Lovers of horror anthologies shouldn’t be put off by Dark Stories’ generic title, French language or origins as an internet series. Despite all those warning signs — and even more, discussed below — the portmanteau picture arrives as a nice surprise.

With more than a smidge of Scheherazade, Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3) plays a suburban mom in the wraparound story. Tied up and trapped in her basement by a sentient, super-creepy ventriloquist’s dummy (voiced by Scott Thrun, 2019’s Anna), she tells stories to the bald killer puppet as a survival technique — six in total.

Up first is a quite creative tale of an art museum exec (Delphine Chanéac, Splice) whose child is sucked into the paintings by a demon. The most overtly comic piece finds Sébastien Lalanne as a a zombie — “immortal, but delicate” — seeking vengeance on the men who put him in the morgue before all his body parts fall off. Arguably the scariest segment concerns a woman (Tiphaine Daviot) haunted by a djinn to the point of an Elm Street-ian sleeplessness.

Less satisfying, although not bad, are bits about ghosts following park jogger Dorylia Calmel (Let the Corpses Tan) and former Bionic Woman Michelle Ryan probing the claims of abduction by aliens — and subsequent God complex — of dimwitted farmer Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen).

Further confounding the aforementioned expectations, Dark Stories feels of a whole even with directing duties split between Guillaume Lubrano and François Descraques — the former responsible for another anthology series in the rather rotten Metal Hurlant Chronicles. Here, however, Lubrano’s sewing skills in unifying disparate elements have improved, striking the right balance of horror and humor all its own vs. beholden to EC Comics. So many contemporary collections of terror tales stumble from that start, so it’s a pleasure to see one not only get it right, but maintain it. —Rod Lott

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Despite having little to no connection with actual cannibalism, that didn’t stop unscrupulous investors from marketing The Cannibal Man as an absolute gut-muncher, because the original title of La Semana del Asesino (The Week of the Killer) didn’t have the exploitative innards they thought the film needed.

In truth — or retrospect — the film didn’t really need it, because Eloy de la Iglesia’s haunting story of a man who slowly feels the threads of sanity become more frayed with each passing day is a truly terrifying tale that should have given the Spanish director far more attention outside of cult film circles.

Spending his day working at a slaughterhouse, Marco (Vicente Parra) kills a taxicab driver one evening in self-defense, which inexplicably awakens something inside him that leads to him murdering everyone from his brother and girlfriend to others who might come around his den of squalor, situated outside a lavish apartment building.

Over the course of the week, as the house begins to smell of death and guilt — always a reactive combination — Marco takes the body parts to work, basically to turn them into liquid mush. I don’t think it gets turned into food and, to be fair, when the prospect of eating the human meat is presented to him, he becomes exceedingly nauseous. Maybe a better title would have been Almost a Cannibal, which sounds like a great romantic comedy.

Director de la Iglesia throws in numerous jabs at the then-oppressive Spanish government — most notably in dutifully homosexual swimming scenes, mildly erotic for the time. When viewed through those rebellious eyes, The Cannibal Man is indeed a film of absolute protest that, through a semi-graphic lens, makes it far more important than most give it credit for. —Louis Fowler

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Not to be confused with the found-footage spooker Apartment 143 — dyslexia excepted — Apartment 413 is almost entirely a two-hander in one location. Yes, of course it’s the unit of the title: a depressing-looking place in a depressing-looking complex in Austin, with a fitting “FML” carved into the window AC unit’s exterior side.

Community college dropout Marco Reyes (Nicholas Saenz, Mr. Roosevelt) needs a job. And fast, because his girlfriend, Dana (Brea Grant, All the Creatures Were Stirring), is about-to-pop pregnant. He’s not having much luck, considering his alarm mysteriously fails to wake him as set, thus causing missed interviews.

As he sits in his apartment all day applying for jobs — and playing video games — stranger things begin happening: Trash re-appears; an unknown text message suggests it’s “not your baby”; and Post-it Notes pop up like magic, scrawled with threats like “THIS IS A WARNING.”

Things escalate from there. Stress? Black mold? Psychotic break? Residual haunting from the site’s domestic murder two years prior?

You’ll find out, although the ending is more confounding than disturbing. As the first film for both director Matt Patterson and writer Ron Maede, Apartment 413 likely serves as a calling card for bigger and better things, rather than a Texas-sized reworking of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion through a millennial-hipster lens. At just under 80 minutes, credits included, not enough happens to do lasting damage, yet so much solitary time with an increasingly unlikable guy is a lot to ask of the audience; as a short, it would be three times more effective. —Rod Lott

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