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

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

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

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

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

Land of the Dead (2005)

Matt says…

With expectations almost unreasonably high for George Romero’s return to the genre he helped forge, it was perhaps inevitable that Land of the Dead would divide opinion. But although the film doesn’t really look or feel much like the previous installments of the Dead saga, it’s largely an elegant and worthwhile return to the director’s trademark themes, advancing the ongoing story in a consistent yet intriguing way. 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

Return of the Evil Dead (1973)

Confusingly, Return of the Evil Dead has nothing to do with Sam Raimi’s trilogy of horror movies. Instead, it’s the rather odd english title given to Spanish director Amando De Ossorio’s follow up to his blind-zombies-on-horseback magnum opus Tombs of the Blind Dead. Made two years later, it’s a rather less original effort than its predecessor; nevertheless, it ups the pace of Tombs and is actually a lot of fun. 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

Saw II (2005)

In much the same way that The Blair Witch Project capitalised on its unexpected success by immediately rushing out a sequel, fans of the diabolical ‘Jigsaw’ had to wait for less than a year for the follow-up to Saw. In light of this it shouldn’t be too surprising that Saw II offers up very little in the way of fresh ideas, but should we really have expected anything else? After all, the strength of the original was in watching helpless victims being psychologically and physically dissected in fiendishly cruel ways. Is this enough to carry a sequel though? Read more

Scream (1996)

With hindsight, can you blame a film for the poor imitations that followed? Received wisdom among horror aficionados states that Scream, Wes Craven’s 1996 mega-hit, is where it all went wrong for the genre, ushering in a series of sub-par slashers and refocusing major-studio horror almost exclusively on teenagers: nearly all the big horror hits of recent years have been neutered, 15-certificate fare or under. All legitimate charges, of course, and when faced with the prospect of Scary Movie 5 next year, it’s hard not to feel some degree of antipathy towards the film that started the ball rolling. 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 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 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 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 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

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)

Director Amando De Ossorio’s much-admired Tombs of the Blind Dead is often considered one of the finest Spanish horror movies ever made - not an incredible feat considering Spain’s less than stellar contribution to the genre. Thirty-five years later the film has dated somewhat, and the impact of the once shocking gore has been tamed by the excesses that were to follow throughout the 1970s, but it’s still an important and impressive piece of work by any standards. 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

Zombi: Dawn of the Dead (1978)

George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is both a career high for the director and one of the most influential horror films ever made. It’s often forgotten, however, that it more or less owes its existence to another genre luminary, the Italian giallo director Dario Argento. Argento had made a name for himself throughout the 70s as both a producer and a director, through stylish slashers such as Profondo Rosso and Suspiria. Argento agreed to finance a sequel to Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, inviting him to his house in Rome to write the script - and in return, Argento would be allowed to produce his own cut of the movie for release in Europe. Under the title Zombi: Dawn of the Dead (or simply “Zombies” in the UK), the film was a massive success in Europe and kick-started the Italian zombie cycle that led to a slew of unofficial sequels cashing in on the ‘Zombi’ title - most notably Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. Whilst its influence was immediate, Argento’s version was superceded internationally by Romero’s US cut, and has only recently been exhumed (in the US) on DVD. Read more