Anthologies

Films whose content is divided into a number of parts, each of which constitutes a narrative entity unto itself. Usually this entails 3 or 4 self-contained segments of approximately thirty minutes each.

An off-screen narrator or a "storyteller" character serves as a link between the episodes, whose common denominator might lie in the subject matter, or in a shared protagonist (for example, a collection of some of that character's life experiences), actor, or director (such as the case of "Black Sabbath," a triptych of disparate stories linked by Mario Bava's gifted direction). Additionally, such films make use of match cuts that enable the character to cross over from one story to the next.

Historically, genre cinema has long utilized an episodic structure, but even though works of this type have been produced since the 1940s - "Dead of Night" (1945) comes to mind - it wasn't until the 1960s when the formula hit its stride, achieving a level of success that made it the hallmark of well-known production companies such as British Hammer Films and - most significantly - Amicus Productions.