Portmanteau film
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A portmanteau film is a film consisting of several unrelated, or mostly unrelated, short films. Often each one is directed by a different director. Sometimes there is a theme, such as a place (e.g. New York Stories), a person (e.g. Four Rooms), or a thing (e.g. Twenty Bucks), that is present in each story and serves to bind them together. One of the earliest films to use the form was the 1948 film Quartet based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham. This lead to two sequels, Trio (1950) and Encore (1951), as well as imitators like O. Henry's Full House.
Sometimes there is one "top-level" story, which leads into the various "sub-stories", as in Dead of Night and The Illustrated Man. The former helped to popularise the format for horror films, and British company Amicus made several such films in the 1960s and 1970s. Another variation is when different sub-narratives share a common incident (usually a turning point), as in Amores perros.
See also: