Explorers (1985)
Joe Dante’s successor to Gremlins and a box-office flop. This nevertheless evokes a genteel sense of wonder in its story with Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as teen inventors who build a backyard spaceship
Exquisite Tenderness (1995)
A medical horror film concerning a disfigured surgeon killing his way through a hospital as he seeks revenge. This is notable for its degree of gore-drenched sadism
Exte: Hair Extensions (2007)
An earlier effort from Shion Sono that concerns itself with hair extensions that take over and kill their host. More straightforward than many of Sono’s other works but the outlandish of the effects make the film
Extinction (2018)
At first glance, this seems a routine alien invasion film. However, this becomes a whole lot more watchable with a mid-film twist that turns what is going on on its head
Extracted (2012)
An undeniably imaginative SF film in which scientist Sasha Roiz to invent a device to view memory only for things to go wrong and become trapped in someone else’s memories
Extraordinary Tales (2015)
An anthology of Edgar Allan Poe tales narrated by Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi and others. Each episode is in a different style, where the succinctness allows the stories to be told as written
Extraordinary Visitor (1998)
Quirkily appealing Canadian fish out of water comedy where John the Baptist is sent to present-day Newfoundland just before the turn of the millennium to prevent the End of the World
Extraterrestrial (2011)
This, the second film from Nacho Vigalondo, is a head-scratcher, Though it is ostensibly an alien invasion film, Vigalondo instead creates a comedy of errors
Extraterrestrial (2014)
Group of twentysomethings go to a cabin in the woods, are abducted and attacked by E.T.s. I wanted to like this but there is something generic and interchangeable about everything that is happening
Extreme Measures (1996)
Solid and effective thriller in the vein of Coma where ER doctor Hugh Grant finds himself in the midst of a conspiracy involving illicit medical experiments at the hospital where he works
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)
Documentary-maker Joe Berlinger makes an exactingly detailed recreation of the Ted Bundy case, while Zac Efron abandons teen pin-up roles and steps into the title role with unnerving likeness
Extremity (2018)
Horror film from the rising name of Anthony DiBlasi set around an extreme haunt, a Halloween horror show that pushes everything beyond people’s limits
Eye of the Beholder (1999)
A strange thriller in the Basic Instinct-mold with surveillance expert Ewan McGregor obsessed with tracking serial killer Ashley Judd, while haunted by the imaginary companion of his daughter
Eye of the Cat (1969)
Psycho-thriller where derelict Michael Sarrazin is taken home by Gayle Hunnicutt and gets wound up in a series of games between her and batty aunt Eleanor Parker
Eyeball (1975)
A giallo film from Umberto Lenzi, best known for creating the Italian cannibal film but Lenzi’s direction is crude and lacking style in comparison to the others working in this genre
Eyes of a Stranger (1981)
Entry from the heyday of the slasher film. Better plotted than most of its ilk, largely because it steals the plot from Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Featuring a teenage Jennifer Jason Leigh in her first film role
Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)
Faye Dunaway is a fashion photographer who gains a psychic link into the mind of a killer. From a John Carpenter script but the thriller plotting is never up to the chic suggestiveness the film is given
Eyes Without a Face (1959)
Classic French thriller about a mad surgeon who abducts women to graft their faces onto his disfigured daughter. The film has a rare visual poetry combined with moments of horror that are still effective decades later
The 8th Night (2021)
A South Korean possession film that creates a fascinatingly outlandish and original plot by dropping the usual cliches to instead draw on Buddhism to create its own mythology
The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993)
A Hong Kong Wu Xia film from Jeffrey Lau that is near plotless and made at a madcap level of slapstick comedy that is frequently exhausting.
The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)
Terence Fisher was a cornerstone figures at Hammer Films. Less well-regarded is his 1960s trilogy of science-fiction films. This is an alien invasion film that is a model of economy, told with a stark effective tension
The Echo (2004)
Filipino ghost story inspired by The Ring and Ju-on films that generates a reasonable haunted atmosphere in its story about mysterious happenings in an apartment building. This later underwent an English-language remake
The Eclipse (2009)
Not to be confused with the Twilight sequel, this is a quiet, modestly made Irish ghost story set around a literary festival where the strongest parts are the characters and performances
The Editor (2014)
A witty parody of the giallo film from members of Canada’s Astron-6 collective who are proving themselves the masters of a certain type of movie spoof
The Eighteenth Angel (1998)
David Seltzer, the screenwriter of The Omen, recycles himself here where Rachael Leigh Cook is caught up in the coming Biblical End of the World around the turn of the millennium
The Elderly (2022)
Quite creepy Spanish film where the elderly everywhere without any explanation begin to act disturbed and turn on the young
The Electric State (2025)
This is a film that had the capacity within its hands to be a classic work about A.I. and robotics. Adapted from the art of Simon Stålenhag and directed by the Russo Brothers who were behind the last two Avengers films
The Electronic Monster (1960)
The very first dreamscape film, prefiguring many other films that have taken up the theme, most notably Inception. By contrast this is a dull affair that lets most of the possibilities slip through its hands.
The Element of Crime (1984)
The first feature film from Lars von Trier, a crime thriller set in a futuristic Europe. There are glimmers of the visual style von Trier would develop but the film also badly drags
The Embalmer (1965)
Early variation on the giallo film with a frogman abducting people from the canals of Venice and then preserving their bodies as statues
The Emerald Forest (1985)
John Boorman film with Powers Boothe searching for his son who has been snatched by Indians in the Amazon. A mystical film, the first to bring issues of deforestation of the Amazon rainforest to public attention
The Emeryville Experiments (2016)
The premise of a small town inhabited by the former inmates of an asylum, suggests a variant on Poe’s The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether. The execution is complete amateurism on every level
The Emoji Movie (2017)
An animated film that bizarrely speculates that the emojis in your text messages are actually living entities that have lives inside the phone. A not-too-well-thought out concept that leaves you with strange questions about its world
The Emperor’s New Clothes (1987)
One of the shabby fairytales produced by Cannon Films. Here the clear and simple moral sting of the Hans Christian Andersen original disappears under buffoonish comedy
The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
One of the head-scratching animated oddities produced by Disney during the 2000s. Not unlikeable, the story concerns a self-centered Aztec emperor who is transformed into a llama
The Emperor’s New Groove 2: Kronk’s New Groove (2005)
Another of the cheap made-for-video Disney animated sequels that were made during the 1990s/2000s, they tries to get by on association with its predecessor’s name
The Empire of Corpses (2015)
Fascinatingly original anime set in an alternate history Steampunk version of Victorian England that has developed a technology based on Frankenstein’s corpse resurrection experiments
The Empty Mirror (1997)
A bizarre film that features Adolf Hitler sitting around in the afterlife joined by Sigmund Freud and others as he reflects on his image
The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
An old-fashioned weepie melodrama about a cottage that allows a disfigured soldier and a plain woman to find love where the magic there allows them to see the other as perfect
The Enchanted Cottage (2016)
A modern remake of an old play filmed twice before about a magical cottage that allows plain and disfigured lovers who stay there to see the other one as beautiful
The Encounter (2015)
Found Footage film about various people in the woods in the aftermath of a UFO crash. Essentially The Blair Witch Project with UFOs instead of a backwoods haunting
The End of the Animal (2010)
Fascinating no-budget South Korean film about a mysterious catastrophe and an even more mysterious godlike stranger who appears in its aftermath. Enigma like the best of Andrei Tarkovsky
The End We Start From (2023)
Jodie Comer is a new mother who travels through an England that has been devastated by catastrophic flooding. Not dissimilar to The Road but less bleak
The Endless (2017)
Nominally a sequel to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s first film Resolution, this concerns a strange cult but expands outwards to involve a mind-boggling array of backwoods timeloops and reality blurrings
The Enfield Haunting (2015)
The Enfield Haunting is a supposedly true-life haunting that most audiences are familiar with from The Conjuring 2; this is an earlier tv mini-series treatment that offers a more realistically grounded telling
The Entity (1982)
Film that is supposedly based on a true story which Barbara Hershey are her family are harassed by a poltergeist. This contains the notorious scene where Hershey is raped by the entity
The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man (2003)
Most classic monsters have undergone an adult movie interpretation at some point – here it is the turn of The Invisible Man
The Escapist (2008)
This is principally a prison escape drama, at which it works well with a strong ensemble cast. It also has a left field ending that reveals it is a fantasy film, which remains its least satisfying aspect
The Eternal (1998)
Michael Almereyda conducts a unique take on the mummy film dispensing with all the cliches in the eerie story of a Druidic mummy unearthed from an Irish peat bog
The Eternal Daughter (2022)
This received acclaim on the arthouse circuit. Tilda Swinton plays both the daughter and her mother who go to stay a hotel that may be haunted. Everything hovers in a state of ambiguity
The Evictors (1979)
From 1970s exploitation director Charles B. Pierce, this charts similar territory to the Backwoods Brutality cycle in the claimedly true story of a couple who buy a house in the South and then experience a mystery assault
The Evil (1978)
Classic 1970s haunted film – at least the ending reveals otherwise. While most haunted house films focus on creating spooky atmosphere, this has been designed as a copy of The Omen driven by a series of bizarre novelty deaths
The Evil Dead (1981)
Ferociously paced low-budget hit that put the names of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell on the map. What made the film a cult hit was Raimi’s full tilt pace and entertainingly over-the-top splatter effects
The Evil Dead II (1987)
Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell return in a sequel to their earlier low-budget cult hit. With a far better budget this time, Raimi goes completely over-the-top with a delirious silliness that will bring tears to the eyes
The Evil Next Door (2020)
The Ghost Story is a genre has felt overused and its clichés churned to a point of exhaustion. All of that said, this Swedish film delivers the goods and conjures an extremely spooky mood
The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
This was the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films. A usually overlooked entry in the series, this is made into something vivid and quite memorable by Freddie Francis’s direction
The Evil Within (2017)
The story of the drug-addicted heir Andrew Getty determined to be a filmmaker is almost as fascinating as the one film he made before his death. The film is an extraordinary work, filled with jaw-dropping surrealistic imagery
The Ewok Adventure (1984)
Crass attempt by George Lucas to further milk the Star Wars phenomenon with a tv movie (released to theatres outside the US) given over the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi
The Executioners (2018)
A film where four girls on a weekend getaway undergo a home invasion. It soon becomes apparent that this is a film homaging I Spit on Your Grave
The Exorcism (2024)
Joshua John Miller, the son of The Exorcist’s star Jason Miller, makes a film where an actor cast as the priest in a remake of The Exorcist becomes possessed. A witty and clever blend of meta reference and autobiography
The Exorcism in Amarillo (2020)
The worst exorcism film ever made. A ridiculous Christian evangelical film about a God-loving American family under attack by malevolent spirits emerged from a book on witchcraft! Supposedly based on a true story
The Exorcism of Anna Ecklund (2016)
Low-budget possession and exorcism supposedly based on a true story that cycles through most of the tropes of the genre. An earlier version of the same “true-life” possession depicted in The Ritual
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)
This became a big sensation with its claims to be on the true account of an exorcism even if director Scott Derrickson alters what actually happened to the point of complete fiction. The rest just rehashes cliches from The Exorcist
The Exorcism of God (2021)
A possession and exorcism film from Mexico, this draws on the same tired and overly worn clichés that have been around since The Exorcist but offers some interesting twists
The Exorcist (1973)
A landmark classic of the horror genre, a film whose take on demonic possession and exorcism laid down a series of tropes that are still present over five decades later. A gruelling and intensive horror story into the bargain
The Exorcist III (1990)
One will go out on a limb and argue that William Peter Blatty’s sequel is actually a far superior work to the original The Exorcist, one that substitutes a literate theological detective story for barf bag theatrics and contains at least one real out there jump
The Exorcist: Believer (2023)
In much the same way as they did with Halloween, Blumhouse and director David Gordon Green offer up a sequel to The Exorcist on the original’s fiftieth anniversary. The results are a bizarre scratch of the head
The Expert (1995)
Rather ridiculous action film where Jeff Speakman breaks into a prison to take revenge against a serial killer because he received too liberal a treatment from the justice system
The Exterminating Angel (1962)
An acclaimed surrealistic film from Luis Buñuel in which a group of people attend an upper-class dinner party but then find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the room
The Exterminator (1980)
Vigilante film with a cult reputation that was banned in places because of its ultra-violence. The film is a mix of Taxi Driver and Death Wish, mostly centred around a series of gory despatches
The Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983)
An Italian exploitation film that blatantly copies the plot of Mad Max 2. It offers the benefit of some vigorous action scenes and English-language dubbing that is out of this world
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (2010)
Luc Besson adapts a French comic-book – sort of a female version of Tintin – with uneven but generally amiable regard. The result is somewhere between an Indiana Jones adventure and the quirkness of an Amelie
The Extraordinary Adventures of the Mouse and His Child (1977)
Based on a popular children’s book, this is a simplistic animated film for very young children about a toy mouse that goes on a quest to find freedom
The Extraordinary Voyage (2011)
French documentary made for the 150th celebration of Georges Melies’s birthday. Interesting if never uncovering anything new. Too much focus is placed on A Trip to the Moon and its recent restoration
The Eye (2002)
Thailand’s Pang Brothers proved themselves some of the best horror directors in the world with this eerie film in which a woman starts to see the dead after receiving corneal implants. Several sequels and an English-language remake followed
The Eye (2008)
An English-language remake of the ghost story from the Pang Brothers follows the other film faithfully but in terms of atmosphere is a pallid copy of the original
The Eye 10 (2005)
The third and weakest of the Pang Brothers’ The Eye films, this has occasional moments of spookiness but mostly feels made up of leftover ideas that didn’t make it to the other films
The Eye 2 (2004)
The Pang Brothers are in this author’s opinion some of the finest genre directors in the world. This sequel to their breakout hit The Eye is an even better film that achieves some genuinely haunted moments
The Eye Creatures (1965)
Larry Buchanan must count as one of the all-time bad movie directors and in this ultra-cheap alien invader film, in itself a remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), he is true to form
The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
An extraordinary film, the story of a disturbed woman who keeps people prisoners in her barn. The stark effectiveness of the film all comes in the brooding black-and-white photography