The news of yet another horror anthology coming out doesn’t inspire the same amount of excitement as it used to several years ago. The arrival of V/H/S, a fun blend of the anthology gimmick with found footage (the horror subgenre du jour), rejuvenated an interest in multiple directors collaborating on different, loosely connected short films. But now, after two V/H/S sequels, two ABCs of Death films, and with more “anthrillogies” on the way, the format is starting to get a bit tired again. That feeling must have been on the minds of the team behind Southbound, who also made V/H/S. They’ve gone in a different direction from their previous film, creating a more collaborative effort that intertwines Southbound’s five stories on both a narrative and thematic level. While the film can’t escape some of the inevitable issues that always plague these episodic movies, its consistency makes it the best horror anthology to come out since Trick ‘r Treat.

Things start with The Way Out directed by Radio Silence, who handle both the opening and closing stories. As an opening, the short really serves little purpose other than reeling viewers in with a deliberately hidden story that will be revealed in the concluding chapter (cleverly titled The Way In). Two men (Chad Villela & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) are covered in blood and fleeing after escaping from someone (or something) that has them freaked out. After driving for a while, they notice a large, floating, skeletal demon following them, and despite their best efforts to escape they find themselves stuck in a sort of closed loop (also serving as a hint towards the film’s overall narrative structure). The purposefully vague plot makes this segment easy to forget, but it does a fine job establishing the major elements that run through the rest of the stories: the long stretch of highway in the Californian desert, and themes of regret, guilt and retribution.

Next up is Siren, Roxanne Benjamin’s directorial debut (she worked as a producer on V/H/S). Sadie (Fabianne Therese), Kim (Nathalie Love) and Ava (Hannah Marks) are a touring band whose van breaks down on the highway, and after getting offered a ride by a polite couple to stay at their house for the night Sadie begins noticing something seriously wrong with their hosts. Benjamin’s segment kicks off the strongest stretch of Southbound, with a fun little horror story that has a few devilish twists, along with a grim yet funny ending that segues into the film’s high point. David Bruckner’s Accident opens with Lucas (Mather Zickel) calling 911 to help someone injured in a car accident he caused. Bruckner hits a sort of twisted groove that none of the other films come close to reaching, and does a far better job at creating a sense of mystery that generates intrigue instead of frustration. And Brucker’s hook to the story is simple but effective: Lucas does the right thing, only to discover that he’s within a realm where morals don’t exist. It’s a brilliant short, with a low-key ending that provides the film’s best transition.

Unfortunately, the next story, Patrick Horvath’s Jailbreak, starts a slight downward trajectory due to its half-assed attempts to build out a mythology around the film’s location. Danny (David Yow) comes to one of the small towns along the highway in search of his missing sister, and it amounts to a lot of elements getting introduced without explanation as a way to imply some elaborate, complex supernatural society or system within this stretch of the desert. Horvath’s specificity only breaks the compelling illusion of something sinister in Bruckner’s previous short, suddenly showing there are weird back alleys and tattoo parlours all around. And the final short plays out as a riff on The Strangers before trying to explain what exactly was going on earlier in The Way Out.

But the less successful shorts in Southbound’s latter half don’t tank the film because of the overall thematic and visual through line. It’s hard to make desert locations look bad, and the film’s four directors of photography do a great job enhancing the isolated and dangerous qualities of the barren landscapes these characters can’t find their way out of. Southbound can act like an argument for why anthologies can benefit from a more collaborative effort, because even when one filmmaker might handle a theme or idea in a way that falters, the echoes of the stronger segments still ring through. It’s a big benefit in Southbound’s case, and helps make an increasingly stale format feel refreshing again.

A version of this review was originally published on September 18th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

Back in 2012, the anthology horror subgenre got a nice shot in the arm thanks to the arrival of V/H/S, a collection of found footage shorts that spawned two sequels and a renewed interest in short-form horror. Now, four years later, the same people behind V/H/S return with Southbound, a new anthology that takes a far more ambitious approach. Comprised of five short stories, Southbound shares both a location and narrative, taking place on a desert highway where poor souls meet terrible fates through interlocking tales. The cohesiveness of Southbound turns out to be the glue that keeps it together, exchanging the hit and miss quality of most anthologies with a narrative and thematic consistency. Much like V/H/S, Southbound is an entertaining collection of shorts that helps expand the storytelling possibilities of the anthology format.

The best stretch of Southbound happens early on with its second and third shorts Siren and The Accident. Directed by Roxanne Benjamin (her directorial debut, although she was a producer on the V/H/S series), Siren follows a small band whose van breaks down on the way to their next gig, but when a seemingly nice couple drives by offering to help, one band member suspects these good Samaritans might be hiding something. Benjamin’s short is a lot of sinister fun, and it’s a great lead-in to David Bruckner’s The Accident. Bruckner’s film is by far the highlight of Southbound, a small-scale piece that follows one man (Mather Zickel) trying to do the right thing after causing a tragic accident. The less said about the twists and turns throughout Southbound the better, since a large part of what makes Siren and The Accident so entertaining is trying to figure out where they’ll end up.

After Southbound’s World Premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, I talked with Roxanne Benjamin and David Bruckner about their contributions to Southbound along with the film’s tight-knit collaborative process.

Southbound comes out in theaters on Friday, February 5th before a VOD release on Tuesday, February 9th.

What do you think anthologies bring to horror that a more conventional narrative doesn’t?

David: I think you can kind of do anything in 25 minutes. You have the ability to go nuts or take risks that you wouldn’t normally take when you have to support three acts. You also get to kind of experiment with a lot of different ideas, like maybe you have a creative impulse to do something and you don’t know if it’ll hold the audience’s attention for an entire movie. The short form campfire tale has a place. When you get into cautionary formats or these kinds of morality tales, you don’t need a lot more time to explore that idea.

Roxanne: Multiple viewpoints, too. You’re getting to work with a lot of people in a short amount of time, and making something together in a more collaborative environment. I think it’s really nice.

Before you decided to make another anthology, did you always intend to go in and change the format from your previous films?

Roxanne: Absolutely. I think with the V/H/S movies we wanted to challenge everyone with the idea of making found footage interesting. With this one, [it’s] “How do we reinvigorate that idea and try to take it to a next level?”

David: And on that note, what would we want to see? If we were going to see a bunch of shorts strung together as an anthology, maybe that wouldn’t be as fulfilling as something that winds together and has a purpose, a certain order or intuitive sensibility for why these things should come together. We were sort of searching for that.

Roxanne: And how to live in one world and make the stories within that world, rather than dropping the audience into a new world every 20 minutes.

David: I was always talking about the idea of a night at the movies where you hear several different voices on a similar topic or idea, so you’re kind of hitting it on different sides. That always seemed like a good night at the movies.

It’s surprising to me that, with so many anthology films coming out after V/H/S, none of these other recent anthologies have tried what you guys do here.

Roxanne: It just happened organically. I can’t speak to the other ones that are out there, but it was something we had done before, so we didn’t want to do the same thing.

David: I think we were interested in finding some sort of connective force to put these things together. I think we also just spent a lot more time on the front end than V/H/S. We were out location scouting together, we landed on the idea that there should be a location, something that ties these things together geographically. That led to a lot of afternoon and evening drives out into the California desert exploring our options. We had a very small budget, and had to figure out what to do to make these things come to life, and just being out on those desert highways together [makes] ideas come about.

Roxanne: And there are easter eggs all over the movie a lot of people don’t know that are tying them together. Little crossovers that…

David: Some of them are excruciatingly subtle.

Roxanne: Yeah. [Laughs]

David: I don’t know if anyone will ever discover them.

Roxanne: But we know they’re there!

So what made you decide on using the desert as your location?

David: It’s awesome.

Roxanne: It’s vast, it’s empty, it’s an ethereal plane of existence. You feel like you’re not quite in reality. Both day and night out in the desert, there’s just so much nothing, and so much opportunity for horror to emerge out of that nothing.

David: I’m from Atlanta, I’m a forest creature. So for me to have that much of a spectrum in my point of view was a little unnerving. [To Roxanne] You actually taught me a lot about the desert because you knew all these locations. You were in some ways my ambassador to California. It was a fun exploration.

How different was the collaborative process on Southbound compared to V/H/S?

Roxanne: Writer’s room.

You all got in one room together and hashed it out?

Roxanne: All the time. For the V/H/S films, our filmmakers were kind of their own entities, and then we brought them together in post. On V/H/S/2 we connected everybody a little bit more by starting earlier, swapping cuts and that kind of thing. On this one it was very much through design, starting with Radio Silence kind of developing the world, [then] everyone getting together and finding their stories within that world and how they’re connected. It’s more like a TV model.

Did you come up with the themes first and find ways to explore that, or did you come up with the ideas and then realize how they tied together?

Roxanne: It’s kind of chicken-egg.

David: It is kind of hard to say. Early on we settled into different things. We knew Radio Silence were going to handle the bookends. I fell into the middle. Patrick’s piece made sense later on because he had a protagonist who knew more about what was going on, and that was a really satisfying turn at that point in the movie. We were conscious of avoiding certain pitfalls like having five act ones in a row. Every time you start a new movie, the momentum dies down a little bit, so we were trying to contradict all of that. You can swing back and forth between having an individual take on something and seeing the bigger picture, and wanting to do something in service of that.

How did you each come up with the ideas for your films?

Roxanne: For Siren, I was working with my co-writer Susan Burke, who’s awesome. I’ve known her for a long time and we have similar sensibilities of this eerie surrealism where comedy meets horror and what those lines are. We were talking about how we both have friends in traveling bands and that kind of era of your life where you’re irresponsible, and you think everything’s an adventure until it’s not. That’s kind of what sparked the idea.

David: For some reason, I really wanted to do a piece with one guy on the phone for most of it. I got attached to that early on. I wanted to focus on a single performance, to have a guy walk into a creepy place and have to act quickly. It really was that vague, and I didn’t know where to go with it from there. There were several iterations of it, and then through the process of talking about where to go, we found a way to make these pieces fit in an event that would hold them together in a unique way.

I really enjoyed seeing Mather Zickel in The Accident since I’m used to seeing him in comedies like Newsreaders.

David: Mather came in to read and blew me away in the room. We had a lot of great reads, and the night after we did those reads Roxanne and I hopped in a car to scout a potential location. I just took all the reads, particularly of the 911 calls, and we listened in the car to actual 911 calls off of YouTube, and then I would just play the auditions. And Mather’s just got us. We believed it, and he took it to a really fascinating place. The piece required a lot of very fast internal transitions, the character has like 5 plates spinning at once. And just from a technical perspective, I don’t know if it’s his comedy background or where he came from, Mather could just move through all of those things in such a fantastic way that could keep the pace of the movie up.

How did you handle approaching the mythological aspect of the film? It feels like you wanted to make sure you didn’t give away too much.

Roxanne: You never want to beat people over the head with that because it takes away that sense of discovery. The fun part for me in early screenings was seeing people arguing over what they thought the mythology was, or when they realized what the mythology was. That’s the most fun part.

David: I think part of it too is that it’s just a fun way to string together these kinds of tales. When we landed on the idea of some kind of hellish haunted highway or however you want to describe it, you kind of come across what you need to come across. So to some degree, the mythology owes itself to each individual character and what their story is. We kind of collected elements together, but I think we never wanted to lose sight of that. We never wanted to be so explicit that we were world building something that could be understood outside the confines of this movie.

I’ve always wondered if filmmakers get competitive with each other when making their own segments in an anthology film.

Roxanne: I don’t think it’s competitive so much as wanting to bring your A-game, because you got a team you can’t let down on top of wanting to make your best thing.

David: I think you get in the mindset of just celebrating something that’s awesome no matter what it is. Wherever it happens, you’re excited to be a part of that. And it’s also being a fan of the people you’re working with and getting to see what they’re doing unfold. Sometimes there’s a thing someone is fighting for in the script that you maybe don’t recognize or don’t understand, and when you see it unfold on set or in the cut you’re constantly going “Oh, that’s what you were doing there.” The medium is so simple, a script is not a finished product, it’s a blueprint for an idea, and it’s not until those elements come across that you really understand what somebody meant. So half the time we’re just listening to each other. Even now, when we screen the film we’ll come out of the film often and go, “I finally heard that moment, I finally heard what you were talking about.”

At the end of Nicholas McCarthy’s The Pact, Annie (Caity Lotz) killed the Judas Killer, her crazed uncle responsible for the decapitation of several women over several decades. Annie was ready to move on, but Evil (or, more accurately, film studio economic interest) wasn’t done with her. McCarthy bailed on making a sequel, leaving Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath to take over writing and directing duties. Hallam and Horvath aren’t a bad choice; their first film Entrance is a bit of a misfire, but its stubborn dedication to low-key horror made it an admirable failure. That restrained form of filmmaking falls in line with the slow burn quality of McCarthy’s film, except Hallam and Horvath fail to replicate anything close to what made its predecessor effective.

Lotz, doing her best take on Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. The main character this time around is June (Camilla Luddington), a crime scene cleaner, and her police officer boyfriend Daniel (Scott Michael Foster, seen mostly entering or leaving their house). Daniel works on a homicide matching the Judas Killer’s MO, while June suffers from nightmares looking awfully similar to the crime scene. It isn’t until FBI profiler Ballard (Patrick Fischler, unsure whether to ham it up or go method) explains what’s going on that the pieces begin falling into place. June’s biological mother was one of Judas’ victims, making June fearful that the killer’s spirit has latched on to her. June begins experiencing hauntings, and as her nightmares grow in intensity more bodies pile up.

The film’s first half is loosely connected to The Pact, making this story feel retrofitted into a clear attempt at building a VOD franchise. Swap the Judas Killer with any other made up serial psychopath, and no one would notice. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if the storyline had any vitality in it. The murky, ugly cinematography goes well with the film’s plodding narrative, setting up a boring mystery none of the characters look particularly interested in solving. For a brief moment it looks like Hallam and Horvath introduce the idea of June committing these murders in her sleep, but that possibility slowly fades away, acting like a half-assed red herring. It’s lazy writing, giving off the impression that Hallam and Horvath have no clue what they’re trying to do. McCarthy’s script for The Pact, while full of its own issues, looks masterful next to this messy attempt at a sequel.

Once Annie comes back into the picture, The Pact 2 shows a brief flicker of life, the kind of fun familiarity from seeing old characters pop up again. That flicker vanishes once it’s apparent that Hallam and Horvath just want to remake The Pact in 45 minutes. The exact same story beats and plot twists as the first film happen here, only this time applied to June instead of Annie. And by lazily slapping a newer, weaker coat of paint over the old one, The Pact 2 devolves into complete nonsense by its climax, throwing in plot twists just for the sake of it. It’s bad enough that Hallam and Horvath can’t do a good job with their own original story in the sequel; even when directly copying the first film, they still screw it up.

Scares are mostly absent here. Carl Sondrol’s score throws screeching strings and booming percussion over scenes in an attempt to freak viewers out. The score actually hurts the effectiveness of the horror, especially during one sequence involving a shadow. If anything the music signals overcompensation on the filmmakers’ part, that they aren’t confident enough in their abilities to unnerve. That lack of confidence runs throughout The Pact 2. McCarthy’s film certainly showed confidence through its direction; the same can’t be said for Hallam and Horvath. The Pact 2 is an amateur, stale follow-up, an attempt to start another low rent, low quality series of horror films to profit from bored Netflix subscribers. The film’s ending, a warning from one character that “it’s starting again,” all but confirms a third Pact will be on its way if The Pact 2 proves successful enough. That thought alone is scarier than anything in this film.

The Pact 2 trailer