. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
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