ABCs of Death 2 is a 2014 American comedy horror anthology film produced by Ant Timpson and Tim League. It contains 26 different shorts, each by different directors spanning various countries. It is a sequel to The ABCs of Death (2012), and second installment in the ABCs of Death film series.[2] Directors featured include Jim Hosking, Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, the Soska sisters, Julian Barratt, Rodney Ascher, Kristina Buožytė, Larry Fessenden, Navot Papushado, Aharon Keshales, Bill Plympton, and Vincenzo Natali.
The film received a much more positive response than its predecessor. A second sequel titled ABCs of Death 3: Teach Harder was announced to be in development during the post-credits title card. However, due to illegal pirating of the second film,[according to whom?] the status of the project has been left in development hell. Despite this, producers released what they categorized as a spin-off, titled ABC's of Death 2½ in 2016.
Like the first film, the sequel is divided into 26 individual chapters, each helmed by a different director assigned a letter of the alphabet. The directors were then given free rein in choosing a word to create a story involving death. The varieties of death range from accidents to murders.[3][4]
A contest was held for the role of the 26th director. The winner was music video director Robert Boocheck, who submitted his short for M.[5]
The movie begins with a creepy stop-motion storybook that opens showing children doing a variety of fun activities that end up being very deadly (i.e. a jump rope slices a girl in half, children playing ball with a boy's head and a girl on a swing made from a boy's intestines). Throughout the film, a teacher with a skeleton face presents the titles to all the segments, with each of the segments ending and beginning with a focus on, or a fade into, the color black.
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 77% approval rating based on 31 reviews, with an average rating of 6.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "ABCs of Death 2 delivers some inventively gory thrills, offering a surprising (albeit still somewhat uneven) upgrade over its predecessor".[6] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 53 out of 100 based on ten critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[7]