A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

From a post-Scream perspective it’s easy to forget that Wes Craven also left an indelible impact on 1980s horror with his finest creation to date, the inimitable Freddy Krueger. A Nightmare on Elm Street is-without doubt-the superior of the two movies and Craven’s never really topped it. Rather like Halloween, a plethora of sequels and spin-offs has tarnished the reputation of the original Krueger brand but these should not be allowed to blot out the sheer magnificence of the original. Read more

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Received wisdom dictates that Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale’s own follow-up to his epochal Frankenstein, is one of the few sequels that actually outclasses the original. Bettering a film as magnificent as Boris Karloff’s first outing as the nameless monster is quite a tall order, and although I accept I’m in a minority opinion, I really don’t think the sequel comes anywhere close; instead of the all-conquering masterpiece I was expecting, it’s actually a bit of a curate’s egg. Read more

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Carnival of Souls represents Herk Harvey’s solitary departure from making educational and industrial films and, intriguingly, he really manages to pull it off. Though the plot is really nothing more advanced than an average episode of The Outer Limits, it is to Harvey manages to mould everything together and churns out a little gem. Read more

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Where do you even start with a film like Dawn of the Dead? Having already looked at Romero’s work in general, as well as casting a glance at some of the films he has inspired, it is all too easy to let his achievements speak for themselves and correspondingly difficult to confine any discussion of one of his offerings to the merits of that particular piece. This is especially so when you’re considering the second film in a series of four, all of which have their own messages but which are inextricably linked. It’s rather like trying to pull a vertebra from someone’s back (a metaphor which I trust will be deemed appropriate in a discussion of any movie involving Tom Savini); however well intentioned it’s really all going to go wrong. Try we must though. Read more

Day of the Dead (1985)

For two decades, Day of the Dead was considered the final installment of George A Romero’s seminal zombie series, and talk of the film has always carried with it the faintest sense of anticlimax. As has been well documented over the years, it’s not exactly the film Romero set out to make - his planned epic featuring, amongst other things, a war between several zombie factions, had to be drastically scaled back for budgetary reasons - but he’s since labelled it his favourite of the original trilogy, and twenty years later there’s a strong case to be made for Day as the best in the series. Read more

Diary of the Dead (2008)

Pub quiz stalwarts will be familiar with the perennial question of which is the only band to have had a number one hit in every decade since the 1960s (answers on a postcard). Zombie film stalwarts are unlikely to need much prodding to point to George A. Romero as having (almost, if you skip the ‘90s) achieved a similar feat. Opinions on whether he has achieved a hit with the fifth entry into his rightly historic Dead series vary from review to review. Whilst the mainstream press is generally enthusiastic, genre commentators are divided and have, rarely for Romero, often been the source of vocal criticism. Read more

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde slipped easily into the cultural consciousness, to the extent that even people who are unfamiliar with the book will have a sketchy idea of its central theme. Much of this can probably be laid at the door of lazy newsreaders, who are adept at finding a neighbour of the latest serial killer who is willing to say that really they were actually quite nice to chat to over the garden fence and that they can’t believe they tortured cats as a child. Of course, this is precisely the kind of phenomenon that prompted Stevenson to write the book in the first place, and it’s perhaps not surprising that with such a meaty philosophical question to ponder we still haven’t found the answers some 120 years later. It also helps explain why the book lends itself so well to screen adaptations (if you can overlook the cameo in Van Helsing) as Stevenson raises the key question but can never really answer it; just what would happen if you could release your ‘bad’ self?

Rouben Mamoulin has a damned good stab at exploring the theme in this, the first sound version of the book. Like the vast majority of adaptations, the perspective of the work is shifted entirely from the narration of Utterson (who is entirely excluded here) to following Jekyll himself. Though this removes the mystery elements of the original story (where Jekyll and Hyde were presented as separate figures initially) I think it’s to the advantage of the film. Almost nobody now would sit down and watch a Jekyll and Hyde film without knowing that they were the same person, though my apologies if you would have and I’ve ruined it for you. You only have to endure Keanu Reeve’s grinding and distracting narration in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” to know that an overly literal devotion to the original text is not always advisable for a film treatment. By focusing the story entirely on Jekyll’s downfall we’re not only forced to confront the horror of what is happening to this eminently likable man but must also try and decide who exactly is to blame for it.

I say this because from the start Jekyll himself is a complex character. The initial sugar-lumps of him lovingly tending to his patients in the charity hospital, charming his delectable fiancé, and mesmerising his audience with his scientific knowledge point to a man confident in himself and happy with the world around him. Mamoulin’s great success though is recognising that beneath this veneer things are not all that they seem. The first time we see Jekyll with Muriel Carew for example, we’d be forgiven for thinking that he is utterly devoted to her and wants nothing more than to spend the rest of his life with her (I lost count of the number of ‘I love you darling’s that were bandied around). What Mamoulin does excellently is show that this dependence is not necessarily a good thing and raises the possibility that Jekyll is almost too in love to the extent that it is a force of harm in his life rather than good. The subtlety in Stevenson’s story-brought out beautifully in this film-is that Jekyll experimented with the twin sides of his personality not because he was a virtuous and curious man of science but because he was a flawed man.

All too often adaptations paint the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde as an elemental struggle between the good and evil, with the latter, when released from its shackles, finally overpowering the former. What makes this film work so well is that it recognises that things are a lot more blurred than this. It’s a little underplayed in relation to Hyde, with his malevolence quickly anchored on sexual depravity rather than primeval brutality. He is quickly-too quickly perhaps-confined to scowling at people until towards the end of the film when things really get going. It’s difficult to resent Hyde because, unlike Jekyll, he is at least honest in his actions. It’s fascinating to see the duel between the ‘two’ intensify to the point where Hyde finally reveals the secret and curses the man he ‘hates most in the world’. It’s also instructive to note that this contrasts with Jekyll, who only seeks to stop Hyde once the killing starts and who even then never brings himself to express hatred for him. Once again the question of who is the more moral is not an easy one to answer. You can never quite tell whether Jekyll resents Hyde’s presence or whether he secretly longs to be overpowered by him and revels in seeing his long-supressed desires fulfilled. I suspect that it is the latter. Hyde is not a ‘bad’ Jekyll so much as Jekyll is a cowardly Hyde.

This is to say nothing of the superb job Mamoulin did in presenting the film. Frederic March is irreplaceable as Jekyll/Hyde, and gives a performance which has few rivals from the 1930s. The make-up on Hyde will be familiar to any viewer of Red Dwarf but March is flawless in using it to full effect. The first transformation is utterly mesmerizing and gives the Invisible Man a run for its money in the special effects department. I can’t praise this effort highly enough. Everything about it works, from the effective dissection of a moral minefield through to the way that it’s beautifully packaged. Though Hyde’s repugnance does eventually lead to the viewer losing their initial sympathy with him I am still unsure whether Dr. Jekyll was ever likeable at all. I think that this was the point all along and I’ll wager that I’d still be unsure after another 120 years.

Dracula (1931)

There have been numerous attempts to adapt Bram Stoker’s landmark work to the big screen but the one that still stands above all others is Universal’s 1931 offering. That is not to say that Todd Browning didn’t make mistakes-he did-but the end result is perhaps the definitive telling of the perennial tale of Count Dracula. Read more

Dracula [Spanish version] (1931)

I’ve always been pretty clear about the fact that Universal’s 1931 adaptation of Dracula is the best I’ve seen and ranks as one of my favourite horror films of all time. For this reason I’ve been hoping to watch the Spanish version-which was shot simultaneously with the English/US version, and with George Melford directing both- for a long time now. Read more

Faust (1926)

Though Nosferatu is probably the most well-known of German director Friedrich Murnau’s films many would argue (me included) that Faust was his true masterpiece. There have been many attempts since to bring Goethe’s tale of tragedy and hubris to the screen but none have the quality or impact of this 1926 offering. More than any of his other films, Faust demonstrates Murnau’s maturity in every aspect of the film-making process. Read more

Godzilla (aka Gojira) (1954)

It’s a testament to how much of a bad rap the film Godzilla has received over the years that any discussion of the movie always has to start with a clarification of which film you’re talking about. No, it’s not the 1998 abomination with Matthew Broderick; no, it’s not the re-edit with Raymond Burr and a bunch of dubbed Japanese actors; and it’s not even any of the sequels you maybe dimly remember being showed on TV during the holidays. It’s the very first Godzilla film, made in 1954, released in Japan under the title of Gojira, and it’s a masterpiece. 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

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Okay, so it’s taken us an unreasonably long time to get round to one of the genre’s defining classics, but is there really all that much to say about Night of the Living Dead? Probably not, and I’m certainly not going advance the art of film criticism by announcing that it’s both a historical and an artistic milestone for cinema. What is interesting is viewing it in the context of the three Dead films that followed it. I rewatched Night for the first time in about 18 months, hot on the heels of revisiting both Dawn and Day and seeing Land and the superlative Martin for the first time, and found it fascinating how Romero managed to bring so many new ideas to the table whilst simultaneously learning his craft both as a film-maker and as a storyteller. Read more

Phantasm (1979)

Viewed at the time of its release as among the better of the slew of low-budget horrors to emerge in the late 1970s, Phantasm continues to attract a cult following. If you’ve got £80 or so to spare you too could own one of Tall Man’s butchering orbs, surely one of the happier consequences of the current strong £:$ rate. But is it deserving of such accolades? Read more

Re-Animator (1985)

Given that 1985 saw the release of both Re-Animator and Dan O’Bannon’s The Return Of The Living Dead, it’s a shame to reflect that the splatter horror has never really enjoyed a sustained level of output. Periodic stops and starts have whetted the appetite but have usually been followed by a series of sequels of decreasing quality and all too infrequent original output. I think this is a real shame, as splatter horror as a sub-genre naturally lends itself to a cross between the niche and general viewer. As well as being great for horror output in itself, this realisation of a duel market is also why splatter horrors, when done properly, can be among the most original, inventive and damned well enjoyable films going. Read more

Tenebrae (1982)

After the candy-coloured supernatural nightmares of Suspiria and Inferno, Tenebrae marked director Dario Argento’s return to the graphic murder mysteries with which he made his name as a director. It tells the story of American crime novelist Peter Neal, who comes to Rome to promote his latest book; soon after his arrival, however, he discovers that a murderer is on the rampage using his novels as inspiration and leaving pages from them at the crime scene. Along with his PA Anne, Neal is drawn into the investigation as the bodies start to pile up… Read more

The Birds (1963)

I have to to confess to not knowing a great deal about Alfred Hitchcock, but I’m reliably informed by someone who does that The Birds is probably the nearest thing he made to an actual horror movie. Based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier (who apparently was none to happy with the finished film), it’s one of those all-conquering, era-defining classics, and I’m not going to waste time echoing the acres of critical praise that the film has accumulated over the years. In a nutshell, it’s brilliant - tense, utterly terrifying and paced so beautifully you could weep. Approaching the film as a horror fan, though, a couple of things stuck out. Read more

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is undoubtedly one of the finest films of the silent era, as well as standing out as a landmark in the development of cinema in general. Though it might appear a little rough around the edges for the general viewer looking for some quick frights, for those who are willing to persevere it offers up a stunning mixture of revolutionary design and style, genuinely gripping plot and pace and surreally beautiful performances from the leading actors. Read more

The Evil Dead Trilogy (1981-1993)

The Evil Dead trilogy confounds expectations in all sorts of ways. At the most basic level, it’s not really much of a trilogy: an original film, a remake of that film and a third instalment that wilfully contradicts the first two. But it’s worth considering all Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn and Army of Darkness for two important reasons: firstly, all three represent important milestones in Sam Raimi’s bizarre journey from video nasty director to Hollywood maven, and secondly, I watched all three in one sitting, so I’ll damn well write them up in one. Read more

The Exorcist (1973)

The Exorcist is that rare beast - a genre film that becomes a genuine cinematic and cultural touchpoint. A controversial phenomenon on its release - and banned in the UK until the late 90s - it achieves its unique power through William Friedkin’s deliberate, un-flashy direction and author / screenwriter William Peter Blatty’s absolutely rigid plotting and pacing. Read more

The Invisible Man (1933)

Somewhere along the line, director James Whale decided to start incorporating comedy into his horror movies. Many people consider 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein to be the high-point of his genre-mixing, but as far as I’m concerned it’s his earlier film The Invisible Man, based on HG Wells’ novel, that’s the most successful. Whilst Bride is obviously a great film, the camp comedy doesn’t sit too well with the tragic elements of Mary Shelley’s story and Karloff’s doleful performance. The fact that the Invisible Man’s central protagonist is, erm, an invisible man, gives a greater opportunity for the comedy to arise organically out of scenario, especially with the script’s bumbling policemen, hysterical barmaids and angry mobs. Read more

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Roger Corman was nearing the end of his Edgar Allen Poe adaptations when he made The Masque of the Red Death, perhaps the most vividly interpreted and original of his offerings. That’s not to say that he takes artistic licence with it as he did with some of the earlier offerings (I’m thinking particularly of The Raven here). In fact it stays pretty faithful to the original text and the viewer will forgive Corman’s occasional flights of fancy as they tend to enhance rather than detract from the final product. Corman had intended this to be his second Poe picture following the success of House of Usher in 1960, but he passed it over because of the release of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in 1957, which he held to be too similar in places. Read more

The Mummy (1932)

The Mummy is almost like an early greatest hits film for the fledgling Universal monster series, pairing director Karl W Freund (responsible for the lovely cinematography on Dracula) with Boris Karloff, then riding high on the success of Frankenstein. The combination is, predictably, absolutely electric; but whilst the film is undeniably a masterpiece, it’s also an unexpectedly quiet, almost dreamy affair. Wisely, Freund doesn’t try to get Karloff to repeat his Frankenstein performance as Im-Ho-Tep; all we see of the mummified version of his character is his face and hand, leaving the rest to the imagination. Read more

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The Night of the Hunter represents actor Charles Laughton’s sole attempt at directing and he presents us with a chilling tale of good versus evil of immense quality and presence. The first thing that strikes you when watching Hunter is the stunning cinematography (the work of Stanley Cortez), which is a seamless combination of German expressionism and American Gothic. Hunter contains some of the most memorable images I think I’ve ever seen on film, from the close-up scenes of the children hiding from a psychopathic Robert Mitchum in the basement through to the closing scenes of him pursuing them across country. Excellent camera work, minimal sets and swift direction combine to add real grit and a melancholy beauty to a simple tale of an evil ‘preacher’-Harry Powell (Mitchum)- who tries ingratiates his way into a family which has recently been widowed to try and steal their cash. Read more

The Omen (1976)

One of the strangest things I’ve ever found on the Internet was a PowerPoint version of the Book of Revelation. Quite how or why I stumbled across it I’ve no idea, but at the time I remember wondering precisely why anyone would ever want to render the such a extraordinary tale in that sterile form. Could it really be that when the Seventh Seal was opened and the angels sounded their trumpets of destruction the plagues, firestones and blood would be preceded by a PowerPoint presentation on what it was all about, with additional reading at the end? Hardly the most dramatic way to herald in the downfall of humanity. Given its ultimate consequences I’ve personally always consoled myself to the inevitable with the thought that at least it would look dramatic and exciting for a bit.

The Shining (1980)

The Shining is the most introspective of Stanley Kubrick’s movies and was received with a good measure of apathy in its day. This may seem surprising to modern audiences, who are used to seeing it close to the top of most ‘best horror film’ charts and who readily accept its place in the genre hall of fame. It probably didn’t help that Stephen King – author of the book on which it is based – turned on Kubrick after its release for expunging most of overt scares and instead offering up the defining tale of what happens when a family goes into meltdown. Compare this to the 1990s TV series for which King himself was the scriptwriter and you’ll probably understand why he was more than a little peeved. Read more

The Wicker Man (1973)

Although it’s often named the best British horror film of all time, the impact of Robin Hardy’s incredible film lies in the fact that it ultimately has very little to do with the shocks and scares we normally associate with horror. The whole film is one giant red herring; the overt referencing of magic and paganism led me to expect a more supernatural conclusion, whereas there is in fact nothing in the film that one couldn’t expect to encounter in everyday life. The magnificent denouement yielded not terror but instead a sickening sense of realisation that such an outcome was glaringly obvious almost from the start, but I’d effectively been looking the other way. Read more

Village of the Damned (1960)

There was a time, if oft-quoted legends are to be believed, when an Englishman could leave his home unlocked without fear of being robbed blind by hoards of smacked-up hoodies. Indeed, so pervasive were English good-manners that we managed to conquer a third of the globe with them. Nations cowered not before our fleets and armaments but in deference to our irresistible gentility. Is it coincidental that the arrival of The Beatles and the ‘permissive society’ heralded the decline of our Empire? I think not. Read more

White Zombie (1932)

White Zombie has to be one of the most unappreciated horror films of all time. It came worryingly close to never being finished, the Halperin brothers (Victor and Edward – producer and director) rarely feature in histories of the genre and it hardly ever resurfaces on TV or reissue. This is a tragedy as White Zombie is a film of stunning merit; as well as being one of the first to feature reanimated corpses it is noteworthy as one of the few successful talkies of the era to perfectly capture the atmospherics of the silent films which were on the demise at the time. Read more