Amicus did something well: it brought the form of the episodic comic to video life. There was a certain genre of hosted comics—a host is depicted and speaks in the second person (to you, the reader). The host greets you, makes jokes or cultural comments, announces a theme, and then introduces a story. After the story end, he comments on it, makes a joke (usually about how the victim deserved it), and then ties that result to something about the next story. Then the next story is announced and the process repeats. At the end, there may be a recap of the theme of the issue’s string of stories, and then a farewell.

That was the format. Amicus brought this comic book device to film. Certain results followed, and these results ended up permeating and shaping the other films that Amicus produced. This genre is called the portmanteau film.

But what I love is the British sexiness and serious issues. Very few Teenage Frankenstein pap here. More real-world sufferings, like infidelity, rejection, loneliness, class sadness, structural class conflict, jealousy, insecurity, fear of God, fear of demons, fear of insanity, fear of wanting to commit suicide. Adult themes—yes. Amicus was “adult” horror made from comics (which are also contemporary cultural mirrors).

Note that Amicus produced two EC Comic titles:

• Tales from the Crypt (1972)
• Vault of Horror (1973) From Beyond the Grave (1974)

Anyway, I find the portmanteau films of Amicus extremely comforting. This mode of presenting distinct stories “inside” or “on top of” some continuity-making context connects the stories also. This notion is Kant’s great contribution to the Western dream of establishing all things on a basis of Formal Rationality. Today the locution is: “deriving quality from quantity,” where quantity denotes all the formalisms of mathematics plus predicate, modal, and other logics. Kant observed that acts of subject-side combination ought to create a residue on the side of the object, since the object is made of subjective states. The mere act of combining sense moments into an apprehended series all of which is an object for one and the same subject is a magical quality-generating act. From the mere act of combination, something formal and quality-less, qualities arise—qualities of the object.

So there is a certain rasa, a certain vedanic enjoyment, that arises from the mediating act of presenting the storyteller. It adds a layer of Brechtian distance with the movie about a host telling stories. This makes them movies inside the movie, which makes the comfort aspect of the horror rasa all the most intense.

Any link?

Is there a link by virtue of their intrinsic qualities between the portmanteau film and the horror genre? Maybe. Are certain stories more from-a-teller than others? I guess this becomes: Are certain stories more dependent on the portmanteau format, which is the normal theatrical or monological format: one speaker who is both speaking to and telling about.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the first horror film—and guess what? It was a portmanteau film! The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari makes use of a Rahmenerzählung, or frame story—a prologue and epilogue establish the main body of the film as a delusional flashback, a novel technique in its day. Amicus revives this ancient (post)modern tradition.