The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This refers to members of the psychiatric or psychological professions that come with malevolent intent. Ever since the classic twist ending of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), the horror film has always regarded those who have control and say over one’s sanity as dubious in nature.
In genre cinema, psychiatrists and psychologists can frequently imprison people in Asylums for nefarious purposes. Often they can be Mad Scientists or Mad Surgeons conducting Illicit Scientific Experiments on those confined, or pushing radical treatment methods. Sometimes they are murderous and have even been known to be Serial Killers.
Another of the unofficial sequels that bear slim to no resemblance to the Amityville Horror hoax. This is a cheaply made and not terribly scary British effort set in a asylum supposedly built on the site of the Amityville house
A surprisingly good conceptual SF film concerning a man trying to deal with a series of increasingly more surreal jumps in which he finds his body is being hijacked
One of the best of the horror anthologies from UK’s Amicus Films. This adapts four stories from Robert Bloch, which are all tales told by the inmates of the titular asylum and settle in with chill effectiveness
From the director of Snakes on a Plane, a film about a co-ed university dormitory that used to be an asylum where students find that former horrors still lurk
Story of the sole survivor of a cult mass suicide waking from a coma to be haunted by the cult leader begging her to join them. This becomes a derivative of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films before a contrived ending
After Joel Schumacher killed off the cinematic Batman franchise, Christopher Nolan successfully revives it, bringing back the dark, psychologically brooding superhero and telling a Batman origin story
For the stew of elements this throws together – a famous unsolved murder case, ghosts, a blind psychic killer, possession, a sinister psychiatrist – it is surprising how dull the film that emerges is
Low-budget film with Bela Lugosi as a respectable psychology professor who disguises himself as someone running a soup kitchen from which he runs a criminal operation and keeps zombies
Mad psychologist creates a giant brain about the size of a small car that controls minds and is hungry to devour people. A deliriously entertaining film that seems to embody the essence of the cheesy makeup effects driven 1980s horror film
One of David Cronenberg’s great early films. Fueled by a messy divorce Cronenberg was going through, it is set around a radical psychological institute that encourages people to manifest their repressed angers through their bodies
Classic film that was groundbreaking for its designs – all distorted and angular sets, exaggerated shadows – that became defined as German Expressionism and its tale of a sinister hypnotist
A remake of the silent German Expressionist classic that replicates the unique look and sets. Interesting, although it now emerges more like a film noir with artistic pretensions than the avant garde work the original was
Cult Italian horror director Lucio Fulci plays himself, a horror director being driven to hallucinations and acts of murder by the violence he directs in his films
A very strange surrealist film about the strange characters that populate a rundown hotel. Includes reincarnation, alien bug people and John Malkovich as a psychiatrist with red hair in a bow
The seventh of the Child’s Play films with the killer doll Chucky. I never much cared for the original series but the modern films – those with Chucky’s name in the title – have become a lot wittier and playful, constantly making jokes back to the rest of the series
The original The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is a classic of silent German Expressionist cinema; this loose remake feels like Eraserhead reconceived with absurd Day-Glo disco decor
Halle Berry is a psychiatrist who comes around to find she has been incarcerated in her own asylum only to then find it is haunted. An improbably contrived set up with some jumps
Robert Pattinson (before he was a recognised name) as a convalescing pilot during WWII who is haunted by demonic spiders in an adaptation of a book by occult writer Dennis Wheatley.
The first of the Hellraiser sequels. This lacks Clive Barker’s original dark obsessive vision but is worthwhile in its own right, expanding the scope of the story out into a magnificent vision of Hell
James Franco co-directs and stars as a sinister psychiatrist in a 19th Century asylum who subjects patients to drugs and mind control so they can play in elaborate orgies. Supposedly based on a true-life incident
This was the second film adaptation of conceptually ingenious Ursula Le Guin novel about a man whose dreams change reality around him whenever he wakes up
Another low-budget H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, this abandons all but the bare bones of the story to create a work about abominable experiments lurking in the halls of an abandoned asylum
A standout adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether where a visitor to an asylum discovers the patients are masquerading as the doctors
The mermaid film used to be the stuff of light fantasy but in recent years has become something much darker. This comes with the promising premise of a mermaid having her tail hacked off with an axe then being placed in an asylum where she tries to convince the other patients of who she is
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
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of the 1947 film noir tale about a fake clairvoyant is an exquisite piece of mood and design
An Irish film that develops an incredibly uncanny atmosphere as a blind clairvoyant turns up at the home where her sister was murder and deduces the truth about what happened
Fine Australian from Richard Franklin that jumps aboard the popularity of Carrie concerning a coma patient who demonstrates psychic powers
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
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
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
Another of David De Coteau’s cheap homoerotic horror films. This has almost no connection to Edgar Allan Poe’s story about a man tied up beneath a descending pendulum and is instead an absurd psycho-sexual film about a series of hypnotism murders in a big mansion
Brian De Palma made a return to his trademark psycho-thriller for the first time in several years but the benchmarks of the genre were now The Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct and De Palma’s wildly contorted plot and flourishes of style for their own sake seem dated
Almost forgotten Disney-made sequel to The Wizard of Oz, this takes a far darker outlook than the version you knew
Early Vincent Price film with he as a sinister psychiatrist terrorising a woman who witnessed him murdering his wife
Martin Scorsese and an impressive A-list cast make a 1940s-styled psycho-thriller about a sinister asylum that soon starts into a series of major reality bending turns
Disappointing remake of Brian De Palma’s 1973 Siamese twins psycho-thriller that changes many elements and crucially lacks De Palma’s stylistic showmanship
Not to be confused with the Stephen King story collection, this is about a film crew shooting a film in an abandoned asylum about murders conducted there who discover a trove of snuff movies whereupon the director becomes obsessed with recreating them
An obscure item among the fad for Edgar Allan Poe films during the 1960s, this threadbare production features Poe himself investigating sinister happenings at an asylum
Modestly effective film in which teens in a small town go berserk and begin killing people as a result of experiments being conducted at the university psychology department
The film adaptation of the popular videogame where a group enter a lodge and become caught in a timeloop where they face horrors and are killed and then resurrected to face them again