The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Clever concept of five people trapped in an elevator where one of them is The Devil. One of the better films to come out under the much debased name of M. Night Shyamalan who lends his name as producer
The zombie genre has become creatively overused and exhausted in recent years but this French entry plays with an appealing originality, sort of like a low-key version of Dawn of the Dead where a man builds a Parisian apartment building into his own paradise
A giallo film with Anthony Steffen as an aristocrat who likes to pick up red-haired girls and kill them in the dungeon in his villa, who then becomes haunted by the ghost of his late wife
Okay but nothing standout Stephen King adaptation with Miguel Ferrer as a tabloid journalist covering a series of killings before realising he is tracking a vampire
Police procedural with Roy Scheider as a detective tracking a serial killer who strikes on the nights of big baseball games
Quite a perversely charged film about a psychopathic child with voyeuristic tendencies
James Mason stars as a brooding composer who may be a murderer in this Gothic thriller
Rebecca Hall gives a standout performance in an eerie ghost story about a woman possibly haunted and discovering disturbing things in the aftermath of her husband’s death
Low-budget action film with Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson hunting vampires. Routine as both action and vampire film.
The British equivalent of The Blair Witch Project, although this makes the title not strictly accurate – it should more correctly have been called A Night on the Moors. This conducts the build-up in an especially interesting way with much interplay between the trio of characters who all come holding secrets
Teen horror variant on the zombie film. Scott Grimes gets a job at his uncle’s morgue only for a lightning bolt to revive his school bullies as zombies.
Entertaining and quite well made potboiler with Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill skulking around a big old mansion as someone or thing starts killing people off
Gripping psychological thriller in which a niece suspects that Robert Montgomery who has charmed her aunt may be a psychopathic killer
The second and better of the films spun off from tv’s Dark Shadows. At last the show gets production values and atmosphere that do it justice, although the series cult figure of Barnabas Collins does not appear
Underrated Australian horror film that prefigures The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in its dialogueless story of a woman attacked and imprisoned by a mad farmer. Directed with considerable all-out effect
Film about a zombie-creating sexually transmitted disease that feels like it was made by a bunch of drunken adolescents trying to out-gross each other after an all-weekend beer party. A film that is readily ventures into bad taste and is prepared to offend
A remake of the original zombie film Night of the Living Dead conducted in animation
A Mexican film about a scientist who turns his son into an ape man that goes amok. A 1940s mad scientist film with the addition of modern exploitation elements. Listed as a Video Nasty in the UK.
Entry in the 00s zombie revival fad from the early days of The Asylum, this is the most gore-drenched zombie film ever made. Overlooked but a better film than you think
Classic occult film from former Val Lewton associate Jacques Tourneur that sits in a wonderfully ambiguous place where we cannot be certain whether the supernatural is real or imagined
Sequel to a film that few people remember, this is all campy one-liners and gory set-pieces conducted with a silliness that boggles the mind
Another pointless remake of an 80s horror film. The original was a cheap Evil Dead ripoff driven by cheesy effects; this provides more professional effects but only becomes a slickly produced assemblage of cliches we have seen dozens of times before
Excellent film about an academic who discovers his wife is a witch. A film that delves into a psychological place between rationalism and belief with stark effect
A once lost Edward D. Wood Jr film with police investigating a fake medium scam being run out of a haunted house
From an Alexandre Aja associate, a reasonably tight thriller about a woman taking shelter in a gas station from a psycho sniper outside
Absolutely extraordinary directorial debut from actor Charles Laughton who transforms the story of an evil preacher (Robert Mitchum) pursuing two children into something approaching a stylised Expressionist fairytale
Remake of George Romero’s seminal zombie classic. The 3D is no more than a gimmick, while elsewhere they are some radical changes – a white Ben, a lame explanation for the zombies, some far-too-cute in-jokes – that fails to match the effectiveness of the original
The film that created the modern zombie genre, that took a creature from voodoo and reinvented at a something stumbling and wanting only to devour flesh. George Romero creates a horror film that shoots out all cozy, established convention
George Romero produces a remake of his groundbreaking zombie film. This adheres closely to the original but manages to modernise it in interesting ways
A unique homage to Night of the Living Dead wherein the original has been recreated with a bewildering range of artwork and short pieces of animation from dozens of different artists, even scenes conducted by sock puppets and animated Barbie dolls
This jumps aboard the zombie bandwagon borrowing the title of George Romero’s classic but has almost nothing in common with it
This rather appealingly plays out as a sex-reversed version of Shaun of the Dead with Maria Thayer as a slightly clueless woman who ends up in the midst of the zombie apocalypse with the guy she spent the night with. Thayer gives a winning performance and the humour is smart and witty
An effective slow burn film that settles in with the promise of being a standard entry with a babysitter being stalked on Halloween night. However, this proves to turn all your expectations on their head
Film concerning a warlock resurrected in the body of a scarecrow seeking revenge. This is conceived around a series of novelty makeup effects but director Jeff Burr treats the material seriously and with reasonable results
The fourth of the Blind Dead films from Spanish director Amando de Ossorio. The film, concerning Knights Templars who were blinded and have returned as zombies, have gained a modest cult
Extremely cheap and impoverished variation on the Nazi zombie film, this is dull and has nothing to recommend it
The only studio-produced entry from the heyday of the slasher film, which gives it a much slicker polish than most of its competitors. Featuring a stunning Rachel Ward in her screen debut.
Witty and funny attempt to update the vampire to the present day being hunted by a reporter. Darren McGavin gives an enormously entertaining performance. A hit tv movie that was spun out into a series.
Less famous sequel to the cult tv movie The Night Stalker but a far superior work. This repeats much of the first film but with Darren McGavin’s Kolchak hunting an immortal killer. Much better script and featuring a superbly eerie climactic venture down into the Seattle Underground
A Blumhouse and James Wan co-production about a malevolent swimming pool
This comes with an interestingly large canvas wherein an innocent chauffeur is drawn into wars between secret vampire clans that run Los Angeles
Another example of Tobe Hooper’s slight into mediocrity in the 1990s, an erotic thriller that features a madly overacting Robert Englund as the Marquis de Sade and an innocent being corrupted by his descendant in the modern day
William Castle psycho-thriller (from a Robert Bloch script) that creates an incredibly haunted mood between dream and reality only to fall apart in an absurdly contrived ending
Called the only horror film Elizabeth Taylor ever appeared in (although one would dispute that somewhat), this feels like a Hammer psycho-thriller made with an A-list cast
An amazing breakout hit from Russia, a film that is busy to the point of overcrowding with ideas and its’ director’s visual excess but delivers the goods in ways that make your jaw drop
Horror comedy set in an office building as a group of inept security guards fight off a vampire outbreak among the staff. Very similar to the earlier Bloodsucking Bastards, this balances comedy and horror but director Mitchell Altieri demonstrates comedy is not his strong point
The second directorial film from Clive Barker is a hugely ambitious work concerning the discovery of a city of monsters – containing some extraordinary makeup creations – but proved a box-office flop
Michael Winner makes a prequel to the classic, multiply filmed psychological ghost story The Turn of the Screw but erases all the ambiguity in his clodding and unsubtle direction
Any Found Footage film about people venturing into a haunted forest cannot help but draw comparison to the progenitor of the genre, The Blair Witch Project. This comes up with some sufficiently original twists and spooky moments, even if it is eventually unbuckled by its pretensions
One of several psycho-thrillers made by Hammer Films soon after the success of Psycho. Despite a plot that collapses under its contrivances, Freddie Francis shoots amazing cinematographic compositions
Resembling a supernatural version of I Know What You Did Last Summer, this South Korean ghost story delivers considerable spookiness
Rodney Ascher, director of the fascinatingly whacked Room 237, returns with a documentary about sleep paralysis that travels into a territory more creepy than most horror films get
Classic work of the 1960s Italian Gothic cycle featuring Barbara Steele, shot in beautifully brooding black-and-white and with a remarkable sadomasochistic undertow
An above average entry in the trend of horror anthologies featuring episodes from different directors, including Joe Dante and Mick Garris. Featuring at least a couple of standout entries
One of the numerous gore-drenched Italian zombie films of the 1980s that came out copying George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. This is like the kid in class who doesn’t have much skill but goes at it with wholehearted abandon
A clearly more commercial film from cult Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto of Tetsuo: The Iron Man fame. This draws influence from Ring but this lacks much of the obsessive drive of Tsukamoto’s other films
Nightmare Detective was Shinya Tsukamoto’s venture into the dreamscape theme of works like The Cell and the subsequent Inception. Many regard this sequel as a superior work.
Documentary about KNB EFX Group, one of the premiere makeup effects companies in contemporary Hollywood. Although nominally focused around KNB and their history, the documentary principally profiles Greg Nicotero, the N of the group
Horror host John Stanley directs a film with an amusing premise where a famous horror actor known for playing a vampire turns out to be a vampire for real, causing problems when he turns up for a convention
Undeniably influenced by the classic Mystery of the Wax Museum, an entertainingly lurid film with Cameron Mitchell as a mad waxworks curator taking revenge on a Hollywood studio by encasing the bodies of its’ stars in wax
This has an interesting set-up about a woman pursued by a boogeyman figure from her nightmares where others cannot be sure whether she is delusional at the same time as the figure starts eliminating them – but the film’s low-budget gets in the way of adequate treatment
One of the most influential horror films of the 1980s, creating a series of dream horror copycats. Before the campy, makeup effects driven sequels kicked in, Wes Craven’s original creates a genuinely unearthly series of nightmare jumps
Yet another in the fad for 19870s/0s horror remakes, a merely efficient revival that reduces the wild, outré scares of Wes Craven’s original to conveyor belt shocks
The point where Robert Englund’s Freddy went from a boogeyman into the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote, popping up like a malevolent jack-in-a-box to quip a one-liner and dispatch victims
Fourth of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. Under Renny Harlin’s hand, the unworldly atmosphere of Wes Craven’s original is replaced by moments of incredible silliness
The first and worst of the A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. The dream logic becomes incoherent, while the film is twisted out of shape to become a bizarre gay Coming Out parable
The fifth of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films offers up the same old thing but director Stephen Hopkins enters at an inspired level that transforms the set-pieces with a genuine weirdness
An 80s Scream Queen film featuring Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer as sorority girls who become possessed. From director David DeCoteau
One of several films based on the meeting between Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Dr Polidori at the Villa Diodati in 1816 that led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein
TV mini-series that adapts eight Stephen King short stories. As with any anthology, the stories vary in quality but are generally quite reasonable
One of the original Video Nasties. In all rather regards, this is a fairly scuzzy looking grindhouse psycho film. Nothing terribly interesting to the show, although it does eventually offer a couple of gory killings, which is what got the censors upset during the day
A film shot during Covid lockdown that creates a great sense of isolation with a man locked inside a possibly haunted apartment
Film supposedly based on true-life serial killer Richard Ramirez who was nicknamed the Night Stalker. This tosses out the facts in favour of its own fictionalised story
Gripping Danish thriller in which morgue attendant Nicholaj Coster Waldau finds a serial killer is playing games with him. Filled with paranoia, sharp twists and lashings of black humour
Ole Bornedal conducts an English-language remake of his Danish thriller Nattevagten. Rich in black comedy and dark twists, Bornedal demonstrates a mastery of Hitchcockian suspense
Nightwatch about the paranoia of a morgue attendant on the night shift was a festival hit. After 29 years, the principals reunite for a sequel
Adaptation of a Martin Cruz Smith novel about an Indian reservation under attack by hordes of vampire bats. The Nature Amok theme suffers terrible effects and plays subordinate to a polemic about the state of the modern Indian
This is a horror film that comes with one of the most captivating and original build-ups of any film seen of recent. A man is hired to simply watch a locked doorway – only to then finding things moving
The best Clive Barker film that Clive Barker never made. A girl hooks up with a guy only to find that his dead ex-girlfriend insists on joining them in bed during sex and won’t leave. Similar to the recent disappointingly tame Burying the Ex but this pushes the concept to soul-baring extremes
This has to be the single worst killer shark film ever made and quite possibly the worst film of the 2010s. A shark film set in a Beverly Hills mansion where the nearest body of water is a swimming pool and where the appearance of the shark will reduce you to tears of laughter
Riding on his fame as Freddy Krueger in the Elm Street films, actor Robert Englund made his directorial debut here but the film is lumbered with the lame concept of a demonic phone line
A sequel to 976-Evil, Robert Englund’s directorial debut about a demonic phone line. This is an almost entirely unrelated work that is now about a killer with astral projection powers
Promising film about two people at a mine in the desert affected by what would appear to be the drill having dug all the way down to Hell. The film plays a corny idea seriously and sits in an interestingly ambiguous place about what is going on.
The Bollywood horror film is a rare and strange beast – what other horror film would you see that comes with song and dance numbers? This is a Bollywood possession film where, despite the use of local colour and custom, it is surprisingly still drawn from the cliches created by The Exorcist
A Stephen King adaptation, this is less the jumpshocks of It than a work of dark brooding psychology as a farmer contemplates the murder of his wife. Think Days of Heaven by way of Grant Wood’s American Gothic
A low-budget film served by some witty fanboy humour, decent fight choreography and unexpectedly good acting
Likeable film made by fans about a ninja team formed to deal with a zombie onslaught
Visually stunning Russian film with a clairvoyant and a police inspector teaming up to solve a series of occult murders in 19th Century St Petersburg
The directorial debut of William Peter Blatty, the writer of The Exorcist, a strange and unclassifiable black comedy set in a military asylum. Imagine One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest directed by Robert Altman
Roman Polanski makes a return to Rosemary’s Baby territory in this work with Johnny Depp as a rare book collector on the trail of an occult tome. Polanski great a great sense of sinister forces surrounding Depp but the film reaches an unsatisfying ending
A true crime film based on Martin Bryant who went on a shooting spree, killing 35 people in Port Arthur, Australia in 1996
From the director of the Sharknado films. This concerns a family dealing with tragedy caused by a lake monster. Unlike Sharknado, this a work that is taking itself seriously
Another in the fad for horror films about escape rooms we have had in the last few years, this concerns a possibly haunted venue and reaches an interestingly odd ending
This creates quite reasonable atmosphere as an undocumented Mexican girl takes a room at a boarding house that has sinister secrets
This second English-language film from Japan’s Ryuhei Kitamura came with a good deal of promising advance buzz but upon being seen emerges as a strictly average psycho film that never offers anything outstanding in terms of twists or suspense, nor pushes its audience in any way
A True Crime film loosely based on an incident in Russia in the 1990s where a man and his mother killed homeless people and ate their flesh. This pushes the material into an admirably grim and disturbing place
Horror film where a group of people end up at an abandoned motel where the secrets they have are turned back on them
Amid the host of Psycho copies that came out during the 1960s, this was one that played everything as a comedy. A wildly overacting Rod Steiger is a psycho actor who adopts a different disguises every time he goes out to kill
An entry in the gonzo killer shark film fad from Mark Polonia, this has some undeniable amusement to its title mash-up as a team go in search of Noah’s Ark, which somehow has killer sharks involved
Film that develops a Folk Horror vibe as Eva Green hires a nanny with mysterious healing powers. The horror version of Mary Poppins