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

High Plains Drifter (1973)

Clint Eastwood has long been a real hero of mine, so I’m delighted to be able to add to the Lagoon a film that he not only starred in but also directed. I concede that High Plains Drifter is probably more of a mystical Western than a Western-based horror film but the proficiency of its supernatural foundations are such that it more than merits a mention here. Read more

Ring (aka Ringu) (1999)

Hideo Nakata’s astonishing adaption of Koji Suzuki’s best-selling novel was for many people their first (and possibly only) brush with the murky world of Asian horror. The film’s global success, and the various franchises it has spawned, was something of a watershed for international cinema; it almost single-handedly spearheaded the Japanese invasion that has dominated Western horror, both for the American studios looking for the latest hot property to remake and for cinema-goers tantalised by the promise of what has been dubbed ‘Asia Extreme’. Read more

Silent Hill (2006)

Computer games have something of a chequered history when it comes to big screen adaptations. Actually I suppose that’s not quite true as their heritage is quite consistent; basically, they’re usually very bad indeed. I’d still like to know who decided that Bob Hoskins would make a good Super Mario, or that Kylie Minogue’s heart-warming portrayal of quintessential Australian suburb-dweller could only be followed by a part in Street Fighter. More recently we’ve had the slightly more accomplished Resident Evil series which wasn’t as bad (no really) as a lot of people feared.

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The Blair Witch Project (1999)

There are lots of people who argue that Scream was one of the most significant horror films to come out of the 1990s. Tosh. When it comes to picking the most significant, most original and most refreshing film to emerge from that decade The Blair Witch Project must be the leading contender for the crown. Perhaps I’m being a little biased here; Blair Witch was the first horror film that I’m conscious of being more than just a film and more a cultural phenomenon even BEFORE it was released in Britain. It seems to be on the wane now but it still happens that a horror film which tries to big itself up before its release styles itself as ‘Blair Witch meets…..’ in the way that Psyhco was used in the 1970s and The Ring is now (in this vein one can only marvel at a film which claimed to be ‘Psycho meets Blair Witch meets The Ring). Perhaps because of the voyeur element of the camcorder it has also spawned more soft-porn tributes than any other film I aware of– horror or not – with titles such as The Bare Wench Project (and the unforgettable Bare Wench 2: Book of Babes), The Erotic Witch Project and Witchbabe: The Erotic Witch Project 3. Read more

The Fog (1979)

There seems to be a thing for John Carpenter remakes at the moment, with this year seeing a big-budget version of ‘Assault on Precinct 13′ and next year the (British) release of The Fog. There were high-hopes of The Fog at the time of it’s release, following as it did Carpenter’s seminal classic, ‘Halloween’ (readers will forgive me for overlooking his immediate successive offering - Elvis: The Movie - in this regard, though I suppose Kurt Russell as The King might conceivably be described as a form of horror). To be fair to Carpenter he doesn’t do a bad job here, and though The Fog lacks the searing impact of Halloween it suceeds in offerering up a more contemplative and developed story, with the trademark atmospherics and effects that you’d expect from his (early) offerings. Read more

The Grudge (2003)

The international success of Hideo Nakata’s Ring led to a frenzied search - both in Hollywood and in Asia - to find the next international “J-horror” (as it’s doomed to be known) success. The unlikely candidate appears to have been the Ju-On series, aka The Grudge, which already exists in five screen versions already - two Japanese TV movies, two Japanese feature films and an American remake, with an American remake sequel on the way. Having only seen the first Japanese movie, I can’t really offer any comparison as to what’s the best, but on this evidence alone I can’t really say that the whole Grudge industry fills me with much enthusiasm. The recent US remake, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, was extensively (and rather cynically) promoted as being the “next Ring”, even down to the spooky girl with long dark hair on the posters, and the UK DVD release of the first Japanese film has a rather odd quote from The Metro on the back, claiming the film “scares the socks of The Ring”, which I can only assume is a typo. Hell, you can even buy the Japanese DVD in Woolworths - even Ring didn’t get that treatment, so someone’s obviously banking on making a lot of money out of this series. Read more

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

It’s always instructive to watch a few movies by the same director in quick succession, so after the joy that is the Masque of the Red Death I was very much looking forward to moving backwards in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe series to his second offering, Pit and the Pendulum. You don’t watch any of the films in the cycle if you’re looking for a true to the text adaptation of Poe’s stories, and Pit is no different in this respect. In Masque, Corman departed from the story only in order to enhance the movie experience (especially with the brilliant ‘brothers of death’ scenes) to great success. In comparison here he seems almost bored with the story, picking out the bits that seem to fit together well and leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps. Read more

The Ring (2003)

The story goes that two Dreamworks execs sat down to watch Hideo Nakata’s Ring quite early in the morning, and they were so impressed by what they saw that by lunchtime they had managed to secure the rights to remake it. Amazingly, for a big-budget Hollywood remake of an independent, low-budget Japanese film, a lot of that passion and excitement for the original actually shows through in the finished product. The Ring, as we are meant to call it now, occasionally misfires, and is inevitably victim to a certain level of major-studio cackhandedness, but on the whole it does an admirable job of bringing the story to a wider audience. Read more

The Ring Two (2005)

Whichever way you look at it, it’s hard not to view The Ring Two as being a crushing disappointment. This follow-up to the US remake of the Japanese classic (you may need to draw a diagram to follow that) was passed over by several directors until it ended up in the hands of Hideo Nakata, the Japanese director who brought us the original Ring. Considering that the US film itself wasn’t too shabby, you could be forgiven for getting excited by this; unfortunately, The Ring Two is almost guaranteed to shake your faith in both the versatility of the original concept and in Nakata’s abilities as a director. Read more

The Spiral (aka Rasen) (1998)

The Spiral’s reputation seems to rest more on the film’s status - or lack of - than anything to do with the movie itself. Based on the second of Koji Suzuki’s Ring novels, Joji Iida shot the film almost back to back with Hideo Nakata’s peerless adaption of the first novel, and the results were released in Japanese cinemas simultaneously. But whereas Ring sparked what can only be described as an international phenomenon, The Spiral bombed, and was later overwritten by Nakata’s own Ring 2. Effectively exiled from the Ring saga - in cinema terms at least - the film has only recently been made available on DVD in the West,but remains relatively unknown. Read more