Premise: A horror anthology with 5 loosely connected stories about unconventional phobias.
I feel like I make new excuses every week about why I’m not doing a film justice writing about it. The real answer is that I need to drop this maniacal commitment to writing something about every single movie I see. My Phobias excuse is pretty decent though. I watched it after an exhausting Disney World week, then before I’d written anything, I came down with COVID. After a week of that, I can’t say I retained as much about Phobias as I’d like.
That’s a shame too, because Phobias is a really solid horror anthology. 5 stories with a sixth linking narrative. A hair under 90 minutes. A nice variety of filmmakers. Surprisingly recognizable cast. These are all good things. Best of all, Phobias succeeds where a lot of horror anthologies fail for me. There’s a consistency of tone. There isn’t “the funny one” or “the one that’s too cool to be sincere”. It actually feels like the producers went into this with some oversight over the assorted directors, and the result is something that is a satisfying whole yet offers variety. Another cool facet I noticed afterwards is that it is casually female dominated. 3 of the 5 segments are directed by women and the cast has gender parity if not female dominance. That doesn’t make it better or worse, really. I just like that it can be done without having to be built into the pitch like an XX.
The main thing the movie lacks is a stand-out segment. I do treat horror anthologies as samplers to decide of full dishes. I found many of my favorite horror filmmakers of the last decade from V/H/S. While Phobias offers several decent stories, none made me stop and ask “who the hell made that?” Vehophobia has a nice twist. I appreciate how Hoplophobia found horror in realism. Atelophobia adds some gnarly body horror to the mix. There’s nothing in Phobias to make me recommend against it. I just wish it had that thing to really excite me.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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