House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Vincent Price is one of those actors who can raise the level of a film just by being in it, with his finely judged moustache, velvety voice and willingness to chew on any scenery that shares his shot. William Castle’s great little movie gives him a good meal; the interiors are magnificently opulent, and the script sits on just the right side of being camp to allow Price to give one of his trademark smooth-but-sinister performances. He plays an eccentric millionaire who pays a group of strangers $10,000 each to come and spend a night in his ‘haunted’ house. Cue all sorts of shocks and scares as the night progresses, but is the house really haunted, is Price up or something or is someone else on the prowl? Read more

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

One of the later entries into Universal’s series of horror / monster movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon is largely just another variation of the well-worn ‘beauty and the beast’ premise mined by many other films, most notably King Kong (nasty scary monster falls in love with pretty girl; monster kidnaps girl; men hunt down monster). But whilst it doesn’t have anything vastly original to say - and lacks a knock-out performance from a Karloff or a Lugosi - it’s still a fabulously visual piece of work, with spades of atmosphere and some great design. Read more

Audition (1999)

It’s not particularly surprising that the current bandwagon for US remakes of Japanese horror films hasn’t yet reached the work of director Miike Takashi, and in particularly his most notorious movie, Audition. Whilst it’s probably true to say that anything American cinema can do, Asian cinema can do in a way that’s altogether more psychologically upsetting, most people probably won’t be prepared for the astonishing brutality of the film’s final reel, which is almost unparalleled in its impact on the viewer. Whilst there have been much gorier films, there can be few that lull their audience into such a false sense of security - almost boredom - before assualting them with horrendous imagery. Read more

The Corpse Vanishes (1941)

If you can look beyond the unnecessarily opaque plot and poor quality production The Corpse Vanishes comes across as one of Lugosi’s better offerings of this period and actually turns out to be a respectable enough little movie. Read more

Halloween (1978)

Like all successful films Halloween has been dragged out into a long-running franchise which, as time has gone on, has increasingly distanced itself from what made the original so compelling and desirable to replicate. A real low-budget affair, it was made for $325,000 and pulled in some $47,000,000. We’re currently on Halloween 8 (Halloween Resurrection-a bland, listless fusion of bad slasher movie and Blair Witch-style techno driven thriller), and though Jamie Lee Curtis decision to bow out may finally have killed off her onscreen nemesis for good, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are further attempts to wring more money out of the Michael Myers story. It would be a tragedy if people’s only experience of the Halloween story was in watching the final few movies because the 1978 original is a seminal work which inspired the genre for the next decade or so and whose originality and quality are beyond dispute. Read more

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