The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The haunted house film is a genre that has been mined to a point of almost complete creative exhaustion. This Kate Beckinsale starring effort is about as formulaic, by the book and forgettable as the genre gets
Shabbily made psycho-thriller where Piper Laurie tries to scam niece Olivia Hussey out of an insurance payout at the same time as Olivia starts to see visions of her dead husband
A hackneyed rehash of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window where Shia LaBeouf is a teenager on home detention spying with a pair of binoculars who realises that his neighbour might be a serial killer
Passable low-budget slasher film that looks as though it is was shot in the director’s home. Somehow the title, which refers to a day when a group of teens decide to ditch school, fails to stand among the great holiday-titled slashers
Tobe Hooper’s career since 1990 felt like a slide down into talentless amateurism. In his last film, Hooper tries to create an Islamic horror film, shooting and casting in the Middle East but slips into hackwork
Horror film in which a young mute boy discovers a book that contains a spell that offers one’s greatest wish, only for he to summon a djinn
Forensic thriller in which Tom Conti is a CSI who discovers evidence that he might have conducted a series of killings while in a fugue state
Documentary about the popularity of zombie films, this covers the history of the genre in reasonable depth, even examines the historical origins and provides an amusing glimpse into the zombie’s pervasion of popular culture
Anglo-horror director Freddie Francis returned to make this period adaptation of an old Dylan Thomas script about the body snatchers Burke and Hare. A literate script boosted by a fine cast
After the Blaxploitation fad gave us Blacula and Blackenstein, there came this wild variation on the Jekyll/Hyde story where a good African-American doctor takes a potion and turns into a rampaging white monster
A fascinatingly torrid 1970s film about a magician who seeks to perfect the secret of resurrecting the dead by transferring souls. It doesn’t take long before things become quite twisted.
A darkly funny take on the slasher film with Larry Drake standing out in a memorable performance as the title mad doctor. This delivers more medical novelty deaths and bad puns than one believed possible
The revived Hammer Films takes on adapting Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with Eddie Izzard playing the role as a trans woman. This offers some amusing modernisations of the familiar, oft-filmed story
Retelling of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from cult Euro erotica director Walerian Borowczyk. Not quite the erotic retelling one expects, this nevertheless conducts some radical revisions
Softcore all-girl take on the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story concerning a formula that brings out repressed sexuality. The expected tumblings are handled with an arty flair that makes for an undeniably interesting watch
The fourth film version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde starring King Baggot in the title roles. This is very faithful to the story, even if it reads as largely unremarkable today
Classic silent version of the Jekyll and Hyde story. A reasonable if not truly standout version, dominated by John Barrymore’s highly melodramatic performance in the title roles
The definitive version of the Jekyll/Hyde story in this author’s opinion, winning a Best Actor Oscar for Fredric March. Rouben Mamoulian uses some unique directorial effects and laces the show with a strong undercurrent of repressed sexuality
Version of the Jekyll/Hyde story starring Spencer Tracy and with Ingrid Bergman as the dancehall girl he liaises with. This has been made in the vogue for Freudian psychology so the transformation is tricked out with dubious symbolism
Excellent tv movie adaptation of the Jekyll/Hyde story starring John Hannah. This is mounted with exquisite period detail and brings new depths and interpretations of an oft-told tale
Modernised version of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story starring Dougary Scott. The principal novelty here is that the bulk of the story takes place in a courtroom as Hyde is placed on trial for murder
Rather enjoyable latter day Hammer Film, which plays its title pun surprisingly seriously. Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick are perfectly matched as the gender-changing Dr Jekyll
The fifth film where cult Spanish horror actor Paul Naschy played the werewolf Waldermar Daninsky. Here Waldemar is pitted up against Dr Jekyll with Naschy playing both Waldemar and Mr Hyde
Not a Jekyll and Hyde film but instead about Jekyll’s grandson who conducts a series of experiments in harnessing aggression. An almost sordid exploitation film
A British thriller where detective Martin Kemp has to deal with a series of murders conducted by someone in a plague doctor mask, which supposedly replicate the Jack the Ripper killings
Here Nick Willing makes an initially promising film but this becomes a disjointed muddle involving hypnotism, serial killers and occult conspiracy. Not to be confused with the Stephen King adapted film
Mike Flanagan, one of the most exciting genre names in recent years, takes on Stephen King’s book sequel to The Shining, managing the daunting balancing act of both adapting the book and turning it into a sequel to the Stanley Kubrick film
The first of Amicus’s horror anthologies. The stories are rehashes of five popular horror tropes, all united by Peter Cushing as the title doctor telling the fortunes of five passengers on a train carriage
One of the classics of mad scientist cinema. A wonderful potboiler of elements with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill on the track of a cannibal killer who has created an artificial flesh. From the director of Casablanca, no less
Another variation on the Dr Jekyll and Hyde becomes a woman theme. This version is played as a modern comedy wherein Tim Daly turns into Sean Young who plays to bitchy excess
A documentary about George Romero that was filmed during the shooting of Dawn of the Dead. Originally made as a teaching aid for a film school class before being given commercial release
The first film from Neil Marshall. Essentially a version of Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort but with soldiers being hunted by werewolves instead of Cajuns. Marshall directs with a satisfying ferocity.
A film about a bunch of boorish lads gleefully eliminating zombie women. A comedy this may well be but doesn’t disguise the fact the film’s sympathies are clearly with the guys making crude innuendos and feeling downtrodden by women
Another in the 1970s fad for Animals Attack films. This features David McCallum facing off against hordes of dogs that turn on humanity with killing intent
Canadian actress Valerie Buhagiar directs a film about a mother and son fleeing an abusive relationship. The surprise is beyond the film’s arthouse ambitions is that it is a regular ghost story
The film that announced Yorgos Lanthimos to the world, a black deadpan comedy about a father who has prevents his family from going into the world outside and their bizarre ways of interpreting everything that happens
South Korean film that creates decidedly eerie and an uncanny atmosphere as various guests are invited to a doll museum where the creations appear to be coming to life to kill
Following his success with Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon went on to make this film about a dollmaker and his malevolent dolls. The doll effects are eniably effective but the film’s appeal to a child-like fairytale morality is uneven
A copycat possessed doll film that came out in the aftermath of the Child’s Play films. A routine effort about an evil spirit uncovered in a Mexican mine that inhabits a child’s doll.
Paul Schrader’s original version of Exorcist: The Beginning that was junked by the producers. This is a far more subtle telling of the same story that eschews shock effect in favour of a moral struggle of the soul
A creaky old-fashioned psycho-thriller – one that draws heavily on Les Diaboliques and a contrived plot to drive somebody crazy – that came out the same year as Halloween and feels a whole world apart
Disappointingly, this is not about the famous pioneer expedition that turned to cannibalism but a modern slasher film that takes place near where the incident occurred. Okay on its own terms.
Fairly average 1980s slasher film – the first on the theme of a killer calling into a radio talkback host. This delves with enthusiasm into voyeurism, while Nicholas Worth has clear fun as the psycho of the show
Guillermo Del Toro produced cinematic remake of a 1970s tv movie, this creates a good deal of creepy mood and atmosphere with Katie Holmes as a mother who finds goblins in the cellar, but never pushes any of it in a way that jolts audiences in their seats
This, which is sort of The People Under the Stairs by way of Wait Until Dark, was greeted with terms like ‘an instant classic’. It is a well-oiled machine that produces some undeniable jumps but little remains in memory after it is over
Don’t Breathe was a surprise hit with its story of kids invading a home only to be hunted by blind man Stephen Lang. This is a sequel that bafflingly reverses all the sympathies
A film that was the cause of much censorship controversy when it came out where two teenage girls decide to become devil worshippers and engage on a spree of cruel and malicious acts
Don’t Fuck in the Woods was a reasonably smart slasher film that came with an attention-grabbing title. This is a sequel that introduces body-snatching parasites to the mix
This gets the award for the ballsiest title of any horror film of recent While the slasher film of the 00s has become much more chaste, this doesn’t let down on the plentiful nudity. At the same time, it is also a smartly self-aware horror film
A film from the slasher era – the scenes of the psycho of the show incinerating victims with a flamethrower were the cause of censorship controversy. Less a slasher film and more a psycho film, this pushes into some disturbing headspace
One of the ‘don’t __’- titled entries of the 1970s/80s. This was an entry in the decade’s popular slasher cycle with a hulking manic stalking trampers in the backwoods
Another of the ‘don’t __’- titled entries of the 1970s. This is a bizarre bad movie about teenage runaways in L.A.’s Griffith Park who fall prey to flesh-eating immortals
An enthusiastically full-tilt horror comedy. This draws from the classic The Hidden in its premise of a demon that hops between bodies, possessing the person that kills its previous host. Dolph Lundgren has the time of his life
Welsh director Caradog James impressed with his previous film The Machine. Here he makes a horror film concerning an urban legend about an old crone haunting those who disturb her, but fails to do anything notable
Horror film from regular Canadian genre director Micheal Bafaro about a group of friends who enact a curse in which they are pursued and killed by a mannequin come to life
Nicolas Roeg’s masterwork. Ostensibly a film about grief and precognition, this is a film that exists as a series of taunting visual clues that constantly map over onto each other with a hidden geometry
Fruit Chan conducts an English-language remake of a Japanese horror film. A confused and hokey effort about a haunted film set that is only centred around the provision of schlock effects
The 1980s slasher fad brought a number of ventures into the Christmas slasher film, which has grown into its own genre niche since then. This is one British entry in the genre about a killer targeting people dressed as Santa
Spanish film that prefigures the subsequent A Quiet Place concerning an island where anybody who makes a noise is killed. This fails to use its premise in any interesting way.
One of the early films from Lucio Fulci – the film that he always insisted was his best – concerning a series of child killings in a small town. Quite different to the sort of film Fulci became known for
Haunted house story that is not substantially different from the 7000 on this site. This has some novel twists in that it focuses on an old man afraid to go out of doors who appears to open up a supernatural doorway as he sleeps
Horror film in which Drew Barrymore is haunted by a doppelganger. Before allowing the film to collapse into incomprehensibility, director Avi Nesher creates some fascinatingly weird images
A modernised version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray where a male model transfers his image to a photograph that ages while he remains immortal
Beautifully produced version of the Oscar Wilde story about a libertine who becomes immortal by transferring his soul into a portrait. This easily stands out as one of the best film versions of the story to date
Entry from the 1980s heyday of slasher film made by students at the UCLA film program with a killer stalking the dorm. Featuring an unknown Daphne Zuniga as one victim
Ireland has been producing a strong body of horror films in recent years. This concerns drug experiments that force a group of subjects to stay awake – just as things start to go wrong
Psychic thriller that draws much from Eyes of Laura Mars as photographer Michael Callan has visions of his models being killed before they are in reality
George Cukor was one of the legendary Hollywood directors. Here he dives into film noir with Ronald Colman as a stage actor who psychopathically over-identifies with Shakespeare’s Othello
Rodrigo Cortes, who made the fine Buried, directs a Young Adult horror, which is produced by no less than Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, concerning supernatural happenings at a girl’s boarding school.
Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura creates a gripping survival thriller about a group of friends driving home who become trapped on a small stretch of road by a sniper
An excruciatingly bad mad scientist film about a scientist tying to find a body to reattach his wife’s head. This treads only where Re-Animator went before. Much of this feels like it should have been played as a comedy
French film about true-life serial killer Marcel Petiot, a respectable doctor who operated a lifeline for Jewish refugees during WWII only to kill them
Sequel to The Abominable Dr Phibes that brings back Vincent Price and seeks to replicate the same droll campy humour as before but with more mixed results this time
A film from the heyday of the mad scientist film in which George Zucco turns an ape into a human being. Zucco is on marvellously demented form as the title doctor
UK’s Amicus Films had a reasonable hit with their horror anthology Dr Terror’s House of Horrors. Director/producer David L. Hewitt jumped in with a copy with a soundalike title produced on a poverty row budget
The second of two video-released sequels to Dracula 2000, this takes place with more of an action emphasis and features vampire hunters tracking Dracula across rebel-torn future Europe
The classic adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel that made Bela Lugosi into a horror icon and created the image of the vampire in dinner-suit and with East European accent. For all its stature, it is a dull and talky film and Lugosi is overwrought
The legendary Spanish-language version of Dracula that was shot on the same sets as the classic Bela Lugosi version. Although it ultimately stands too much in the shadow of the Lugosi film, it is the better of the two films
The point where the legend of Hammer Films and the careers of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing began. A vivid colour remake of the Bram Stoker book that put a stake through the heart of the staid Universal horrors and created a new English horror industry
Lushly produced, big-budget adaptation of Bram Stoker starring Frank Langella that places much more of a romantic emphasis on the story than any other version. Here is the beginning of the darkly romantic vampire film
An interesting attempt to bring Dracula into the modern day – the film that Dracula A.D. 1972 should have been. An unknown Gerard Butler makes a captivatingly magnetic Dracula
BBC costume drama version of the Bram Stoker novel, which offers the most radical take on the story of any version made to date, substantially changing many of the familiar characters
Interestingly odd attempt to update and relocate Dracula to present-day Hollywood. This has promise despite a low-budget but eventually flounders amid a non-linear story and an entirely confused ending
Hard to describe what an utter disappointment Dario Argento’s take on Bram Stoker is. Argento seems to have entirely lost the mojo. Thomas Kretschmann makes for the screen’s mellowest Dracula
BBC mini-series retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that deconstructs and widely expands on sections of the book to create something relentlessly modernistic, sometimes in ways that take you aback
There is undeniable interest to the idea of Dracula in the future but all we get is a standard Alien copy with Dracula on a spaceship. The acting and dialogue frequently enters into the absurd
Luc Besson makes a return with an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The surprise about this is that he fairly much uncreditedly remakes Francis Ford Coppola’s version of the story
For their seventh Dracula films, Hammer introduced Dracula to the present-day. The result was a wild mishmash where Christopher Lee plays second fiddle to Hammer’s belated attempts to jump aboard the Swinging 60s youth scene
Not an adaptation of Bram Stoker but an anime based on the Marvel comic-book Tomb of Dracula (the same title that gave birth to Blade)
Excruciating West German-made vampire sex comedy (that doesn’t feature Count Dracula despite the title). Painful and agonisingly unfunny comedy routines directed by someone who has no idea how to set them up
Mel Brooks had a huge hit with Young Frankenstein, an affectionate spoof of the Universal Frankenstein films. Two decades on he returns to do the same for the Dracula film but with far more scattershot results.
The inevitable adult version of Count Dracula. Beyond the obvious, this is halfway watchable, having a sense of humour and even a story, which plays out as a straight version of Love at First Bite
Almost certainly this is the one Christopher Lee Dracula film you will never have heard about. This was a French comedy made not long after Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, spoofing the Dracula film
The fourth of Hammer’s Dracula films. There is a certain amount of silliness to the plot but new director Freddie Francis is on fine form. Christopher Lee is not given much to do
The first of two sequels to Dracula 2000. This is based around the idea of trying to scientifically examine a vampire’s body, sort of a vampire film by way of CSI
Pakistani film that is a blatant copy of Hammer’s The Horror of Dracula often scene for scene. Not without some effect and it is fascinating to see the familiar story translated into different cultural terms
Guy Maddin’s reinterpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a ballet and silent movie is an extraordinarily creative work while remaining far more faithful to the original story than many other film versions do
The third of Hammer’s Dracula films. Christopher Lee returns to the role but is given no dialogue. Nevertheless, Terence Fisher delivers some vivid directorial set-pieces that make this one of the better sequels in the series
One of several Dracula vs Frankenstein crossover films of the early 1970s. This version comes from cult exploitation director Jesus Franco but squanders the opportunities of a great title match
The 1990s brought us the darkly romantic vampire spearheaded by Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This was a Roger Corman produced bandwagon jumper on the trend