The Pale Blue Eye (2022)
Superlatively moody and well written film that winds a young Edgar Allan Poe into an occult murder mystery
Horror
The Pale Door (2020)
Weird Western where a group of outlaws on the run end up in a town of witches
Pandemic (2016)
While the title leads you to expect a plague outbreak film, you soon discover this is a zombie film. What it is is a Found Footage film mounted as a First Person Shooter film at which you have to admit that it launches into action with considerable gusto and ferocity
Pandemonium (1982)
The slasher film only really came into existence in 1980 but was so prolifically milked that by even two years later it had spawned its own sub-cycle of parodies. This hits in with a wacky anything goes absurdity but, aside from an amusing Carrie spoof, little of it is funny
Paparazzi (2004)
Mel Gibson produced film where a Hollywood actor becomes fed up with paparazzi and begins eliminating them
Paperhouse (1989)
One of the most sophisticated and intelligent of the 80s copies of A Nightmare on Elm Street with a rich central idea about a girl who can enter the world of her own drawings
Paranoiac (1963)
One of the psycho-thrillers made at Hammer Films by Freddie Francis, starring Oliver Reed at his bad boy best. Francis’s visual compositions are absolutely extraordinary
Paranoid (2000)
Psycho-thriller in which Jessica Alba finds herself drugged and then held a captive prisoner by Iain Glen
Paranormal Activity (2007)
No-budget film that became a word of mouth hit, spawned a series of sequels and sparked off the Found Footage fascination that took over the 2010s. Unlike most of the films that followed, Oren Peli creates a creepingly chill atmosphere and some undeniable jumps
Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)
This necessarily lacks the surprise effect of the first film but still captures some of the same eerie dread anticipation as spooky things begin happening
Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)
The Paranormal Activity series still manages to produce a reasonable amount of eerie scares and jumps a third time around, although by now the claim to still being found footage is starting to strain credulity
Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)
The Paranormal Activity series has had a better run than most horror franchises up until now but the cracks are starting to show through here. This feels like it is straining to find some new way to do the familiar moves but fails to provide anything unexpected or original
Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)
Blumhouse resurrects the Paranormal Activity series for another outing about an investigation into the secrets of an Amish cult
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)
For supposedly the Paranormal Activity series final entry, this offer the novelty of the first Found Footage film in 3D – a gimmick that signals the series is out of fresh ideas. Moreover, the series’ look via watching security cameras has been de-emphasised in favour of another CGI driven ghost story
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)
Less another sequel than a spinoff of the Paranormal Activity series, this takes place with Latino characters and in a whole different culture and socio-economic strata. While this gives the series a face change, everything else it feels like the shuffling of a well-worn deck of plot cards
Paranormal Asylum (2013)
Loosely set around the legend of Typhoid Mary with ghostbusters investigating an abandoned asylum. One of a host of films that automatically relegate themselves to B movies by borrowing the prefix ‘Paranormal’, this sits between the amateurish and occasionally interesting
Paranormal Entity (2009)
The Asylum’s answer to Paranormal Activity Oren Peli made his film for $15,000, which is about as cheap as it is possible to make a film; this manages to look even cheaper – simply someone wandering around with a camcorder that is at best aimed in the general direction of things happening
Paranormal Extremes: Text Messages from the Dead (2015)
The second-to-last film from legendary Z-budget filmmaker Ted V. Mikels. The title is a misnomer and the film is more about a woman discovering her abilities as a medium. Despite having been making films since the 1960s, Mikels has improved none in quality
ParaNorman (2012)
Stop-motion animated children’s film from Laika that demonstrates a willingness to be scary. The film starts to move out of the amiably likeable after around the halfway point when it begins to play a number of horror tropes against expectation to deliver a reasonable message about fear and prejudice
Parasites (2016)
This reverses the sympathies of films like Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Rather than having people tortured by backwoods hicks, one man is forced to survive on a brutal run for his life through the more disreputable parts of L.A. while hunted by homeless.
Parasitic (2012)
Low-budget directorial effort from a makeup effects artist about a parasitic creature loose in a nightclub after hours
Parasomnia (2008)
William Malone, the director of House on Haunted Hill remake, makes an interestingly different film about a girl who has spent most of her life asleep being pursued by a genius killer who invades her dreams
Parents (1989)
Bizarre black comedy directed by actor Bob Balaban that takes place in a paranoid parody of 1950s normalcy about a boy who believes his parents are cannibals
Party Bus to Hell (2017)
A party bus is stranded in the desert and surrounded by Satanists. At least this is a film that you cannot complain delivers exactly what it promises – plentiful toplessness, gore and cheesy creature effects
Party Hard, Die Young (2018)
From the director of Attack of the Lederehosen Zombies, a slasher film set at a rave event
Party Line (1989)
Tawdry thriller about brother and sister psychos who lure people from a phone sex line and kill them
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Mel Gibson wants to give us a film that shows Jesus’s suffering leading up to the Crucifixion but has taken it to such an extreme that he has actually created a Torture Porn film that gives the Saw and Hostel franchises a run for their money
Passionate Revenge (1996)
Low-budget director Fred Olen Ray makes a softcore variation on Fatal Attraction with a vengeful Shauna O’Brien obtaining a job as the babysitter with the married man who jilted her
Patient Zero (2018)
Former Doctor Who Matt Smith is absurdly miscast as someone who can speak the language of zombies. The film does nothing to make the premise believable.
Patrick (1978)
Fine Australian from Richard Franklin that jumps aboard the popularity of Carrie concerning a coma patient who demonstrates psychic powers
Patrick (2013)
This remake of the Australian classic about a coma patient with psychokinetic powers is astonishingly bad. Richard Franklin’s stylish scares are replaced by laughably overwrought sequences
Patrick Still Lives (1980)
Patrick was a modest Australian film about a bedridden coma patient exhibiting physic powers. This is an unofficial Italian-made sequel made way back before anyone coined the term mockbuster. This has no compunctions about aiming for the completely trashy – and all the more entertainingly for it
Pay the Ghost (2015)
Nicolas Cage has never had a good relationship with the horror genre – remember The Wicker Man and Vampire’s Kiss? This gives all impression it was designed for the 50c bargain bins, in which Nic tries to save his missing son in what amounts to a supernatural version of Taken
Pearl (2022)
Ti West made the extraordinary X earlier in the year. Here he and the greatly underrated Mia Goth return to make a prequel
Peelers (2016)
There have been a surprising number of films in recent years offering up the combination of zombies and strippers. Although what we have is never quite specified as zombies, this offers up strippers kicking zombie ass with a great deal of gore-drenched relish
Peeping Tom (1960)
Classic psycho film that came out the same year as Psycho but was killed in release being seen as morally repugnant. From the great Michael Powell, this features a killer obsessed with filming women as he kills them and finds an uncomfortable brilliance in the way it blurs a director’s obsessions and a viewer’s complicity in what they see on screen
Peninsula (2020)
Yeon Sang-ho makes a sequel to his international breakout zombie film hit of Train to Busan, appropriating the basics of Escape to New York to good ends
The Penny Dreadful Picture Show (2013)
Not to be confused with the recent tv series Penny Dreadful, this is another in the recent spate of multi-director horror anthologies – The ABCs of Death, V/H/S films etc. Directed with a retro vibe, the episodes are expectedly uneven but better than might be expected from the hands involved
The People Under the Stairs (1991)
Wes Craven in which a young thief breaks into a home where a crazed couple imprison children and have turned the house into a series of deathtraps
Perfect Blue (1997)
The directorial debut of Satoshi Kon, overseen by Katsuhiro Otomo, an anime concerning a troubled Japanese pop singer being cyber-stalked by a doppelganger
Perfect Creature (2006)
Conceptually ambitious New Zealand made film set in an alternate history where vampires live alongside humans
A Perfect Getaway (2009)
David Twohy has shown himself a standout screenwriter and director with the Riddick films but came unstuck with this effort where tourists in Hawaii come to believe their traveling companions are wanted killers. A film killed by far-fetched twists
The Perfect Nanny (2000)
Modest psycho-thriller with Tracy Nelson as a psychopathic babysitter who kills all in the way to romancing her employer
Perfect Prey (1998)
When the Bough Breaks was one of the better 1990s serial killer thrillers; though it didn’t need it, this is a sequel, albeit with a completely different cast. While the original was clever, this falls into drawing too much from The Silence of the Lambs, the inspiration behind both films
Perfect Skin (2018)
Thriller in which a girl is abducted and imprisoned by a mad tattooist who wants to use her body as a work of art
Perfect Strangers (2003)
Very strange New Zealand-made film that starts out seeming to be an abduction thriller and then turns into an even stranger ghost story that we cannot be sure is happening or all in the heroine’s imagination
The Perfect Tenant (2000)
Okay psycho-thriller with Maxwell Caulfield as the tenant who moves into Linda Purl’s sleepout with the intention of taking revenge against her
The Perfect Wife (2001)
Psycho-thriller with Shannon Sturges as a woman who marries Perry King with the intent of destroying his life
The Perfection (2018)
Quite the most insane film I have seen in recent memory. The rivalry between two classical music students reminds of Black Swan albeit wound up to the histrionic level of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, all added to the most pleasingly twisty mess-with-your assumptions script
Pernicious (2014)
A film about three American girls who are haunted by a vengeful child spirit while in Thailand. Another post-Insidious film that uses a sinister adjective as title
Persecution (1974)
A British psycho-thriller in the Baby Jane mold with Lana Turner as a deranged mother determined to wreck son Ralph Bates’s marriage
Personal Column (1947)
Psycho-thriller with an unknown Lucille Ball as a showgirl used by Scotland Yard as a lure to trap a maniac killer
Personal Shopper (2016)
Olivier Assayas’s high-profile but wildly critically divided work feels as though it has several competing plots circling around Kristen Stewart – a ghost story, one about a mystery texter and briefly a murder mystery – which feel incomplete and unfinished and only maybe intersecting with one another
Pesticide (1978)
One of the films from cult director Jean Rollin. This is a zombie film, clearly influenced by Night of the Living Dead, but with a uniquely French spin – the zombies are caused by drinking toxic wine
Pet (2016)
This seems to be shaping up to be a modern variant on The Collector in which Dominic Monaghan abducts the object of his desire and locks her in a cage beneath the dog shelter where he works. From there the film starts to twist expectations on their head
Pet Sematary (2019)
Remake of the Stephen King novel that opened to very divided reaction. The surprise about the film is bar one central aspect it is surprisingly faithful to the book. On the other hand, the changes make the crucial difference
Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023)
A sequel, or more correctly, prequel to the recent remake of the Stephen King novel. This has some legitimacy in that it is adapted from a story recounted in the book
Pet Sematary (1989)
An okay Stephen King adaptation that does nothing particularly wrong but lacks the impact that has caused people to regard the novel as one of the best of King’s works
Pet Sematary II (1992)
Sequel to the 1989 Pet Sematary that reverses the sympathies of the original – now it is a child that resurrects a parent – but this never quite finds the same effectiveness
Petals on the Wind (2014)
Sequel to the Lifetime channel adaptation of Virginia C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. Andrews’ prolific output of Gothic melodramas are really the horror equivalent of daytime soap operas. Though marginally better, this drowns in the same stultifying blandness as its predecessor
Peter Cushing: In His Own Words (2019)
Peter Cushing is one of cornerstone figures in the Hammer Films story. This is documentary based on interviews he made towards the end of his life
Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025)
From the people behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, this is the horror version of Peter Pan. And good grief, does this go dark with Peter as a child abductor and Tinkerbell who shoots up ‘fairy dust’ through a needle
Phantasm (1979)
Cult film from Don Coscarelli that takes place in a funereal twilight world and is filled with images of wild surrealism. Not a lot makes sense but the film is meant to operate on the logic of a dream. Several sequels followed.
Phantasm II (1988)
The first and best of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm sequels, one that creates an eerie twilight zone ambience that sits between dream and reality
Phantasm III (1994)
The third of Don Soscarelli’s Phantasm films reunites many of the regulars and goes some way towards offering explanations for everything
Phantasm: Ravager (2016)
Phantasm was a cult hit with its eerie otherworldly dream horrors. It spawned four sequels of which this is probably the last given that Angus Scrimm died earlier this year. The series peaked a couple of films ago and here the regulars pander to a comfortable familiarity without adding anything new to the mix
Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge (1989)
This amusingly updates the story of The Phantom of the Opera to have the Phantom lurking in a modern mall. Cheesily entertaining 1980s horror coasting by on the coattails of the massive success of the musical adaptation where the most amusement comes in the gorily over-the-top despatches
The Phantom of the Megaplex (2000)
A Disney Channel film, this has the amusing idea of translating The Phantom of the Opera to a modern multiplex and telling it as a children’s story
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
The first and still the best version of the story. Made when The Phantom was a horror story rather than a weepie romance, everything from Lon Chaney’s performance to the amazing Gothic design and directorial set-pieces is classic
Phantom of the Opera (1943)
The second film version of the story, lavishly remaking the classic 1925 Lon Chaney version in sound and colour. Alas, all this serves to do is stuff and mount the story. With the addition of a sympathetic backstory and cast with a wimpily diminutive Claude Rains, Chaney’s magnificently mad Phantom comes across like an indignant fox terrier
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Hammer Films’ attempt to update the classic story went astray – the Paris opera becomes a dreary English repertory house and Terence Fisher misses the tale’s grandeur
Phantom of the Opera (1983)
TV mini-series remake of The Phantom of the Opera starring Jane Seymour that rewrites and rearranges much of the story to negligible effect
The Phantom of the Opera (1989)
On the back of popularity of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and the Elm Street films, Robert Englund was cast in this version where the emphasis is on the slasher element, which works far better than you might think
The Phantom of the Opera (1990)
Lush tv mini-series with Charles Dance as the Phantom, this stands too much in the shadow of the then recent Lloyd Webber musical and its making The Phantom into a romantic figure as opposed to a horror icon
The Phantom of the Opera (1998)
Dario Argento takes on The Phantom and welcomely rescues it from musical romance and returns it to being a horror film. Despite a beautifully mounted production, Julian Sands’ Phantom is too weak and wimpy
The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
The long-planned film adaptation of The Phantom musical emerges as disaster under Joel Schumacher. The Phantom’s presence has all been watered down and the film exists as no more than a series of scenographic poses
The Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Predating The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brian De Palma conducts a very funny parody of The Phantom of the Opera (and several other horror films) as a glitter rock musical
Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954)
A version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue that was made for the original 3D fad. That is to say, it is more a case of some elements of the story having been shuffled around into a new story with Karl Malden as a mad zookeeper using a hypnotised ape to kill women
Phantom of the Theatre (2016)
A fascinating Chinese version of The Phantom of the Opera, transplanted from a Parisian opera house of the 19th Century to a film being shot in an abandoned theatre in the 1930s. On the other hand, this version makes the most radical changes to the story of any of the Phantom films
Phantom Town (1999)
A quirkily enjoyable horror Western about children searching for their parents and ending up in a town that exists in an afterlife netherworld populated by an assortment of weird creatures
Phantoms (1998)
One of the best and most underrated Dean R. Koontz adaptations, which creates eerie atmosphere out a town where the residents have disappeared due to what is revealed as a uniquely different creature
Phenomena (1985)
Another of Dario Argento’s giallo thrillers filled with all his trademark artily extravagant deaths. At the centre of the film is a teenage Jennifer Connelly who can psychically communicate with insects
Phenomena (2023)
In the same vein as The Conjuring films, a film about a true-life Spanish team of paranormal investigators
Phobia (1980)
The great John Huston, the director of The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen and other classics, directs a psychotherapy psycho-thriller. Alas the thriller essentials slip entirely through his hands
Phobia (2008)
Horror anthology featuring four ghost stories from Thai directors. While all the segments vary in approach and style, this is a spooky and above average effort with the real standout being the final segment with an air hostess aboard a plane with a dead body in the midst of a storm
Phobias (2021)
Another horror anthology with each episode from a different directors, united around the wraparound theme of stories being told by patients in a strange psychiatric facility
Phone (2002)
South Korean jump aboard the Ringu phenomenon about a series of haunted phone calls that works well through a clever ending
Phone Booth (2002)
Sharp and original script from Larry Cohen in which Colin Farrell is trapped inside a phone booth by a sniper. Good story that even the awful Joel Schumacher in the director’s seat doesn’t screw up too badly
Picture Mommy Dead (1966)
Bert I. Gordon, best known for his giant bug films of the 1950s, makes a torrid psycho-thriller about a young girl being cheated of her inheritance as people around her are being killed possibly by the ghost of her mother (Zsa Zsa Gabor)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
Adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel about an unaging libertine starring Hurd Hatfield. This is regarded as a classic but reads as fairly melodramatic and tame today
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973)
From producer Dan Curtis, creator of tv’s Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel about a libertine who remains eternally youthful while his debaucheries are transferred to a portrait. This has to count as the best version of the story to date.
Pieces (1983)
A venture into the slasher film from hack Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon that features utterly surreal bad dialogue and copious amounts of blood
Piercing (2018)
An interestingly strange film with Mia Wasikowska as a disturbed hooker and Christopher Abbott as a man who plans to kill her
Pig (2010)
A Backwoods Brutality entry from the increasingly underrated Adam Mason where the entire film has been shot in a single take. Often brutal but much of the film seems monotonous with indulgent improvised performances allowed to dominate the show
Pig Hunt (2008)
One of the most conceptually confusing films I have seen in some time – it starts out seeming like a film about people hunting a near-mythical giant pig before abruptly veering off into Backwoods Brutality territory and then out of the blue introducing a sinister cult to the mix
Pig Killer (2022)
A film based on true-life Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton who fed his victim’s bodies to his pigs
Piggy (2022)
Raw and undeniable brutal film in which a plus-size teenage girl forms a relationship with a serial killer after he abducts her tormentors
Piglady (2023)
A True Crime film where the story of a woman who killed two men and fed their remains to her pigs is essentially turned into a slasher movie
Piglet (2025)
Another of the horror versions of children’s stories, this has a in-name-only connection to Winnie-the-Pooh’s Piglet and is otherwise a variant on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre about a growth-hormone enhanced killer
Pillow Party Massacre (2023)
A well made tribute to the 1980s slasher film with characterisations and performances that make much rounded characters than usual