Bloody Pit of Horror (1967)

Dir: Massimo PupilloCountry of Origin: ItalyRunning Time: 87 mins
The demand for Gothics, particularly abroad, had become almost insatiable by the mid-1960s. Since the opportunities for aspiring Italian filmmakers were based almost exclusively on how much cash your films brought in, most took to making films that did well abroad rather than in their native Italy. On these cheaply made films, shooting schedules were fairly short and they usually at least made their money back. A lot of directors signed up for these opportunities, some innovated and others ended up stuck making crappy B-Movies that followed whatever was trending. This wasn’t a bad thing for longevity, mind you. One of the reasons Lucio Fulci (director of Zombie Flesh Eaters) worked for so long was how adaptable he was to different kinds of material, making gialli (violent murder mysteries) in one decade and gruesome zombie flicks in the next. Some ended up stuck with contracts to make films they didn’t really want to make, or at the very least were being required to make films on an almost production line basis.
This was the reality of the industry at the time. You made the film quickly and cheaply, or you didn’t work at all. The problem is of course when you make films like this, getting across any kind of vision or even any sense of quality and entertainment is challenging. Mario Bava was good at doing this. Others struggled with the material that they were given, and others just threw everything but the kitchen sink at a project. Massimo Pupillo, a workmanlike but highly capable director who had previously made ‘Terror Creatures from the Grave’ (which I will review) was challenged to make films for the studio as appealing to audiences as possible, which basically meant putting in as many boobs and torture scenes as a film could reasonably allow at the time. The film ended up being credited to its producer Ralph Zucker because Massimo Pupillo did not - and I quote - ‘give a fuck’.

                                         This bodes well.
The frankly ludicrous plot runs like this; a troupe of models and photographers for a magazine, are driving through the countryside when they happen upon an abandoned castle. After exploring, they discover that it isn’t is as abandoned as they think it is and is in fact the home of a reclusive retired actor called Travis Anderson, Who clearly doesn’t want them there. He relents, but soon bad things start happening, usually involving women not wearing very much, or extraordinarily unconvincing Iron Maidens with rubber spikes. 
The main antagonist is played by Mickey Hargitay, former Mr Universe and widow of Jayne Mansfield who in one of the least surprising twists of all time, declares himself to be the reborn crimson executioner, whom we saw get executed for his hideous crimes of murdering women with rubber iron maidens in the prologue. His presence in a set of ludicrous red spandex pants, a gold medallion around his neck and a domino mask, does certainly loom large on the screen although not for the reasons Pupillo probably intended. Hargitay starts the film with the sort of hammy intensity some muscle movie actors could only dream of, but then something happens and his performance just ramps up and up until he is constantly wearing an expression that makes him look like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone. All of this while he gets torturing attractive young ladies to death in his cellar o’ S&M and proceeds to chew up even more scenery. The film does have some wit about it, some of the banter between models and photographers is quite amusing at times, although it rapidly wears out its welcome during the middle of a film when you want things to actually start happening. It’s got some lovely cinematography at times mind you, mainly because the castle they are in is quite stunning. There were times when I drifted off just watching the castle - actually the castle itself has more charisma than several of its leads, particularly the photographer Dermot, which in one of the most meta moments of all time, is played by producer Ralph Zucker who ended up taking directorial credit for this film (and how proud he must have been).                                                                                                  The greatest spider robot in the world
The film is utterly daft, an exercise in lurid, melodramatic nonsense that is never anything but ridiculous. A particular standout is a ludicrous scene in which one of the models is attached to a giant spider’s web, with crossbows around her prepared to fire anyone some just touches any of the strings, all while a poisonous mechanical spider is zooming along the ceiling towards her. If this sounds awesome, I can assure you it absolutely is not.
 I still couldn’t tell you if the spider is supposed to be real or not, because as either a living or a mechanical spider, it still looks like crap. Apparently Pupillo was trying to make the most of the subject matter he had, struggling to introduce some sexual symbolism here and there, but unfortunately it is just a film that is just the sum of its parts. When you have a film in which most of the punch-ups involve people throwing punches that never even connect quite visibly on screen, your thoughts aren’t really on the inherent symbolism. When the crimson executioner it is on screen, you’re more startled by his terrifying bulge than anything else.                                                                             Thank god it’s not in 3D..It is a fairly enjoyable watch provided you turn your brain off. This is in spite of a middle section that drags and the utter hamminess of the whole enterprise. It is in glorious Eastman colour and it is quite amusing, whether intentionally or not. It’s not really bad enough for a bad film night, and it’s not exactly good enough to be considered a classic of the genre either, even if you are stretching the definition of classic to its absolute furthest extent. It has its fans, but it’s best regarded as a perfect crystallisation of all the excesses of the late 1960s.

A new beginning

I’m going for a bit of a rebrand, here. I was umming and aahing over a few different ideasUntil I finally realised really, I love pulp. I love mad old horror films, grainy monster flicks, kung-fu movies with dubious dubbing, creepy gothics and some of the craziest stuff that World Cinema has to offer. Since I have accumulated something of a collection now, I have access to more films than I would’ve done before, I feel that I can now actually commit to doing this. You have to understand that the actual availability of many of these titles was very limited, up until very recently. I will try to avoid spoilers if absolutely necessary, and there will be a fair amount of humour sprinkled throughout because that’s my style. I’m not reviewing these because I want to tell you how bad they are, although I am going to cover some pretty bad movies. It’s because they are genuinely interesting, all representing a strange corner of cult history with traits and features all their own.

That said, I’m also going to be honest. If I don’t like a film I will tell you that I don’t like it, and I will not give films excuses just because they are on the aged side,  or have extremely low budgets. These will be taken into consideration, obviously I’m not going to compare the special effects of films made in the 80s to a film made in the 60s. All I mean is, that if a film has age badly, that has to be confronted head-on.Whether it be special effects or sexual politics, it’s kind of cowardly to ignore the shortcomings of films just because you feel precious about them.Then again the other reason I’m doing this is to share a passion. I’ve always been fond of these kind of movies, whether they be good or bad, I think some of these could do with more recognition. Admittedly there are a number of cult fans who probably won't piss in my direction,But then those who do will hopefully except these reviews as what they are – I loving tribute to the weirdest stuff in cinema. Let’s enter the Cult Room.

A Tale of Two Suspirias: Suspiria (2018)

Remakes, by their very definition, have a lot of hard work ahead of them. They have to replicate the alchemy of a very specific property, and then reboot it in a way that keeps the original in mind and yet do something completely different. The purpose behind remakes varies from franchise to franchise, sometimes it is a purely financial consideration and other times it is a genuine attempt by a creative team to do something different with an existing property. Suspiria never needed to be remade for financial considerations based on its enormous success in 1977, and remaking an Italian horror classic always struck me as slightly strange but to be honest, the more I thought about it, it didn't seem to be a bad idea. Not because the original had some heinous flaws that needed correcting, but because a modern day Suspiria sounded like quite a fascinating prospect.

Allow me to briefly examine the original because the object of this article is more to look at the remake than the original, but allow me to say I love the 1977 Dario Argento classic. It's a delightful, grand-guignol fever dream that attacks with the force of a screaming hurricane. It is an assault on the senses and an utterly extraordinary experience, and add to that one of the most memorable, snarling film scores of all time and you have something utterly unique. It is, with no doubt, one of the greatest horror films ever made and nobody who claims to like horror can be without it in their collection. Which brings us to the tricky subject of what happens when you try to make lightning strike twice.

Now the news that Luca Guadagino was taking the helm made a lot of people very excited, particularly because of his pedigree with producing art films that did well with audiences too. There were a few worrying signs; the description by Guadagino of the film as 'delicate, almost childish'  and the screenwriter of the new film admitting he found the original somewhat impractical seemed to show a certain misunderstanding of what made Suspiria work. That said, the artistic choices made aren't bad ones - the setting of the film in the 70s, the determination to couch it in that aesthetic actually works well in its favour and the more muted colour pallet certainly works - but I digress. The remake is enormously ambitious in its complexity, turning the dances into rituals, creating comparable political climates both inside and outside of the dancing school and bringing in a feminist aspect that (mostly) works well.

This is a very complicated way of my saying that the remake almost works - almost. I do wonder what Luca Guadagino's fans make of this film. It generally seems too horrific and violent for his fans, and not really scary enough for horror fans though it does contain some remarkably effective horror scenes (and those with a weaker stomach had better avoid like the plague). It's very well made but a strangely mixed bag, with a lot of fat that needs trimming. The original was a lean 96 minutes and a masterpiece of visual storytelling, whereas this one is a whole hour longer than that and periodically stops to explain the plot to its viewer. Again, I could never say this is a bad or lazy film - it has too much power and intelligence for it to be considered shoddy but it’s determination to distance itself from its source material does not always work in its favour.

The film is not a feminist reinvention as much as it is an attempt to reconcile what the original film did not; examining the role of women in society and their cultural outlets post-war, and it makes for interesting viewing. The problem is that politics were never a concern of the original, and that is what I enjoyed about it. In spite of the controversies regarding Dario Argento's work and the misogyny his work is accused of perpetrating, Suspiria is not one of the films that suffers from this issue. It actually has more women involved in its production than the modern Suspiria does, since Daria Niccolodi (Dario’s muse and then wife) was involved in crafting the story. Yes, it is dated in that it was made in the 1970s but it was a relentlessly effective piece of visual storytelling. Incoherent occasionally maybe, but I never said it was perfect. The new film suffers from a desperate need to be 'important' and feels as if it needs to distance itself from the original as much as possible. Its ambitions as an art film are remarkable but its commitment to this aspect does give the film a sense of relentless self importance that it seems reluctant to slough off when it comes time to deliver. That said when it delivers, by god the film delivers with bone breaking, head exploding panache - which is why it is so damned frustrating to go from one extraordinary horror scene to a group of women sitting around discussing at length what we have just seen. It lacks the tight choreography of a film designed to scare, with lots of indulgent touches that mean very little in the scheme of things. I could easily have trimmed twenty minutes off of the film and it would have had no real impact on the end, I can assure you. There is an entire sub-plot with the only male character of note (weirdly enough played by Tilda Swinton) wanting to find his wife and having the chance of finding her tantalisingly held out of his grasp, and only about a third of this entire plotline really has any impact on the finale. Dakota Johnson does well, but she disappears during the middle act for quite some time, making me wonder who exactly I was supposed to be following this entire time. The ending does try to explain this somehow, but it feels a bit pat considering the sheer complexity of what we have had thrown at us for nearly two hours plus.

In the cinema I saw it in, a resident art critic's review was posted on the wall - and described the original as 'iconic, but deeply flawed' which I think is a slightly overly complicated way of saying 'the plebians like it, but I don't like it'. This makes me wonder why Guadagino remade it with this crowd in mind. The original is hardly a feminist classic, but it wasn't made in the era in which such ideology was expected. It was a visual phantasmagoria with amazing sound design, and eye popping horror so extraordinary it lingers in the memory forever afterward. This does not tend to play well with the art crowd.

Another issue with the desire to make an art film is the slightly thorny subject of feminism. True, it has a female cast and the story is driven by the women, but it is hardly the defining characteristic of the film. That said, the reinterpretation of the witches coven does work. The original had them as a monolith, this one shows them as possessing dissent and alternating views, which actually sells what could have been a ludicrous ending as a fairly laudable one. At the end of the day however, there is a difference between someone determined to make a feminist art film and someone actually making one without needing to compromise on the kind of film they are making. You can only go on about the Baader Meinhof complex and terrorism for so long before I start praying for something to actually happen that moves the story along.

This is probably why Suspiria could have done with a female director. Not to cast aspersions on Guadagino's direction or ability, but the original does have plenty of female fans and I would have suggested one of them for the honours. If you want to make a film feminist, give it to a female director who understands horror but also knows she wouldn't want to ideologically take it back to the 1970s. As it stands, it feels a bit like Guadagino has tried to put a foot in the horror and art camps without making a film that totally appeals to both.

This gives the impression I don't like the film and this is nonsense; I really did like it. It isn't a patch on the original of course, and anyone who claims otherwise has clearly never seen the original but it is original, dark and mesmerising at times with some extraordinary visual flourishes and some show-stopping scenes.

Oh, and Thom Yorke's score is a meandering piano melange with a couple of good orchestral moments. Give me Goblin's shrieking insanity any day.

CLASSIC REVIEW - The Elephant Man (1980)

The idea that we once took people with unfortunate physical deformities and paid good money to gawk at them is perhaps one of the most galling in human history. As indicative of the human tendency toward cruelty as slavery, genocide and our early treatment of the mentally ill, the story of Joseph Merrick, aka the Elephant Man, is a heartbreaking tale of one man’s quest to be treated as just that – a man. A mostly true story (some events are fictionalized, but the structure largely remains true to life), it follows the discovery by Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) of Joseph Merrick (John Hurt), whose now legendary deformities made him an outcast in Victorian London but who ended up developing something of a rapport with the surgeon and whose well published life made Britain begin to reconsider its position on how to treat those who up to that point were called ‘freaks’ or ‘monsters’. 

This slightly surreal, hauntingly beautiful second feature from David Lynch is by turns touching and sad, with a performance from John Hurt that is so genuinely incredible it actually breaks your heart to watch him on screen being so polite and kind to those who clearly fear him. I dare you to watch the scene in which he confronts a baying mob with his now legendary cry of ‘I am not an Elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being!’ without a lump in your throat. Victorian London is brought vividly to life, and given a sinister hue by the monochromatic cinematography that manages to draw startling visual contrasts between the safety of John Merrick’s personal rooms and the dangerous streets of London outside. 

Despite its beauty and clear respect for its title character, it also has to be said that the film is a little manipulative, and is perhaps kinder to Dr. Treves than it should be. By all reports, their friendship was real but only really became genuine after Joseph left because he was tired of being exhibited to the pathological society as a scientific specimen, much like he had at the freak shows he had tried to escape. Even with these controversies, you cannot deny the power of this film, masterfully commanded by Lynch who demonstrates a lightness of touch and humanity that some of his more obtuse works seem to lack. It may not be as completely truthful as it should be, but it is made with absolute love and shines with some career-best performances from John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, who only manage to heighten the heavy emotional impact ‘The Elephant Man’ possesses.

DUNGEON SPOT - Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

                                              


Everyone has seen Manos: The Hands of Fate, and yet no-one has seen it. The majority of people who claim to have actually seen this film have usually only seen the MST3K version readily available on YouTube. The problem is, that watching this film in an abridged form with a comedy commentary is rather missing the point of Manos. I had heard of it and read amusing recaps, but decided I wanted to watch the film myself. Luckily, unlike quite a few other legendary bad movies, it is quite easy to find. The reason being that no company really wanted to take responsibility for it, and it is public domain even now. I watched it just to see how atrocious it really was. Well...

Yeah, it's bad.

In order to experience why this film is one of the worst ever made, you have to watch it in it's entirety with no witty commentaries. The film is just shy of 68 minutes long, and yet, as you will see - it feels a hell of a lot longer. No commentary or comedic sketch can do justice to the mind numbing tedium that is Manos: The Hands of Fate. What the film purports to be is a horror tale of a family who get lost on a cross country vacation and stumble across a mysterious house with a sinister keeper, and find themselves drawn into the clutches of an evil cult wizard who wants to destroy them. Now the idea is schlocky, sure but the core idea is actually rather cool. This is perhaps the reason it is so hard to wrap your head around how bad the film actually is; basically, the idea is interesting but it could hardly have been worse executed. The story begins with a man named Harold Warren, a fertiliser salesman, who made a drunken bet in a bar with Oscar-winning-writer-to-be Stirling Silliphant that he could make a smash hit horror film with the minimum of budget. As befits a film born in a drunken stupor, Warren decided to write and direct the film, and also cast himself as the main lead, Martin. If you ever wondered what a fertiliser salesman with precisely zero filmmaking experience would produce for his feature debut, Manos gives you some idea as to the result.

It just screams class, doesn't it?

This film is so embarrassingly amateur that the majority of the cast and crew actually sneaked out of the premiere to avoid being associated with it. In fact, the only person who was ever truly happy with the film was Hal Warren himself, who went to his grave unrepentantly proud of his only feature film. It was his first and last cinematic venture. This should give you a pretty good impression as to just how mangled and incompetent the film is. It looks utterly hideous, with film quality so bad it's as if it were dragged through a desert before they put the film in the projector. The poor quality should come as no surprise, given it was shot on a handheld camera capable of shooting only thirty seconds of footage at a time, and had no ability to record sound. No joke, all the sound you hear was dubbed after shooting, in what passed for 'post-production' in Manos. It's production values make early Doctor Who episodes look like Avatar. Boom mikes are constantly seen, actors seem to barely realise they are there and there is even a glaringly visible clapper-board in the final cut of the film. Not the outtakes or the work-print, but the final cut.

I made this especially to prove I am not making it up.

While I remind you that the idea was at least interesting, the script itself is utterly bewildering. Dialogue is so stilted and vague that you get the impression Hal Warren has not only never written human speech but never heard it either. There is so much padding that the film would probably be half its actual length without it. The legends surrounding the 'Manos' driving scenes are not exaggerated. Nearly ten minutes of the film's opening comprises of driving footage, filmed either out of the window in the form of landscape drive-by shots, or from the back of the car where it is so confined and dark you can barely see anything. Given that the film is only just over an hour long, this is not a good thing.

I got chills. They're multiplying.

The performances range from dull to plain weird. On the dull side we have the family, who are clearly not a family, in which Hal Warren tries to play hero and a barely conscious child who seems to not so much speak as honk like the adults from Peanuts. The film for ten minutes is just dull, but then we arrive at the house and meet the magnetically strange Torgo, played by John Reynolds. I dare you to take your eyes off this guy for the whole time he's on screen. And given the penchant of Warren to hit you with sudden and endless close-ups, you will often have no choice. Not that his acting is good, it's just that he's....strange. He twitches the whole time and walks like he's filled an adult diaper. Apparently he's supposed to be a satyr, according to my research, but actually looks like he has water on the knees. The reason for this is that John Reynolds was higher than a kite that is tripping balls. The crew confirmed that he was on several varieties of LSD during the making of 'Manos'. Which does explain how he was able to complete filming.

TRIPPY DUUUDE...

The majority of the middle act of 'Manos' is spent inside the house with the camera shifting awkwardly between Margaret (Diane Mahree) looking faintly upset, and her husband reassuring her as to the absolute normality of their situation despite the drug addict hosting them in his 'cabin in the woods'. The little girl runs away and comes back, their dog goes missing and as night falls the film stock has another major drop in quality. Very little is revealed during this segment, although it is proved that Torgo is kind of a gigantic creep as he openly hits on Margaret while her husband is barely six feet away. Having somehow hoodwinked the family into staying the night by telling them to not stay the night, we finally start getting glimpses of the master himself - at the near thirty minute mark. And what a sight he is. Costuming certainly was not the strong suit of 'Manos' (as if any part of it was) but the cape that belongs to the master has to be one of the most eye-boggling garments ever put in a film. It is a giant flowing robe with great red hands printed on it. Pictured below.

Fabulous, darling.

The film from this point onward becomes a head-scratcher, with the action shifting between the freshly awakened master and his 'wives' who seem to spend most of their time nattering like a knitting circle or fighting amongst themselves as the Master swirls his arms around at them.

'Look as uninvolved and bored as possible.'

The plot at this point starts to go way off track as the family stumble around in the darkness with the master in hot pursuit, and Hal Warren kills a snake from another dimension with better film quality (it's a stock footage snake. Really.), and Margaret whimpers and fails to make a mark as one of the great progressive female characters by crying all the time and failing to do anything at all. Musically, this scene is grating. The music in the rest of the film is annoying and repetitive, but at least classifies as 'music'. This scene appears to have been scored by a dog that has discovered a recorder and is blowing into it repeatedly to keep making that funny noise it is hearing. Meanwhile, the master is gesticulating and gurning like a dog with a toffee as he hunts them down. Torgo makes one final appearance before disappearing from the film altogether, having had little or no impact on the plot at all. There is a sort of subplot in which Torgo is revealed to be jealous of the Master and his way with the ladies, demanding Margaret for himself. As I said however, this goes absolutely nowhere. The lack of interest in the plot is pretty clear to see, especially towards the end and one of the reasons the film is so short. Eventually, the film just sort of stops and tacks on a little epilogue in which a new couple arrive to find John the keeper of the house and the women now brides of Lord Gurnalot.

Director / Star / Producer / Writer / Well Meaning Lunatic, Hal Warren

The sheer badness of 'Manos' is almost a wonder to behold. It is currently public domain and subsequently not hard to find digitally. I have heard rumours of a Blu-Ray re-release with a full restoration, but exactly how you could restore film stock this shitty I have no clue. The legend of Manos is so enormous that even Quentin Tarantino owns an original print, calling it his favourite 'comedy'. Documentaries and even an unofficial sequel have sprung out of this bizarrely awful flick, with a following that is second only to 'The Room'. The film is a bizarre testament to the power of deluded belief. It is a terrible film and yet we are still talking about it; Hal Warren, in a weird sort of way, did win his bet. It is a film worth watching, despite It's dullness - and especially for filmmaking students. if only because it will remind you that no matter how bad you think some of your work might be, it'll never be as astronomically amateur as Manos.

DVD SPOT - Frozen (2014)

So yeah. It's good. It's not great, but it is good.

Perhaps this is too vague a start, I'll explain. 'Frozen' is now the most successful animated film of all time - and that is one hell of an achievement considering how many truly great animated films there have been. Not that success is the best indicator of quality mind - Pinocchio was famously a complete flop on its release and almost bankrupted Walt Disney. Now it is regarded as one of the most influential and powerful animations in the history of cinema. This is not to say that 'Frozen' is bad, absolutely not. Only that after the sheer amount of explosive hype the film has gotten, and given how the internet has latched on to the accompanying song 'Let It Go', the actual product is sort of underwhelming as a result.

It is a beautiful, beautiful film. The animation is stunningly detailed, and characters emote with absolute authenticity. Even the story is a rather lovely one; based on Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Snow Queen', it follows two royal sisters - one of whom has the ability to manifest ice and snow out of thin air. After an awful accident at the Royal Court, Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) flees into the mountains, and her sister Anna (Kristen Bell) pursues her. The kingdom is stuck in a permanent winter, and will not survive if Elsa cannot figure how to undo what she has done. It's all pretty good dramatic stuff, and the voice cast get their teeth into the material well. There's also a rather pleasing comedic turn from Josh Gad (Elder Cunningham from the Book of Mormon) who is a rare case of a Disney comic relief character who doesn't make me want to remove my own eyes with a clawhammer. The whole thing has a grace and sincerity that sets it above the Dreamworks pretenders of the same type, and the fictional setting it chooses gives the film a striking visual aesthetic.

And yet...and yet....

The film sort of begins to, if not precisely fall apart, come loose under close inspection. There is a certain sense that despite the fairy-tale trappings, we have rather seen this before. The dramatic turns and twists get irritatingly predictable, especially in the resolution of a rather tricky love triangle that is solved in a pretty flat manner. While questioning character motivations may seem like nitpicking, these are pretty serious problems that do impact the plot. I'll start with Elsa - whose abilities appear to work however the filmmakers wish. She creates ice and yet also seems able to change the weather and create life. Also for a person who has no idea how to harness her abilities, she is more than capable of creating a palace out of nothing.

Then there's Prince Eric, who (if you hadn't guessed it) turns out to be the upper-class toad trying to marry Anna in order to be King. After leaving her dying (through means too complicated to explain right now) he then explains in detail to the flabbergasted royal advisors. Uh...really? This is seen as a credible plot twist? It kind of feels like it's forcing our emotions at times. Also Sven could be totally edited out of the film he has so little impact on the plot.

The biggest audience for this of course is children, and children could give less of a flip about whether or not Frozen makes a lot of sense character-wise. What they see is an enchanting little fairytale, but what I see is something that has been done often before by Disney, and often better. It just treads a lot of familiar ground and not as well as others, even making the ending 'power of love' plot device so literal it comes across as kind of half-arsed. As I said, this is not a way of me saying the film sucks; it does not suck, absolutely not. It is the highest quality production, and when Elsa sings 'Let It Go' by god, does she mean it, weird rules about her powers or no. It is just that as someone who has watched almost every Disney film and has laughed and cried along with everyone else, it all just feels a bit too familiar.

P.S And you can stop sharing links of 'Let It Go' now! Dear lord!!

6 Horror Films to Watch this Halloween

So yeah, I'm back. Basically what we got here are six films I seriously suggest you see over Halloween. They're six of my favourites that you may not have all seen, so check them out on DVD or Netflix or similar such!


1. Night of the Demon (1957)

Objectivity is a tough thing. You naturally want to recommend Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman as essential halloween viewing. They are great films that have aged but are nevertheless milestones, without which the horror genre simply would not exist. The problem I find is that if you want to recommend a scary one, I tend not to go to these films. Don't get me wrong, there is no hate here or a desperate viewer trying to take the classics down a notch. The Universal Studios monster pictures are wonderful gothic works, but are rather of their time. The music gets a bit overwrought and declamatory, and supporting players tend to disappear in the face of the iconic central performances. Instead, if I want to point people toward a genuinely unnerving horror film from the era of black and white, I mention the 1950s effort 'Night of the Demon' from auteur filmmaker Jaques Tourneur. Tourneur was a master of using zero budgets to make successful horror pictures, as seen with his 1941 film 'Cat People', and he brought these sensibilities to this adaptation of short story 'The Casting of the Runes' by M.R James. The story is quite simple; a scientist from America, John Holden, has flown to London to debunk a cult led by one Dr. Karswell, and his stubborness to accept the possibility of supernatural activity of any kind gets him cursed by Karswell. In three days, the demon will come for him. His refusal to accept this and his coming to terms with being stuck in a noose that is gradually tightening around him provide a fantastically desperate atmosphere to the film. And yes, it is basically the same plot as Drag Me To Hell – but with fewer exploding heads.

This aside, it is a superb example of horror done right. There are too many moments in the film I could mention. From the explosive opening encounter with the demon, to a journey through a wood that shows Holden being followed by a malevolent entity that only a few hours before he did not believe even existed. The film is patient, masterfully so, and perfectly happy giving the viewer only tidbits of the horror that Holden is facing until it winds to an almost unbearable climax. Now if you have seen Drag Me To Hell, you will know the main get-out clause that needs to be fulfilled to avoid being festroyed by the demon, and Holden's race to do this makes for a thrilling climax. The film's fascinating debate on when one starts to believe and what one chooses is real makes for a very real and unsettling atmosphere and forms the crux of the story: specifically, can Holden believe in time?
The film's demon does appear (unfortunately) and is a rather lame special effect, but everything else is perfect. Stark shadows, sinister performances and a sense of palpable fear of something coming make this a masterpiece of black and white horror cinema. I cannot recommend this beauty highly enough.

2. The Fog (1980)
   

Beloved UK critic Mark Kermode described the Fog as 'really boring'. Then again, he thinks Twilight is better than Star Wars so to be honest, I take what he says with a pinch of salt. The reason I feel the need to contradict him here is because it is simply not true. A rather unusual entry in John Carpenter's repertoire because he is not really known for his ghost stories. I could have picked The Thing here, but everyone's seen The Thing. Less have seen The Fog. It is a lovingly told ghost story, about a town called San Antonio Bay which is struck by a – surprise - fog, bringing with it some unwanted guests. It even begins around a campfire, giving a terrific atmosphere of a bedtime story with some nicely gory hooks to give it some spice. The portents of something wicked this way coming are done with aplomb, such as a washed up ship sign and some rather strange happenings in the coroner's office, and one of my favourite sequences from any film in which a hapless sailor is trying to find his colleagues in the pulsing glare of a ships foglight, with something not entirely human approaching him...

The cast are regulars of John Carpenter, with the ever reliable Jamie Lee Curtis and Adrienne Barbeau taking on prominent roles in the ensemble. There are not any stand out performances per se, but the cast does sterling work, and they respond to the events befalling their little seaside town in a believable and sympathetic way, unlike a lot of films that seem to have their casts running the gamut from complete moron to horror encyclopedia. Top that up with a pulsing score by John Carpenter himself and a deftly done ambiguous ending, and you have a great way to spend a Halloween Night.

3. The Changeling (1981)
   

Now for something rather more obscure. It does share its name with the Angelina Jolie movie of the same name, but is not remotely the same thing. This is a haunted house film, and one of the better ones of its kind. These types of films vary enormously. They can be character studies of fragile minds (The Haunting, The Innocents), fascinating atmosphere pieces with stupid endings (The Burning), b-movie nonsense (13 Ghosts) or sometimes just plain crap (The Haunting's remake). One way or the other, you are never guaranteed what you are going to get. The Changeling is in the first category, with a wonderfully vulnerable George C. Scott as composer John Russell, a man who after experiencing a heartbreaking bereavement, moves into a historical mansion to get some composition done and finds he is not alone. His grief and pain create a very real sadness that pervades the film from beginning to end, and it is refreshing to see a husband and family man who isn't just a closet drunkard – see The Burning and The Shining. There is a ghost, of course.

The ghost story here is rather unlike any you will have seen, and the kind that absolutely stays with you mainly because it is unafraid to take the haunted house trope and completely turn it on its head. The twist is actually one of the best horror twists I have ever seen, and actually manages to be both moving and cathartic when the 'mystery' is unmasked. The film is a moody piece to be sure, but has its fair share of frights and set pieces. A rather creepy moment with a bouncing red ball provides perhaps one of the best moments in the film, and captures grief and loss just as well as Don't Look Now can.

4. The House of the Devil (2009)
   

Director Ti West is certainly one to watch. A friend of Eli Roth but considerably more talented, West directed The Inkeepers a couple of years back. It was an uneven film, but very creepy nevertheless. More consistent is this earlier effort, an homage to seventies films like the Exorcist and Halloween but with an atmosphere from both. The film was inspired by a surprising statistic about the number of Americans in the seventies and eighties who believed that devil cults existed, and claimed to have known somebody who had been affected by them. Like all the best horror films, it keeps the set up seemingly quite simple. A girl needs a job to pay for her new apartment, and sees a cryptic babysitting request on her University noticeboard. The job is not quite as it appears of course, and she soon finds herself in very real danger. Now, you do need to be patient with the film. It is a very sinister film for forty-five minutes, but also quite slow. This all changes for the final half hour, where the build up turns into some of the most frightening cinema in quite some time. All of it takes place in the one house, and it is a beautifully tense cat and mouse game.

The devil, if you'll excuse the pun, is in the detail. A suspicious but relatively harmless set-up develops teeth and claws quickly, and it is surprising how much you can actually miss watching the first half of the film. Something Ti West understands clearly is not peaking too early. Too many films are so excited to reveal their twists that they give them away far too soon, but in House of the Devil, the sheer patience exuded by the film becomes all the more surprising given the power of its second half. The fact I only found out about it by picking it up in an HMV bargain surprises me; I would have thought more people would have heard about an actually scary horror film, but I hope that maybe a few more will consider this films ability to chill and wrench genuine fear out of what is generally considered to be a well worn subject.

5. Re-Animator (1985)
   

Now for something completely different. This film is often cruelly overlooked in the genre on account of people who dismiss gory films out of hand because 'that's the sort of thing SAW would do'. I shall ignore the fact the original Saw is a really good film, because that is not the point here. You may have heard of this film from American Beauty as the film where the head gives head, and yes, it is every bit as infamous as you have heard. Based on a short story by H.P Lovecraft, you will come across few films that are as blackly funny and gruesome as Reanimator. The story essentially concerns a young medical orderly, Dan, who is reluctantly (and slightly possessively) befriended by Herbert West, a brilliant young scientist who has invented a serum that brings the dead back to life. Naturally he needs something with which to try it. From that, I think you can imagine where things go. There is something of Laurel and Hardy about the antics of the two men desperately trying to control the army of corpses they have brought back through their experiments, director Stuart Gordon easily blending slapstick outrageousness with the macabre nature of their activities. I nearly put Braindead in this slot, but as much as I love Peter Jackson's ultimate splatterfest, Reanimator balances the horror and the comedy rather more evenly. The central performance is Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, and utterly inhabits the skin of the fastidious, unhinged and remorseless student doctor who drags the very likeable Dan, played by Bruce Abbott with great warmth, into his awful and unethical experiments. The irony being that Herbert West is not a villain in this piece. Yeah, the scientist who resurrects the dead with mixed results is not in fact the bad guy.

It is gory, gross and utterly hilarious. The comedic moments are perfectly judged and somehow manage to be juxtaposed with the more gruesome moments – upon discovering his dead cat in the refrigerator, Dan demands to know why Herbert West didn't tell him or leave a note. 'I was busy pushing bodies around as you well know' West replies irritably 'And what would a note say, Dan? "Cat dead, details later'? The infamous scene I mentioned earlier in which the villain makes use of his decapitated head to rather lascivious purposes is every bit as grim and funny as people make it out to be, but it is also worth mentioning it is only one of many scenes. ReAnimator is more than just the sum of its parts, demonstrated amply by its sequel, which while being good, was made up of individual scenes rather than being one of the finest horror films in history. What the original film did was tell a story, splash it liberally with gory scares and make us chuckle along with every outrageous moment. Not one for the squeamish, but hey, I doubt you'd be reading this if you were.

6. Candyman (1992)
   

You know the dare. Everyone who was at school in the nineties was made to do it. Say 'Candyman' in front of a mirror five times, and Candyman himself will appear behind you, and gut you with his hook. The story that Candyman was based on, 'The Forbidden', by Clive Barker posits the very unpleasant idea that belief in an urban legend can bring it to life. In this case, it's imposing actor Tony Todd – the guy with the scariest voice ever – as the titular hook handed ex-slave brutally murdered and brought back to awful life by the terrified inhabitants of a Chicago project. The original story was set in Liverpool, but Liverpool has no location that projects as much misery, poverty and violence as the project of Cabrini Green, a very real place in Chicago. Virginia Madsen plays a University professor named Helen, who investigates the legend of the Candyman, finding his roots in the project of Cabrini Green. Her investigation brings her into contact with the horror and suffering that brings him into existence, as nightmares and reality blend in stomach-wrenching fashion. The film does feel like a nightmare; one of the reasons it still scares me. Bernard Rose's film is stark, unforgiving and unflinching. The fact that Candyman is rooted in such a real world, and his unwillingness to compromise ('They will say I have shed innocent blood.' he chillingly intones 'What is blood for if not for shedding?') make him a terrifying bad guy.

Candyman is never shy in reminding Helen that his presence there is her fault, and torments her mercilessly. 'You did not believe the stories' he says, 'So I was obliged to come.' The film is beautifully shot, the rot and filth of the projects contrasting with the chic apartment complex in which Helen herself resides. Candyman it seems is a 'man of the people', a boogeyman that Helen comes to believe in utterly, at the cost of everything she holds dear. The savage bleakness of Candyman, assisted by Philip Glass's sinister score, is what makes the film so outright frightening – and an essential Halloween watch.