Starting today, Film Forum 2 presents “Tales of the Brothers Quay,” a compilation of short film works that have emerged from the two heads and four hands of Pennsylvania-born, London-based identical twin filmmakers Timothy and Stephen Quay. Film Forum’s retrospective weighs in at a little more than two hours with intermission and features films made between the mid-1980s and 2000, a fertile period during which the Quays contributed to educational films, created their own inscrutable short form literary adaptations, made music videos and commercial spots, conjured the memorable dream sequence in Julie Taymor’s “Frida,” and eventually mounted two live-action features of their own — 1995’s “Institute Benjamenta” and last year’s “The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes.”

From 1984’s “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer,” a compendium of illustrative stop-motion animated sequences culled from a longer film about the influential Czech surrealist filmmaker, to 2000’s “In Absentia,” a mix of color, black-and-white, live action, and puppet animation made in collaboration with 20th-century composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Quays have gone their own way. Their work — dark, obsessively and meticulously decorated 3-D animations of decaying objects, broken toys, miniature sets — burrows into the viewer’s unconscious.

Freudian in their obsessive, fetishistic detail, and Jungian in their unsettling appropriation and combination of symbols and signs, the Quays’ films have a faintly suffocating, rust-hued dazzle that is entirely free of the attention-begging audacity of most latter day filmmaking attempts at cinematic surrealism.

Using shadow, texture, and movement to turn narrative and physical logic on their ear, the Quays appear to “paint” what they see. No one else behind a camera sees what they do. In 1985’s “The Unnamable Little Broom or the Epic of Gilgamesh,” for instance, an energetic, squashed-head child’s toy (or possibly a toy child) on an iron-age tricycle does psychological and physical battle with a demonic figure that seems to have sprung to life from a Max Ernst collage.

My first exposure with the Quays was via a late-’80s interstitial sequence on MTV. While a creaky chamber group played a soundtrack dirge (the film’s full music credit is to “The Blata Gimnazjum Children’s Orchestra”), a thatch of iron filings comes to life, spreads like moss, and ultimately becomes breakfast for an animated antique doll in such poor condition that it would warrant it’s own feedback category on eBay. Sandwiched between Paula Abdul and Guns N’ Roses videos, the clip, “Dramolet (Still Nacht I),” with its claustrophobic fever-dream world, OCD-jogging camera movements, and silent film iris-ins, seemed like a pirate signal from a cable station run by Franz Kafka, Victor Sjöström, and Paul Klee.

In addition to the MTV “Art Break” piece, the Quays directed several music videos. Sadly, due to rights issues, their brilliant 1989 visual exploding of Michael Penn’s “Long Way Down” has become something of a lost film. But a pair of music videos made in collaboration with Livonia, Michigan, alt pop band “His Name Is Alive” are included in the Film Forum program.

Both 1992’s “Are We Still Married? (Still Nacht II)” and its sequel of sorts, “Can’t Go Wrong Without You (Still Nacht IV)” freeze and unfreeze reinterpreted imagery from Lewis Carroll in an evolving and vaguely menacing series of tableaux. As in most of the Quay brothers’ films, the frozen expressions of the stuffed animals, puppets, and dolls inhabiting the His Name is Alive shorts sharply contrast the frantic, purposeful, and often disturbingly naturalistic frame-by-frame movements that their bodies make.

The Quays’ most fruitful longterm musical collaboration has been with Polish composer Leszek Jankowski. In 1987’s “Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies,” Mr. Jankowski’s minimalist, emotionally eloquent arrangements of violin with various other instruments lends a kind of controlling logic to the hair, wires, and perspective lines that stretch, crawl, and plunge in and out of focus under the supervision of perhaps the most genuinely disturbing, grotesque doll in the Quay oeurve.

Many of the Quays’ homegrown shorts are based upon credited literary sources. But “Street of Crocodiles,” their 1986 adaptation of a short story by Polish author and Holocaust casualty Bruno Schulz, is not so much a faithful rendering of Schulz’s prose as it is a fervid, muddied brainstorm taking place in the story’s margins.

Schulz’s book marries intimate black-humored autobiographical details with flights of magic realism. But the Quays’ adaptation transforms “Street of Crocodiles” into a fugue state fantasia in which a museum custodian lubes up a hand-cranked kinetoscope with a gob of spit, then watches the show. Self-removing screws emerge from rotting wood like maggots through putrid flesh and an untethered marionette barters with a hollow-headed baby-doll hospital staff using a pocket watch full of meat. One wonders, given the jaw-dropping results of this Brothers Quay departure from literary source material, what they might have made of “The English Patient.”

Through January 25 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).