Mopping Up.

Just for my own amusement, some pointless statistical breakdown of my recently completed count-down…

COUNTRIES -

USA – 14
Britain - 5
France – 2
Italy – 1
Japan – 1
Germany/Poland - 1
Czechoslovakia - 1

Hmm… poor showing for Italy. Dunno how that happened.

MONSTERS -

Satan / Cults / Witches - 8
Zombies and other undead nastiness – 8
Mad Scientists - 4
Inexplicable Cosmic Terror of Some Kind - 4
Miscellaneous Psychos & Degenerates – 3
Vampires – 2
Frankensteinage - 2

What, no werewolves? I thought I really liked werewolf movies. Guess I don’t like any of them *that* much. Truth hurts.

STARS -

Christopher Lee – 2
Boris Karloff – 2
Denis Gilmore – 2
Everybody else – 1 each

Denis Gilmore is that ugly lookin’ kid with red hair who appeared in “Psychomania”, “Blood on Satan’s Claw” AND Corman’s “Tomb of Ligea”, so I thought I’d give him a shout-out. I hope he bought his agent something real nice to say thanks.

Funnily enough, Christopher Lee is probably my least favourite of all the big name horror stars, but… he sure made a shitload of movies, and in the two I’ve featured here he was indeed very good.

STUDIOS –

American International Pictures – 3 (4 if you count “Black Sunday”, 5 if you count “The Devil Rides Out”s US release as “Devil’s Bride”)
Hammer – 2
Universal - 2
Others – 1 each

Only four films on the list actually emerged from major Hollywood studio, and two of those were from the ‘30s. Result!

DECADES –

1970s - 10
1960s - 7
1980s - 4
1930s – 2
1950s – 1
2000s - 1

GENDER OF DIRECTORS -

Male – 25
Female – 0

Oh dear. Some stuff about the film industry in the 20th century really sucked, didn’t it?

ROCK N’ ROLL QUOTIENT -

ROCK N ROLL!!! – 1
Explicit rock n’ roll – 4
Implied rock n’ roll – 9
No rock n’ roll - 11

#1 Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)

“They’re dead, they’re… all messed up..”

When I initially scribbled out a top 20 horror films list, I put “Night of the Living Dead” in the top spot without even thinking about it – an instinctive reaction that I’ve just gotta go with.

I wish I could surprise everybody with a passionate essay explaining why “The Navy vs. The Night Monsters” or “The Howling III: The Marsupials” is the greatest horror movie ever made, but I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen. At least not today.

Obviously there are many, many different ways of reading “Night of the Living Dead”. In fact I have a little book sitting right here on the shelf, published by no less an institution than the BFI, which is entirely concerned with setting out the film’s production history, cultural context, historical importance, critical interpretation and yadda yadda yadda. So I could always have a quick flick through and crib some stuff from there, but frankly I can’t be bothered. Right now I’m not really interested in trying to weigh in to the voluminous discourse concerning the film’s racial, political, social, psychological significance. I tend to feel the role of social commentary in Romero’s work is overplayed and overanalysed anyways, often to the detriment of the films’ more immediate virtues as cracking pieces of cinema, so let’s just say that like any truly great text, whatever you’re looking for in “Night..”, you’ll probably find it. Any message you can manage to pull out of the thing is both entirely deliberate and entirely accidental. It’s clear to me that Romero and his gang were channelling contemporary issues and anxieties on an almost unconscious kinda level, so let’s leave the arguments of what is there and what isn’t for another day and move on.

Because frankly, better questions might be how and why “Night of the Living Dead” has managed to attract this level of attention in the first place, and why it continues to fascinate and obsess us nearly fifty years after it crawled out of Pittsburgh. On a personal level, I can only say that NOTLD is one of the small handful of films that I can happily watch again and again and again. Every moment of it is engrained on my mind; watching it is a comforting ritual, a sort of weird catharsis - the cinematic equivalent of sitting in the dark listening to a doom metal album on headphones, or whatever. I can lose myself endlessly in the grainy, toneless black & white, the caverns of weird, echoed library music, the familiar, hopeless brutality, but most of all the creeping sense of entropic doom that obscures all else. (I love the way that film itself moves forward with the same grinding, foreboding pace of the zombies themselves.) It is ‘horror movie’. The effect it has on my lizard brain is as pleasing and inexplicable as that of ‘comic book’ or ‘rock n’ roll’.

Perhaps just due to over-familiarly, every aspect of NOTLD – every facial expression, line of dialogue, weird, blaring noise – seems perfect to me, from the bullet holes on the cemetery sign in the credits sequence (signs of sporadic human/zombie conflict already in progress, or just a happy accident when the crew turned up to shoot the scene?), to the chilling still photos that end the film. Honestly, it’s like some kind of holy scripture – I know that objectively speaking the film is far from flawless, but the idea that even the smallest element of it could be changed seems absurdly offensive to me (I’ll spare you the tale of how I accidentally bought a DVD of the retouched/rescored John Russo version of the film a few years back and was consumed by an unprecedented fit of nerd-rage).

From the disgusted/condescending newspaper critics who marked the film’s initial release through to bold sacred cow killers of the present day, many have railed against NOTLD’s ubiquitous popularity over the years, complaining that the production is amateurish, the acting dreadful, that Romero’s compositions are sluggish and uninspired, and so on. (For a thorough critical beat-down, see the 1968 Variety review, quoted here.) All I can say is, the film’s ‘amateurism’ is very much in the eye of the beholder. I can understand the criticisms, but personally I’ve always seem NOTLD is a truly exceptional piece of filmmaking. Those who predicate quality on the basis of lavish production values and nuanced, brow-furrowing performances may indeed choke on the film’s rough edges and chaotic mise en scene, but to me that choking is precisely the point.

“Night of the Living Dead” is weird, visceral, assaultive and unrelenting – it is punk filmmaking that wears its shoestring, regional production values with pride rather than trying to hide them. As such, it speaks to me far more powerfully than any of rather airless new-Hollywood ‘landmarks’ that followed in the subsequent decade. Along with many other people I suspect, NOTLD really hit me upside the head when I first saw it. More than anything else, it is responsible for helping me define the kind of cinema I really love, for opening the floodgates to a whole new world of incredible stories and images, completely disconnected from the stifling push and pull between arthouse pretention and blockbuster banality.

Getting a bit more abstract, I definitely see NOTLD representing as a kind of defining UR-text for the whole horror genre. Every history of the genre recognises the film as a singular line in the sand, usually either beginning or ending their study with its release - love it or hate it, “Night..”s status as a game-changing event is difficult to deny. More than simply marking ‘the birth of the modern horror film’ though (as suggested by Kim Newman’s great “Midnight Movies” amongst others), NOTLD’s transformative influence can be seen to extend further in both directions: an accidental crossroads of mighty pop cultural power, forever connecting the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ (or maybe the ‘dead’ to the ‘living’ if you want to get completely preposterous about it).

Feeding into “Night of the Living Dead”, we have: the theremin-haunted sci-fi monster movies of the ‘50s, the funereal/gothic tropes and dutch angles of ‘classic’ horror, the shock tactics of HG Lewis, a cynical up-ending of the Howard Hawks small-cast survival drama, and a mammoth dose of the wider ‘cinema of anxiety’ that built slowly through the ‘60s in the form of “Psycho”, “The Birds”, “Repulsion” and so on.

Feeding out from “Night of the Living Dead”, we have: the birth of the ‘midnight movie’ circuit, the industry’s realisation of a potential market for graphic violence and doom-laden pessimism, and a shot in the arm for regional/independent producers everywhere. We have “Last House on the Left”, “I Drink Your Blood” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.“Eraserhead”, David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara. Increasingly graphic violence in the ‘70s works of Bava, Argento, Fulci et al. “Cannibal Holocaust” and that whole scene. “Zombi II / Zombie Flesh Eaters”, “Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue”, and every other zombie movie in existence. “The Hills Have Eyes”, “Assault on Precinct 13” and Romero’s own “The Crazies” helping cement the whole formula for ‘survival horror’ narratives. Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, “Reanimator”, and, well – you get the point.

To take a line from the kind of voodoo hokum that Romero & Russo’s new conception of the zombie forever relegated to horror movie history – whether you’re moving forward or looking backward, you’ve got to pay your respects at the crossroads.

To bookend a whirl through the horror genre with quotations from “Night of the Living Dead” has become just as much of a cornball gesture as the sight of shambling ghouls on the horizon, so….. I won’t if it’s ok by you.

Thanks for reading, and sorry that my big December project has lasted most of the way through January – normal (eg, sporadic and random) service to be resumed shortly!

#2 Blood On Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971)

“Hail Behemoth, spirit of the dark, take thou my blood, my flesh, my skin and walk; Holy Behemoth, father of my life, speak now, come now, rise now from the forest, from the furrows, from the fields and live…”

Another one of those films whose reputation has slowly grown over the years, recent writings that mention “Blood on Satan’s Claw” (not to mention that recent BBC doc, which gave the film an applaudable amount of screentime) have tended to see the movie as the third side of a triangle of early ‘70s British ‘folk horror’ classics, alongside “The Wicker Man” and Michael Reeves’ “Witchfinder General”.

Whilst it is nice to see “..Satan’s Claw” getting some recognition, I would actually go further and declare it a greater achievement than either of those excellent films. Indeed, my enthusiasm for the movie grows with each viewing, to the extent that it currently gets my vote not only as the best British horror movie ever made, but as the kind of film against which every other horror movie should be judged. Bold claims there I realise, and in truth, each time I return to “..Satan’s Claw” I expect to be disappointed, thinking it can’t possibly live up to the expectations I’ve built around it, but each time my admiration just grows.

As with many of the more eccentric choices on this list, my love of the film probably stems more from the extent to which it appeals to *me*, than from any kind of objective ‘better-ness’, but still, when I watch “..Satan’s Claw”, I can’t help but think that whatever qualities one might be looking for from a horror film, this one ticks the boxes. It is intelligent, well directed, well written and beautifully shot. It is also violent, shocking, erotic and disturbing. It has a haunting atmosphere of heavy cultural/historical resonance, an amazing, unconventional score and a great, memorable cast. It is full of awesome occult imagery and ritualistic/psychedelic freakout potential, but also features engaging and unusual character relationships and plumbs uncomfortable psychological depths. For the less high-minded amongst us, it also features gratuitous naked witches and Patrick Wymark battling the devil with a gigantic claymore. I don’t know about you, but that just about makes a 100% hit rate for me.

Beyond the rather tenuous ‘folk horror’ tag, what Piers Haggard’s film really shares with “Wicker Man” and “Witchfinder..” is a certain seriousness of intent that immediately sets the three films apart from their contemporaries. As much as I love British horror from the ‘50s and ‘60s, it is probably accurate to say that the majority of writers and directors working in the field saw themselves at best as craftsmen delivering solid genre pictures, or at worst considered themselves to be ‘slumming’ in the widely derided horror/exploitation field. Reeves, Hardy and Haggard though were all younger men who, perhaps influenced by the increasing public interest in weird/occult shenanigans sparked off by the ‘60s counter-culture, did the unthinkable and took the subject matter of their horror films seriously, setting out to consciously avoid the gothic cliché and nod/wink good humour of Hammer et al, and investing their respective films with all the thought and earnestness and attention to detail more usually expected of an auteur-led arthouse film.

For all that though, two of those three directors still essentially emerged with a different kind of film, using the foundations of the British horror film industry to turn in a nihilistic historical drama and a strange metaphysical mystery film respectively, leaving Haggard the only contender to really turn his talents to the creation of some straight up supernatural horror.

And indeed, boiled down to a quick plot synopsis, “Blood on Satan’s Claw” is as conservative as “The Devil Rides Out” and as lurid as “Lust for a Vampire”, presenting sex and youthful rebellion as direct manifestations of Satanic evil, threatening a benevolent social status quo that can only be maintained through the intervention of a violently puritanical adult authority figure. There are several elements though that help make “..Satan’s Claw” a far more interesting and subversive work than such a summary would suggest.

Firstly, we have the gleeful pleasure Haggard takes in relentlessly pushing the envelope as regards the connections between sex and violence, and the conflicting reactions that can be generated in the target audience when said connection are taken beyond the realms of the comfortable. The film’s rape scene is of course pretty infamous, and the ghastly fate allotted poor old Wendy Padbury (familiar to 1971 UK viewers from TV soap ‘Crossroads’ and her role in the Patrick Troughton era Dr. Who) is strong medicine indeed for the relatively polite world of British film. The casting of such a recognisable actress, notable for her homely, helpless innocence, is a viciously unsettling decision by the filmmakers, and hard not to read on some level as a kind of cultural attack.

And this attack continues throughout, as the film delights in mixing eroticism with psychosis, never missing an opportunity to fuck with the hetero-male expectations of a ‘sexy horror film’. Perhaps the most astounding moment of such for me is the scene in which the rather furtive village doctor takes it upon himself to ‘cleanse’ Margaret, the captured member of Angel Blake’s cult, by surgically removing the ‘taint of Satan’ from her. Nobody much seems to talk about this scene, but I remember watching in absolute disbelief the sight of two stony-faced middle-aged men holding down a hysterical teenage girl, as the doctor tries to save her immortal soul by taking a straight razor and cutting away a suggestively shaped patch of thick, tumour-like hair and skin from her thigh. Such sickeningly imaginative imagery, carrying such a gruesome and obvious subtext, it seems to cut straight to the heart of the way a repressive religious upbringing can spark truly twisted horrors, making it’s point with a visceral power that would never have been seen in a ‘real world’ story dealing with such issues.

Secondly, and on a slightly more esoteric note, one of the keys to the film’s success I think is its portrayal of the ‘evil’ that overtakes the village’s children not as some simple demonic invasion of a god-fearing community, but rather as a completely natural, atavistic process. In “Blood on Satan’s Claw”, the land itself is evil – whether the mysterious bones lying in wait in a freshly ploughed field, or the verdant promiscuousness of the flowers in the meadows. Christianity is imposed upon this pagan landscape, not vice versa, and it can only be maintained through violence, self-denial and continual vigilance.

The demon, or devil, or whatever it is, literally rises out of the earth beneath the feet of the young people, using their natural energy and rebellious nature (not to mention their skin and hair) to pull itself back into the world and take on new form. On one level, this is a brilliant reflection of the way the fevered imaginings of the actual 17th century witchhunters served to create an incorporeal ‘evil’ in the public mind that proved just as destructive as any cloven hoofed ne’erdowell… but on another level, it can simply be read as the most bloodcurdling metaphor for the perils of puberty ever devised.

Beyond all this though, what you’ll remember about “Blood on Satan’s Claw” are the individual moments and oddly persuasive details that live on in the memory after viewing…

• The indescribable look on Tamara Ustinov’s character’s face when they drag her down from the attic – actually sends a shiver down my spine.

• The attention given to the landscape throughout, and the amazing cinematography of (no sniggering at the back please) Dick Bush - the way the dead, disembodied eye rising from the soil looks no less natural than the foreboding shots of ravens and branches that begin the film.

• The handful strange, older people who appear out of nowhere join the demonic children in their rituals, with no explanation asked or received… they seem to emerge from the woods as some kind of ‘outcasts’ from the regular, Christian community, happy to see the ‘old ways’ revived… a strange and chilling touch.

• Patrick Wymark as the Judge! I love the horror movie stand-by of the learned gentleman who initially scoffs at any suggestion of the supernatural… then sees something that changes his mind and immediately becomes deathly serious and starts busting out the grimoires and holy artefacts. (Also see Peter Cushing in “Dracula”, Andre Morell in “Plague of the Zombies”, etc.) You know that that guy means business, and indeed, Wymark’s Judge can be seen as the horror genre’s pre-eminent exponent of NOT FUCKING AROUND.

• Every single damn thing about Linda Hayden’s portrayal of Angel Blake, even the eye make-up – no explanation needed.

And, well, I could go on…

Appropriate to its theatrical title, “Blood on Satan’s Claw” is a rare kind of horror movie in the fact that all its horrors seem to rise unheeded from nature itself: red in tooth and claw.

#3 Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

“There is nothing to fear except God, whatever that means to you.”

There is nothing I can say that could prepare you for Zulawski’s “Possession”. It is to a conventional horror movie what straight scotch is to Bud Lite. The other twenty four films on this list, even in their more disturbing moments, are films I enjoy, films I would watch for comfort and good times. But nobody fucking enjoys an Andrzej Zulawski movie. Even at their most (ha) accessible, this man’s films seek to drag their viewers into a black pit of howling insanity and vicious, hysterical chaos. Characters in a Zulawski film tend to begin proceedings on the verge of complete mental and physical collapse, and quickly go downhill from there, as he coaxes performances from his cast that aren’t so much ‘over the top’ as ‘rampaging through the enemy lines in a fucking gold-plated digger’, if you will.

So when ‘Possession’ finds him presenting the world with a Lovecraft-via-Bataille tale of apocalyptic terror set in Cold War East Berlin…. well I hope you’ve got tranquilizers close at hand and have locked away the sharp objects. God knows, you’ll be wishing the people on the screen had soon enough.

I remember the first time I saw ‘Possession’ a few years back, as part of Leicester’s much missed Far-Out Films festival. I left the screening dazed, not quite believing what I’d just seen, and wandered the streets for hours, eventually realising I should probably go home after I nearly walked in front of a bus. I’m not the kind of person who normally does stuff like that after watching a film, but this was something else.

It’s difficult to write much about “Possession”s plotline without ruining the surprises that await the first time viewer, but let’s just say that one of the things that makes it so effective is that for the first hour or so, there is nothing to clue you in to the fact you are watching a horror film. Instead, it seems like a film that’s just plain horrific – Zulawski showing us Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani’s volatile relationship going south in the most traumatic manner imaginable, with both partners collapsing into a state of violent, neurotic hysteria as their young child looks on and the audience yells PLEASE, WILL SOMEONE CALL SOCIAL SERVICES, FOR CHRISSAKE?

And so, in the second hour, when we first start to catch on to the fact that supernatural elements may be involved in this story, the effect is not much the relief that might come from finding oneself back in the realm of a comfortable, familiar genre film, but more a sense of genuine, pit-of-yr-stomach sickening dread. Kind of like: jesus fucking christ, things were bad enough already, this is the last thing we needed…

Several times in this Top 25 rundown, I’ve discussed the notion of the ‘beyond-the-ken-of-mortal-man’ cosmic horror communicated by H.P. Lovecraft’s best stories being inherently ‘unfilmable’, and indeed, however varied and enjoyable the majority of the films based on the man’s work have been, there has yet to be one that really proves otherwise. ‘Possession’ though, despite rising from a time and place and artistic background completely removed from Lovecraft’s influence, is the only film I’ve seen that not only grasps HPL’s pinnacle of unnameable dread with both hands, but actually surpasses it, amping it up to meet the violence, instability and excess of late 20th century culture and throwing the results straight in our faces, leaving a film that feels like some beserk art/exploitation movie Necronomicon - not an unraped mind left in the house.

And he could have left things there. He could have brought this thing in at, say, 100 minutes, and still left us feeling like we’d been through hell. But Zulawski being Zulawski, he just has NO IDEA when to quit. Machine guns are fired, cars crash and terrifying global conspiracies are implied. The freezing, mazelike derelict apartments of Berlin loom and twist and burn. There is weird, oozing viscera, all over the place. There is an electric carving knife. The closest thing the movie has to a ‘hero’ beats a man’s head against a brick wall and drowns him in a filthy toilet bowl. People scream and stare and contort, and change. A five year old child runs upstairs and drowns himself in the bath in sheer terror. Bombers fly ominously overhead.

For anyone who believes the sole purpose of horror is to horrify and unsettle the viewer to the greatest possible extent, “Possession” is perhaps the most successful horror film ever made.

Here’s how they tried to sell it to people;

#4 Psychomania (Don Sharp, 1972)

“The word, mother, is FUZZ..”

‘Psychomania’ first entered my life, as it entered the lives of many people in this country I suspect, through a late night TV screening. Back in the glory days when they used to fill early morning airtime with old horror movies, the BBC used to pull this one out of the hat on a surprisingly regular basis.

For a while a few years back, I remember that I had a VCR on which the ‘record’ function had broken or something, and my brother used to occasionally video stuff I might like off the TV for me. One day he called me up, and said something to the effect of hey, there’s this thing on tonight called ‘Psychomania’ – British movie, 1972, about a gang of bikers who get turned into zombies or something - sounds like your sort of thing, d’you want me to record it for you? Yeah, sounds great, I said, and thought no more about it.

The next day, my brother, not usually a big horror movie enthusiast, called me again. “I’m watching that movie, ‘Psychomania’, right now,” he said “and it’s… extraordinary – seriously, you’ve got see this.” He described it to me as being completely unlike a conventional horror movie, and more like some offbeat comedy/drama in which incredibly bizarre supernatural things keep happening. In retrospect, and with more understanding of the aesthetic landscape of low budget British movies in the early ‘70s, I’m not sure if that’s really an accurate description, but I definitely see where he was coming from. Although the film’s imagery and plot-line, and its sinister opening sequence, immediately mark it out as horror, there is something that from the outset is different about ‘Psychomania’ - something utterly unique and sublimely weird.

For one thing, all of the violence in the film (and it ends up with a pretty high body count) either takes place off screen, or is played for laughs. None of the usual tension and titillation of a violent horror film is even attempted. In fact, there is something almost quaint about the film: along with the lack of explicit bloodshed, absolutely no reference is made to sex or drug use, and there isn’t even any bad language (unless you count the petrol station attendant’s immortal cry of “I’ll teach you a lesson, you long ‘aired git”). For a movie that is ostensibly about anarchic undead bikers unleashing a whirlwind of havoc upon the British countryside, ‘Psychomania’s wholesome and genuinely quite humane approach to the material is as mystifying as it is delightful. Quite why the film was initially released in Britain with an ‘X’ certificate is beyond me – I can only assume it was either self-imposed in an attempt to corner the horror market, or that the BBFC took umbrage with the generally mind-bending tone of proceedings, the comedic suicide montage, or the shocking portrayal middle-class miscreants on two stroke motorbikes knocking workmen off ladders and upsetting trays of buns as they blaze a trail of righteous destruction through the new-build shopping precincts of the home counties.

Attempts at evoking a ‘gothic horror’ atmosphere, or indeed the atmosphere of a biker film, are sporadic at best, but the aesthetic identity that takes their place – that of an otherworldly, almost naive early ‘70s Englishness, is so potent that it practically glows, with an otherworld palette of pale greens and browns. ‘Psychomania’ is, quite simply, one of the most wonderfully strange films I’ve ever seen, and furthermore, one whose cultural concerns mesh with my own so perfectly, it was always going to be love at first sight.

When I saw the opening titles, in which the skull-helmeted Living Dead motorcycle gang ride in slow motion about a green-lit, fog shrouded stone circle as John Cameron’s incredible psyche-fuzz theme plays, I knew this was gonna be good.

When said bikers were revealed to be an unlikely alliance of weedy, plum-voiced English youth with names like Gash, Hinky, Hatchet and Bertram (Bertram?!?) sewn onto the back of their jackets, headed by human dynamo Nicky Henson, doing his best impression of Malcolm McDowell in “If..” in the role of aristocratic gang leader Tom Latham, I knew this was gonna be BRILLIANT.

When Tom winds down by taking his sweetly innocent girlfriend Abby toad-hunting in the local the cemetery and tells her “it’s not me that scares you baby, it’s the world”, before he returns to his gothic/modernist family home and waltzes around the hideously decorated living room with his psychic mother (Beryl Reid!), telling her “you know why the fuzz called, mother? We blew a fellow’s mind tonight; it was beautiful – he went straight through the windscreen”, my jaw had just about hit the floor.

By the time Tom had cornered the family retainer Shadwell (George Sanders) and demanded to know, “..why did my father die in that locked room? Why do you never get any older, Shadwell? And what is the secret of the living dead?” (the last question masterfully delivered just as he takes a bite out of a gigantic sandwich), I was fully converted.

And by the time Tom had entered aforementioned locked room for an astounding psychedelic trip sequence featuring shrieking feedback, menacing toad-god visitations and flashbacks of his parents selling their baby son’s soul to the devil…. well let’s just say I was busy cancelling upcoming appointments in my diary and preparing to dedicate the rest of my natural life to the intensive study and appreciation of this thing known as ‘Psychomania’.

Subsequently, ‘Psychomania’ continues much as it has begun - with a parade of demented highlights that almost never lets up. I could spend thousands of words listing them up for you, but probably best if you just watch the movie. Practically every scene is seared onto my brain indelibly, making me grin and cackle as I walk down the street, over five years and over a dozen viewings later. Still though, I guess there might be those of you reading who are unfamiliar with the film, so… it’s just something that’s got to be done I suppose (deep breath):

After his locked room freakout, Tom commits suicide by driving full speed off a motorway bridge. The grieving gang hold a burial for him amid the standing stones, interring him upright on his bike! Gang member Chopped Meat sits at the graveside with a guitar, and lip-syncs to the timeless ballad ‘Riding Free’ (“he really got it on / he rode that sweet machine just like a bomb..”). Later that day, a man who looks a bit like Mr. Bean takes a shortcut through the standing stones when his car breaks down, and is startled to hear the sound a revving engine emanating from beneath him. He tries to run, but is cruelly mown down by a resurrected Tom, as he explodes out of the earth like a weird biker movie phoenix! After enjoying some “carnage at the pub” (as one of the track titles on the Trunk Records soundtrack CD puts it), Tom returns to the gang and informs them that he has indeed discovered “the secret of the living dead”. Apparently, all you need to do to achieve immortality and superhuman strength is to kill yourself, whilst believing that you will come back. Simple as that! Quoth Living Dead second in command and red leather-clad femme fatale Jane Pettibone; “oh man, what are we waiting for..?”

Cue cinema’s greatest ever comedic suicide montage, some extremely perturbed Morris Minor-driving policemen, and a rampage of bloodless undead biker anarchy that leaves the whole of Walton-on-Thames cowering in terror!

Deepening the glorious mystery that is ‘Psychomania’ are the rather vague circumstances by which the film came into being. Reading the plot synopsis above, you might reasonably expect it to be the work of one maniac auteur, but no, ‘Psychomania’ seems to be a film that forced its way into existence simply through… I dunno, osmosis or something – an accidental masterpiece that no one seems to want to raise their hand and take credit for;

Independent producer Andrew Donally allegedly picked it for production simply because it was the only one of a pile of potential projects that his financiers jumped at. Don Sharp was hired as director simply because he was seen as steady hand with a knack for filming good action scenes. Sharp is still alive, but to my knowledge he has never seen fit to comment on the film (if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know). And, despite their enthusiastic performances, most of the surviving cast now seem either baffled or deeply embarrassed by the film’s cult following.

If authorship of the film can be placed anywhere, it is probably with blacklisted American screenwriters Arnaud d'Usseau and Julian Halevy, who made a brief but highly successful comeback in the realm of early ‘70s Euro-horror, penning both ‘Psychomania’ and the similarly inventive/joyous ‘Horror Express’. Clearly those guys had some pretty singular mojo going on, making me wish Hammer or somebody could have put them on the payroll, but even so – chances are d’Usseau and Halevy didn’t consider themselves to be going much more than cramming together currently sale-able plot elements, hoping to make a quick buck.

Trying to determine quite where the incredibly strange totality of ‘Psychomania’ came from is likely to remain a thankless task. Probably best just see it instead as a confounding, life-affirming oddity that arose fully formed from the freaked out mire of its particular post-‘60s, pre-‘70s cultural moment – the perfect cult film, revved up and ready to go. It’s not ‘Psychomania’ that scares you, baby - it’s the world.

#05 Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi, 2000)

“ALCOHOL MIXED THROUGH MY BLOOD / BABY IS THE ONLY ONE I SEE! / GOT AWALLET ON MY ASS WITH A ROCK N’ ROLL LICENCE / THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE I’LL EVER DIE!”, sing Guitar Wolf in a deafening concert sequence midway through the endlessly amazing exemplum of punk rock filmmaking that is ‘Wild Zero’. “LIKE ROARING BLOOD, LIKE ROARING BLOOD, EXPLODING BLOOD, LIKE ROARING BLOOD!”, they continue. What can the likes of you and I do, but look on in awe?

You may find it difficult to accept that a shot on video Japanese comedy-gore movie could really hold the power to change people’s lives for the better, but then you presumably weren’t there to see me in 2002, holding my newly-acquired VHS of the movie before me like a holy relic, recent witness to an experience less like a motion picture, more like some deranged dream I might have had after falling asleep drunk listening to Iggy & The Stooges on my headphones.

When you read some posting on the circa-2002 internet about some crazy new movie in which Guitar Wolf fight alien-zombies, it is easy then as now to declare “wow, that sounds amazing – I’m gonna watch that”, knowing that you are setting yourself up for a certain degree of disappointment. So god bless director Tetsuro Takeuchi for delivering not only the anticipated tornado of crazy trash-horror tomfoolery, but something that surpasses even our wildest expectations – a potent and elegiac coming of age tale that exultantly proclaims the gospel of rock n’ roll (sorry, ROCK N’ ROLL!!!), leaving agnostic viewers in little doubt as to its status as the benevolent guiding force of the universe.

Ok, so maybe that last bit was just me projecting a little, the result of too many student days spent drinking too much coffee and listening to too much thundering amphetamine madness, but whatever – fact is, I’ve not been quite the same since.

How could I not take to heart the tale of Ace (Masashi Endô), feckless avatar of all nervous teenage rock n’ roll fanatics, who inadvertently helps to save his favourite band Guitar Wolf during a tense backstage shootout and finds himself initiated into their blood brotherhood by way of thanks, as the band present him with a magic whistle that he may use to summon these nigh-on supernatural rock n’ roll warriors to assist him in his hour of need?

How could I not feel for our hero, as the strange sensations brought on by both a new love and the UFO-birthed flesheating zombies who now roam the Japanese countryside drive him first to euphoria, and then to the point of existential despair, as he finds himself alone and surrounded by the undead, his noble fantasies of romantic intimacy with his new beau Tobio thwarted by unforeseen gender confusion and his own cowardice and self-loathing made cruelly clear?

“THERE IS NO GOD HERE!!” screams Endô at one point, giving the performance of a lifetime as he curses the empty heavens. Ace has all but given up on life, is ready to surrender to the pressures closing in around him, when suddenly, Guitar Wolf himself appears, glorious as an apparition of the Virgin Mary, to point him toward the light: “ACE! - LOVE KNOWS NO BORDERS, NATIONALITIES OR GENDERS! - DO IT!!!” (Never has the maligned art of the multiple punctuation mark been so righteously and unrepentantly employed as by the English sub-titlers of ‘Wild Zero’.)

And DO IT Ace does, crow-bar in hand, rescuing himself and his love from the very brink of oblivion, achieving a state of blood-drenched cosmic transcendence, as Guitar Wolf sets out on his flame-spewing motorcycle, guitar upon his back, beer in his hand, to get this zombie/UFO shit sorted out once and for all. (Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf follow at a respectable distance, in a small car.)

Bullets rain, gore flies, zombies howl, bikes roar, shit blows up, beer is chugged, flying saucers blacken the skies and a selection of odd and engaging secondary characters get busy, as The Oblivians, Bikini Kill and The Zeros blare across the soundtrack, mixed so loudly it makes the speakers on my cheap-ass TV go kaput every time.

Action-packed, hilarious, inept, beautiful and demented, full of love and flames and blood and deafening, holy feedback, “Wild Zero” represents everything that is great about punk rock and everything that is great about trash cinema, combined for all eternity. Hallelujah! ROCK N ROLL!!!

#06 Spider Baby (Jack Hill, 1964)

Jack Hill’s “Spider Baby” was one of the first films I ever wrote about for this weblog, back in the halcyon days of May 2009. You can read what I had to say here if you like, although my formative stab at long-form film-writing probably leaves something to be desired.

In particular, I’d like to take back the bit about the straight/normal characters lessening the film’s impact when they turn up halfway through. On the contrary, looking back now, I think they’re all pretty brilliant – some great comic acting and memorable turns from all concerned. Obviously they’re somewhat overshadowed by Lon and Jill and Sid, but who wouldn’t be?

What an amazing movie, though. It’s like the weirdo-horror “It’s A Wonderful Life”. Makes me cry every time, seriously.

#07 Le Frisson des Vampires (Jean Rollin, 1971)

“I remember at this hour, at nine, they used to go out. They sent their dog to me, and he took me along. The dog’s name was Anubis. They went hunting, hunting all night, as wolves do. How happy they were. Sometimes I could escape, and went hunting with them. You couldn’t understand. They went after some monstrous prey, with pikes. They wore holy relics, talismans and crucifixes. They resembled the knights of the crusades. When they returned, they were covered with blood, drunk with carnage! But one day, they came back with wounds on their throats, wounds that looked like bites. Out of which their blood was flowing… flowing…”


Variously translated as “Thrill of the Vampire”, “Shiver of the Vampires”, “Sex and the Vampire” (I like that one – it’s got a nice academic ring to it), or retitled with undeniable accuracy as “Strange Things Happen at Night”, “Le Frisson..” by any name is my favourite Jean Rollin movie.

More than that though, it is a huge landmark in my own personal film-watching mythology, a central text in the investigation of precisely what it is I love about ‘60s/’70s European horror movies. It is one of those rare movies that I could happily watch all the time. If my well-worn Redemption tape of the film got terminally stuck in the VCR, well…I guess it would be a shame I wouldn’t be able to check out some of those videos I haven’t watched yet, but basically I would be completely fine with the situation.

More than any other film I can think of, “Le Frisson..” is a litmus test for my own particular branch of cult/euro-horror fandom. If someone were to ask me, “so Ben, all these fucking sleazy-looking old vampire movies you keep watching all the time - what’s the deal?”, a viewing of “Le Frisson..” would be my answer. If they ‘get it’, well, great, they’re in the club. If not, well not to worry, I’m sure I’ve got some ‘normal people’ movies round here somewhere…

It should be noted at this point that “Le Frisson..” is at least a lot more easy-going and conventionally enjoyable than much of the rest of Rollin’s filmography. It’s funny, it’s goofy, it’s fast-moving and it’s full of lively characters. It is also one of the only Rollin films to include a ‘regular joe’ protagonist in the form of Jean-Marie Durand’s Antione, whose bafflement and rage at finding himself stuck in the middle of Jean Rollin-land proves a great source of hilarity throughout. It even has some semblance of a linear storyline.

Well, kinda. I mean, it’s that old story: Antione and his fiancée Isa are speeding across Europe in their swanky motor-car en-route to their wedding when they decide to take a detour to visit Isa’s mysterious ‘cousins’, her only surviving relatives, who live in a dilapidated hilltop chateau. Arriving, the couple are greeted by a pair of nubile servants in diaphanous gowns, who inform them that said cousins have both recently died, but insist they stay anyway to, I dunno, rest after their long journey or something – it’s a bit vague. Anyway, at midnight, a lady called Isolde emerges from the grandfather clock in Isa’s room and initiates her into the ways of vampirism. The next day, Isa’s cousins return in the form of two outrageously camp intellectual dandies and proclaim themselves to be very much alive. Antione swiftly tires of these salty characters and their brain-aching tirade of hippie-occultist babble, and his mood is scarcely improved after he is attacked by a sentient library. That night, our cast march in procession to the eerie, red-lit cemetery where strange and sexy vampiric rites are performed. French psyche/prog band Acanthus rock the fuck out on the soundtrack, as they continue to do to varying degrees through the film’s entire duration. At some point, another lady called Isabelle turns up and, in one of the most beautifully lyrical passages of crazy dialogue ever written by Rollin for one of his films, regales us with evocative tales of her life as companion to the two cousins, whom she claims were daring vampire hunters prior to their untimely demise. Isolde kills Isobelle by means too extraordinary to discuss here, and the cousins subsequently attempt to wrest control of the vampire cult from Isolade, after she accuses them of being “mere peasant vampires”. More rituals in the cemetery follow, and Isa finds herself becoming frightened of daylight and chomps on the neck of a dead pigeon. The nubile servants lounge around naked in the castle’s ivy-covered ruins. Antione gets even more ratty and starts running around with a gun. Then everybody goes to the beach.

I don’t know who won the ‘best screenplay’ Oscar in 1971, but in a fairer world they would’ve done the decent thing and sent it airmail to M. Rollin’s Paris address pronto, that’s all I’m sayin’.

Fun and games aside though, what I love above all about “Le Frisson..” is the absolutely exquisite ritualistic atmosphere, the opiated haze of gothic/psychedelic/surrealist zero budget splendour laid on so thick, you could cut off chunks and eat it on toast.

I know that when I first started getting into ‘60s horror movies, it was this indefinable ‘ritualistic’ quality that drew me to them above all else. I could (and still can) sit through hours of tedious, set-bound time-wasting, just to rejoice in the fleeting sight of some subterranean occult gathering, or an establishing shot of a decrepit, fogbound castle, or some fuzzy footage of mysterious, red-robed figures marching through some distant woodland. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t have an answer, but I just love that shit.

As such, discovering the films of Jean Rollin, and this one in particular, was an absolute revelation – finally, a guy who seemed to be on the same wavelength as me, and who recognised the strange poetry of this mysterioso imagery, cramming as much of it into his films as he possibly could, caring not a damn for the conventional mechanics of plotting and logic and other such jive-ass baloney.

With its extreme red and blue lighting, its candlelit, nocturnal processions, its hypnotic graveyard blood rituals, theatrical vampirism and beautiful, diaphanous gowned maidens, its primitive stop motion special effects and wonky grandfather clock materialisations, all set to the churning pulse of wild psychedelic rock, flapping bat wings and weird, inhuman shrieks… watching “Le Frisson des Vampires” makes me so happy I can barely express it.

#08 Messiah of Evil (Willard Huyck, 1973)

About twenty minutes into Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’ much underappreciated weirdo horror masterpiece “Messiah of Evil”, we have a scene which finds our protagonist Arletty Lang knocking on the door of a room in a dilapidated beach-front motel. She is following up a tip off from a blind gallery owner (hang on – blind gallery owner?!?), who told her that some strangers in town have been asking questions about her missing father.

As in just about every scene in this movie, seagulls call in the distance, and the waves of the Pacific crash hypnotically on the soundtrack.

Receiving no answer to her knocking, Arletty pushes the door, which creaks slowly open, revealing the frightened face of Charlie (played by the wonderful character actor Elisha Cook Jr), who is seated inside.

---

CHARLIE: I’m as old as the hills… mama delivered me herself…. She took me from between her legs… bloody little mess, just about to feed me to the chickens, and Daddy said, ‘maybe we could use a boy, Lottie’, and that’s how I came into the world.

[Arletty’s gaze moves across to the bed, where Tom (tall, dandyish young man with long-ish hair and a white suit) and Laura (bored looking hippy chick) lie. Tom is pointing a microphone at Charlie.]

ARLETTY: Excuse me – they said at the gallery you were looking for Joseph Lang, I’m his daughter and…

TOM: Just come in and close the door.

ARLETTY: All I want to know is if…

TOM: Close the door.

[She closes the door.]

TOM: Go ahead Charlie.

CHARLIE: I can’t always remember back on things, but I remember the red moon my daddy told me about… he only told me once… mamma gave him a bad look when he talked about it… he was only a boy himself then… he called it the ‘blood moon’… he said that was the night when he lost religion…

[A toilet flushes and Toni (a teenage groupie type in a halter-top) emerges from the bathroom and begins applying suntan lotion.]

CHARLIE: He… he learned that men could do horrible things… like animals…

TONI: I’m really hungry - I’ve got the munchies.

TOM: Shut up! Go ahead Charlie. What about the moon?

CHARLIE: One hundred years ago, the moon started turning red up in the sky, and things began to happen. He said it was like… the redder of the moon got up there, the closer the people were being jerked, toward hell… people started bleedin’ out of control… they found children eating raw meat… it was like the town was festering with an open sore, until the night that they… until the night they came down out of the canyon…

TOM: Who came down, Charlie?

[Charlie stands up suddenly.]

CHARLIE: I gotta go!

TOM: Charlie…

[Charlie moves toward the door]

TOM: Take the wine Charlie.

CHARLIE: Thanks for your… kindly hospitality.

---

When I first watched ‘Messiah of Evil’ last year, having heard its praises sung by assorted writers and bloggers whose views I trust, I was pretty blown away. My first thought was that I should write about it for this site *straight away*, but… I just couldn’t. Like many of my favourite things, I found it very difficult to write about, even to think about what I would say. The strange appeal of the film, and the overwhelming effect in has on me, are impossible to put into words without resorting to cliché.

Like several films in this top ten, “Messiah of Evil” adopts a structure and atmosphere which I can only descibe as ‘Lovecraftian’, despite taking no direct inspiration from the works of Lovecraft. Or is there some conscious influence there I wonder? The idea of a stranger investigating family ties in an isolated seaport town whose populance have their own strange rituals and dark secrets is certainly reminiscent of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, and the character of Charlie is a dead ringer for that story’s Zadok Allen.

Pure conjecture of course, but the film’s convoluted story-telling structure, in which multiple voice-overs (Arletti’s sanitorium ravings in the prologue and epilogue, her sane description of events during the film, her father’s increasingly disturbing letters, and Charlie’s fragmentary narrative as quoted above) weave in and out of each other, perhaps also owes something to HPL’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” and his other ‘pieced together’ narratives. I know some people have criticised this reliance on voice-overs in “Messiah of Evil”, but as a Lovecraft freak, I love it, and appreciate the way that rather than simply providing tedious exposition, these assorted monologues continually offer dark hints, fragments of unguessable truths and the like, in the classic weird tale tradition.

In fact, whilst trying to figure out how to write a review of this film last year, I found myself instead sampling vast quantities of the movie’s audio. Assembling an ‘album’ of sorts from the resulting recordings, I was amazed at how well they functioned without the accompanying visuals – kind of like a really disturbing avant garde radio play or something. I was going to share that ‘album’ here, but sadly I lost the whole thing in a hard drive crash and haven’t had a chance to go through the laborious process of putting it all together again.

In my write-up of The Fog last month, I dropped some hints about the uncanny similarities I find between it and “Messiah..” – the isolated, inward-looking harbour community, the cliffs, the beach houses, weird small businesses and the disused lighthouse. The relentless crashing of the waves. Watching either film, you can almost feel the ocean breeze rolling in off the sea at night. The difference is though, “The Fog” is a straight-up, logical horror movie of the ‘80s (which is awesome, don’t get me wrong), whereas “Messiah..” is something far deeper, darker, stranger – a potent and disorientating cocktail of low budget ’70s USA grindhouse churn and ‘60s-hangover European counter-culture/arthouse decadence, contrasting aesthetics oozing over each other, rich with film school stylistic zaniness and brooding poverty row brutality.

All this of course is one one or two of the hundreds of things you could say abut Huyck & Katz film. If you were so inclined, you could say it was pretentious, slow moving, confusing… well so are a lot of my favourite movies, get used to it.

Horror at it’s best should invoke mysticism. It should defy explanation. As soon as a supposedly far-out story is streamlined to extent that X can be seen to represent Y, and Z stands for X and so on, all in a neat package, well... that’s cool, that’s one kind of story. But the stories that really stick with me are ones like these.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to knuckle down and say all the things that need to be said about “Messiah of Evil”, but for the moment hopefully I may have at least succeeded in sufficiently intriguing a passing reader or two to the extent that they give it a go.

The way that this film has apparently been mistreated in the VHS/bootleg/public domain wilderness over the years could fill an article in itself, but let’s just conclude by saying that Code:Red’s current DVD edition finally does it justice. If you’re not familiar with the film and you’ve put up with my blather thus far, well – you know what to do.

#09 Phantasm (Don Coscarelli, 1979)

I knew this would happen: as we get into the top ten, I’m increasingly confronted with films that I dearly love, but whose significance/appeal I’m loathe to try to put into words.

So I’ll go out on a limb here and assume that everyone who has seen Don Coscarelli’s “Phantasm” already knows what it is that makes it one of the best-loved independent American horror movies of all time. Here are merely a few of the things that I like about it.

I realise this is not exactly an original observation, but I love the way that, beyond its primary function as a wildly imaginative sci-fi/horror film, “Phantasm” is really a beautiful meditation on growing up, dealing with death and loss, and the emergence from childhood into life as an independent adult. Please don’t stop reading there though, there are psychotic alien dwarves and graveyard sex-murders too.

The first time I watched the film, I guess I didn’t quite pick up on this, being too taken aback by all the crazy ideas and images. But as I looked back on it, I began to realise that the moments that stuck in my head the most weren’t all the now-famous horror/weirdness set pieces, but, like, the bit where Jody and Reggie sit on their porch playing guitar, or the heart-breaking scene in which young Mike literally runs behind his big brother’s departing car, terrified that he won’t come back.

Coscarelli’s film portrays this strange, sad family of orphaned brothers with a matter-of-fact gentleness and believability that is rare in any kind of movie, and particularly in the kind of middle-brow indie/arthouse fare that strives to wear such virtues on its sleeve. We don’t need any heavy-handed back story or chest-beating ‘blood is thicker than water’ speeches to persuade us that these guys constitute a family who have been through some tough times together: they ARE a family. We see them care for each other, and we in turn care for them.

What is also great is the way that the film’s incredibly imaginative, bizarro-horror plotline actually plays directly into these aforementioned themes, without the film ever feeling the need to signpost the connections for us. In the name of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I owe parts of the following analysis to Stephen Thrower’s review of the film in his (essential, incredible, etc) book Nightmare USA - but once put into words, one realises how implicit a sub-conscious understanding of it is to any viewing of “Phantasm”.

So get this: it is Mike’s attachment to his dead loved ones, and the loss and loneliness he has experienced as a result of their passing (as represented by his obsessive investigation of the Tall Man’s funereal, death-fixated realm) that puts him in danger of being stuck in a perpetual childhood (literally crushed down to a miniature size slave and thrown through the inter-dimensional dwarf-portal). Only by escaping his morbid introspection (overcoming the Tall Man, rescuing his surviving brothers and destroying the mortuary) can he escape the shadow of death that hangs over his family, and emerge from the cocoon of protection that they are no longer able to give him, into adulthood.

From the ‘childish’ nature of Mike’s older brothers’ chosen professions (ice cream vender, rock musician) to the way that his sexual awakening, watching his brother make out with a mysterious girl in the graveyard, is interrupted by supernatural emissaries of death/evil, this struggle to escape the dream that is childhood (or death?) seems to permeate every aspect of the film, inevitably tugging the heart-strings of the overgrown adolescents who lurk not so deep within all us movie/music nerds.

As befits a film that so thoroughly mixes up ideas of fantasy and reality, “Phantasm” is also one of the absolute best examples of the kind of ‘weird world’ aesthetic that I’ve talked in previous reviews about loving so much in low budget horror films. With few concessions to real-life geography, “Phantasm” seems to take place entirely in some anonymous, dreamlike suburb, bordered on all sides by darkened woods and hills. Wherever Mike roams, on his bike, by car or on foot, he seems to return to the same few central locations again and again, with the Tall Man’s hyper-real Victorian mortuary looming large. Even the bar that Jody drives out to to hang out and pick up girls is sublimely weird – a kind of deserted, roadside theme bar based within a heavily decorated porta-cabin, scarcely much bigger that the muscle-car their only customer arrives in.

Everywhere, “Phantasm” is marked with the kind of wonderful, wilful eccentricity that only a regional, independently produced movie can provide. Would a studio-produced film, or the work of some industry guys trying to make a buck, have allowed us the pleasures of the scene where Mike visits the mute fortune-teller and her grand-daughter, and the unexpected tribute to Frank Herbert’s “Dune” that ensues? Or the aforementioned front-porch jam session? If not an out-and-out crazy movie, certainly not an amateurish or illogical one, “Phantasm” nonetheless draws you into the atmosphere of, well, a dream – a place just to the left of conventional filmic reality, where anything could happen next.

“Phantasm” is maybe the most successful example I can think of a filmmaker using the framework of the horror genre to explore – ugh, forgive me – difficult, real life issues, communicating a sense of understanding and compassion that knocks every tedious ‘issue’ movie out there into a cocked hat. I can only speak for myself here, but personally I find an emotional resonance within “Phantasm” that is comparable only to that of François Truffaut’s early films.

And unlike “Jules et Jim”, “Phantasm” has psychotic dwarfs and graveyard sex murders too.

Case closed. I love you, Don Coscarelli.

#10 Black Sunday / La Maschera Del Demonio (Mario Bava, 1960)

Ok, I’ll level with you: right up until I sat down to write this, I’d been torn as to which Mario Bava film to include on this list, “Kill Baby Kill/Operazione Paura” (1966) or “Black Sunday”. The former is probably my favourite Bava horror, its haunting imagery, stunning Technicolor production design and delirious psychedelic plotting all second to none. “Black Sunday” by comparison is somewhat stagey and linear in its non-setpiece scenes, its black & white photography admittedly brilliant, but perhaps not truly representative of a director best known for his use of colour. But on the other hand – “Black Sunday” has the immortal iconic value of it jaw-dropping opening scene, its status as the all-time definitive example of ‘60s gothic horror, and, most importantly, it has Barbara Steele.

I thought long and hard, I considered reviewing both of them side by side, but… “Black Sunday” wins, I think. “Kill Baby Kill” might be a masterpiece, but it’s a pretty obscurist masterpiece. A jewel in the crown for aficionados of loopy Euro-horror cinema maybe, but probably too disjointed and strange, too specialist in its appeal, for many. “Black Sunday”, on the other hand, is a film for everyone! Watch it with the family, and bar the door if they try to leave! Who in the world could watch that opening sequence for the first time and not be completely floored?

Words failing me, I am forced to quote from “The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to The Devil in Cinema” by Nikolas Shreck (not that one), which I conveniently happened to find knocking about in a pile of old books this week;

“‘One day in each century it is said that Satan walks among us. To the God-fearing this day is known as Black Sunday,’ a portentous voice has told us. Surely this is that day, and the face that glares at us from the screen, transfixed in a seeming ecstasy of evil, is Satan incarnate in bewitching mortal form. The glaring depths of her eyes radiate pure hatred, but strangely, this in no way obscures their beauty. A predatory joy in her savage expression imbues the pale visage with an inhuman quality. Her lips are thin, yet sensuous. Wild black hair frames the pale cheekbones. A study in chiaroscuro, her luminous portrait is delineated in shadows worthy of the brush of an unknown master. The exquisite face is cruelly marred by a pattern of wounds, impressed upon her flesh by the spiked mask she has worn for centuries.”

Quite so! Thanks for that, Mr, uh, Shreck.

The unforgettable moment of stylised violence that closes the film’s prologue makes clear that “Black Sunday” is going to be extremely strong medicine for its era, and it is slightly unfair I feel to claim, as many reviewers have done, that “Black Sunday”s script subsequently follows a hackneyed, predictable path, the film drawing its power entirely from Bava’s virtuoso direction and stunning production design. That may seem an accurate enough assessment from a modern POV, but it is easy to forget that to a great extent “Black Sunday” defined the gothic horror conventions that we now see as hackneyed. It is often assumed these kind of films have been around forever, such is their anachronistic hoariness, but it seems to me that throughout most of the ‘40s and ‘50s, there was little resembling gothic horror to be found on-screen. The Hammer films of the late ‘50s, whose success presumably inspired the Italian film industry to start bankrolling horror flicks, can to some extent take credit for pioneering the kind of self-conscious archaicism and theatrical mannerisms seen here, but “Black Sunday” is still probably the earliest film I’ve seen in which the conventions of full-blown ‘60s gothic (the “come, you must be tired from your long journey” syndrome, you might call it) come into full bloom. Not that that’s necessarily a recommendation I hasten to add, but for those such as myself who feel irresistibly drawn to this weird sub-genre, it’s an interesting point to note.

Something else I’ve noticed about “Black Sunday” – something it shares with just about all of the later, less vital Italian gothics that appeared following this film’s success – is it’s reliable on an unremittingly dreamlike, incorporeal atmosphere that almost completely undermines the importance of a linear narrative. Just as in the films of directors like Ricardo Freda or Antonio Margerheti, or indeed Bava’s later gothic reveries in “Kill Baby Kill”, “Whip & The Body” or “Lisa & The Devil”, it is almost impossible to recall the precise details of what went on in “Black Sunday” a few hours after viewing. After a certain point, who did what to whom when and what it meant simply ceases to matter: what you remember of the film is rather the incredible images, burned upon your waking mind with a strength that seems to plunge them straight through to your sub-conscious. And also, you remember the overall feeling of the film, as if it were some dream that seemed incredibly important, but that you just can’t quite recall the details of, until they return the next night, ready to bite.

In the avalanche of cheaper, less celebrated horror films and giallos that went on to characterise the next two decades of Italian cinema, this incorporeal spirit is often mistaken for bad filmmaking, as movies are written off as lazy, slow-moving, incoherent. But Bava, in his indisputably masterful realisation of this film, proved once and for all that there is a lot more to the Italian approach to horror than simply random, woozy-headed weirdness. It is incredible in fact that a thriving commercial industry could be built up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, centring around the obsessive presentation of this kind of disturbing, almost subliminal, oneiric imagery. Chuckle all you like at those Italians with their barmy, gas-huffing scripts, but they know a thing or two about what makes us tick - the dark magic of “Black Sunday” runs in their veins.

#11Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)

“I hope her bones are firm..”

I know, I know, an obvious choice, but seriously guys: in much the same way that I spent about ten years stubbornly refusing to listen to The Beatles, I only got around to actually watching this a few months ago, and what can I tell you: it knocked my block off. What a movie!

Ok, so the opening fifteen minutes or so – in which Mary Shelley refers to her husband as “Shelley, dear” and Baron Frankenstein cuddles up with his bride-to-be wondering how he ever got involved with all that god-challenging evilness in the first movie - is sorta inexplicably terrible. But as soon as Dr. Pretorious is on the scene, well… I’ve rarely seen a film that turns on a dime so suddenly and just fuckin’ goes for it with such furious vigour.

It’s all so, so… VIVID, y’know – the absolute antithesis of the kind of slow-moving, stagey filmmaking we tend to associate with the 1930s - barely a minute is allowed to pass without our senses being bombarded with something utterly grotesque and incredible. Seventy-five years of cumulative influence and analysis have served to give films such as “Bride of Frankenstein” a sort of ‘high art’ aura, as our attention is drawn to the German Expressionist influence, to the weighty themes and sub-texts and yadda yadda yadda. And that’s all well and good, but really I think that “Bride..” can be better viewed as one of the all-time triumphs of LOW art – pulp in excelsis! Full of booze and cigars and crazy, craggy faces and desperation and rage and confusion and ecstasy, this is two-fisted gothic madness of the highest order, a film that doesn’t so much hint at the more twisted and disturbing aspects of its plotline as throw them in your face and insist you wrestle them to the ground.

Whatever else may or may not have been on James Whale’s mind, his main motivations here were to titillate us, repulse us, excite us, and generally keep us glued to our seats with crazed, barbaric imagery and ghoulish, transgressive notions, fired at us more quickly than we can really process them. Even today, “Bride..” makes for startling, violent and fast-moving viewing – in 1935 it must have been nothing short of mindblowing! I mean, first of all Pretorious is gulping down straight gin, showing us these fucked up little people he keeps in bottles, telling us he “grew them from seed”, then we’ve got poor old Karloff stomping around like a hunted beast, absent-mindedly caving people’s heads in and hurling old ladies down mineshafts, and then the film is asking us to imagine what would happen to the human race if a man-made creature constructed out of sewn together corpse-parts was to mate with his female counterpart to produce living offspring, and… oh my god “Bride of Frankenstein”, slow down, you’re freaking me out!

And of course, the lightning rod for all this weirdness is Dr. Pretorius himself - surely one of the most fascinating and ambiguous characters in all of horror cinema. Not quite a villain, not quite a tragic mad scientist, he’s utterly inexplicable – a genial avatar of amoral, Luciferian anarchy, parachuted into the movie to take charge and ride the fucker to masterpiece status, reducing Frankenstein himself to the status of an irritating, priggish sidekick. Who WAS this guy? Where did he come from? Where did he GO? Merrily gallivanting back into the horror sub-conscious, a figure so dangerous no one’s ever quite dared to call upon him again, no matter how many thousands of subsequent mad scientists and cult leaders have ripped a chunk out of Ernest Thesiger’s definitive performance.

What more can I possibly tell you? You’ve seen it, you know. I know I talked in the “Black Cat” write-up about the genesis of the ‘weirdo horror film’ – well it’s rare that anyone has managed to top this one.

#12 The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

“Strange about the cat… Joan seemed so curiously affected when you killed it..”

Recently, I’ve been conteplating the notion that cats, black ones in particular, are good omens for a horror film. From Lucio Fulci’s astoundingly peculiar “Il Gatto Nero” to the Peter Lorre/Vincent Price segment of Corman’s “Tales of Terror”, to zany beatnik murder caper “The Fat Black Pussycat”, and even that nutso low budget ‘60s version of “The Black Cat” put out by Something Weird where that guy force-feeds his parrots champagne and whacks his wife in the face with an axe, the presence of a black cat seems to be a pretty reliable indicator of a great time. Whether or not my theory would stand up to a viewing of 1972’s Night of 1000 Cats remains to be seen, but for the moment I’m sticking to it. And where better to mark the genesis of this noble cinematic lineage than with Edgar Ulmer’s 1934 Black Cat – surely one of the strangest and most extraordinary horror films ever made, and the one I’m going to try my best to hold forth about here today.

Ahem.

A common interpretation of German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s sees it as a therapeutic/interpretive reaction to the mechanized horrors of World War I, and the same logic is of course applied to the whole of the wider explosion in Modernism that took place in the arts after the war. And if the Universal/Hollywood horror film of the 1930s can be seem as the bastard child of Expressionism, then “The Black Cat” is the mutant beast that squares the circle, as Austrian director Ulmer combines the familiar gothic trappings of Universal horror with a strange variation on stark, European Modernism, drawing us back explicitly to the traumas wrought upon European consciousness by the Great War.

As soon as the opening credits have rolled, our straight/normal honeymooning couple have the singularly bad luck of seeing their train carriage canoodling disturbed by an anxious Bela Lugosi, who tells them in agonising detail of the fifteen years of soul-destroying hell he has spent in a POW camp. Try that one out for ‘things you’d least like to happen on your wedding night’. When they all leave the train and continue their journey by coach, the driver regales them with tales of how the land they are traversing was the scene of some of the worst slaughter of the war, cheerily recalling the sight of bodies piled upon bodies, before the poor fellow promptly joins them when the coach takes a tumble off the rain-soaked mountain road, a circumstance that sees our characters changing their travel plans and paying a visit to Bela’s ‘old buddy’ - Boris Karloff as the almost impossibly sinister visionary architect Hjalmar Poelzig, whose terrifying modernist edifice of a house is literally built atop the mass graves of the men who died during the war under his treacherous command. Worst honeymoon ever, I think it’s fair to say.

A top-heavy wreck of conflicting aesthetic and cultural ideas, in which traditional horror movie notions of good and evil are left vague at best, “The Black Cat” is a challenging film to really write about or analyse. More-so than just about any other ‘golden age’ horror movie, it is an uncomfortable, disturbing viewing experience, reconstructing distant echoes of Poe’s original scenario into a modernist nightmare in which characters seem to exist in a constant state of nervous desperation and nothing ever quite seems to make sense.

As their characters renew their long-standing blood rivalry, Lugosi and Karloff seem to be competing to see who can appear the most utterly cracked, maxing out their respective allowances of morbid weirdness almost straight away as they start indulging in marathon staring contests, twitching like lunatics and undertaking lengthy, unprovoked digressions about such matters as ‘the dark of the moon’ and ‘the nature of evil’, as the appropriately named Peter Manners as Mr. Straight Guy looks on incredulous. Even their servants are fucking mental – Karloff’s major-domo played by craggy-face horror regular Egon Brecher, and Lugosi’s servant some kind of mute oriental strong man. In a scene that has to be seen to be believed, Bela spears Karloff’s cat with a thrown fork, before Boris quietly explains that his friend ‘suffers from a nervous affliction’ that renders him utterly terrified of cats – the only point at which cats, or Bela’s inexplicable fear thereof, are referred to in the whole damn movie!

Dull as they are, it’s hard not to sympathise with our ‘normal’ couple, plunged unexpectedly into this realm of world class boggle-eyed lunacy, trying to relax and recuperate in a complex of bare, Travelodge-esque bedrooms, under constant threat of Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff barging in unannounced through the communicating doors to subject them to strange tirades of obsequious politeness. Bela is supposed to be a ‘good guy’, relatively speaking, and indeed he does his damnedest to take on a Van Helsing style gravitas when telling young Joan of the dangers she faces from evil old Karloff, but he’s not fooling anyone – it’s clear that he’s just as much of a vengeance-crazed loon as his opposite number, and understandably she just wants the whole lot of them to fuck off and leave her alone with her husband.

Then, just when you feel things have gotten about as freaky as was possible for a 1934 movie without its makers being incarcerated in the name of general public well-being, Ulmer drops the bomb that Karloff’s character is a Satanist. I mean, an actual, honest to god Satanic cult leader who summons his robe-clad coven to celebrate the rites of Lucifer around a terrifying Cubist/Expressionist altar in the catacombs beneath his house!

I realise that doesn’t exactly sound like much of an eye-opener by modern horror standards, but how many Satanic cults do you reckon had been seen in American cinema prior to 1934..? Now I’ve not done any actual research into the matter, but I’m gonna take a wild guess and say NONE. And furthermore, I don’t really think devil worshippers and black magic cults began to become an accepted part of horror movie procedure until probably the late fifties/early sixties, with the emergence of films like Jacque Tourneur’s “Night of the Demon” and Hammer’s “The Witches”. Why on earth did Ulmer feel the need to make Polzig a Satanist? Like, as if this film wasn’t berserk enough already! The Satan angle comes completely out of nowhere in the film’s final act, serves little actual narrative purpose, and rendered “The Black Cat” so controversial that Universal allegedly cut down Ulmer’s director’s cut down to a lean sixty minutes prior to release, whilst the British censor objected so strongly to the Satanism that he excised it completely, presenting UK film-goers with a version that ran less than fifty minutes.

Thank god for obscurely-inspired maniacs like Ulmer though, because “The Black Cat”s black mass is absolutely breathtaking – the first scene of its kind seen in popular cinema anywhere in the world, and the last too for many years, it brings a dream-like, ritualistic intensity to the film that prefigures all my favourite bits of modern horror.

Everything about “The Black Cat” is completely inexplicable – it is a work of near protean high weirdness, a haunted, desperate, genuinely unstable film in which nothing is easy, nothing is certain, no one is happy, nothing is the way it should be. I know I’m often inclined on this site to talk about my conception of ‘the weirdo horror film’ - well, “The Black Cat” (perhaps in a fifty/fifty split with the next item on our list) can be considered the daddy of them all.

#13 Plague of the Zombies(John Gilling, 1966)

“Would you like to tell me about your dream, Peter? It sometimes helps..”

An unusual choice for ‘favourtie Hammer movie’ perhaps (back when the Watching Hammer weblog was asking people to pick their favourites, it didn’t even turn up in anyone’s top ten), but John Gilling’s “Plague of the Zombies” holds a special place in my heart. I’m not sure why really – partly just nostalgia for seeing it for the first time on late night TV many years ago I’m sure, but more than any other Hammer film, it just makes my nerves twitch and my senses warp in the best possible way.

And, looked at on a more objective basis, “Plague..” does thankfully prove pretty unfuckable with as a solid, mid-table British horror flick. Andre Morrel is absolutely superb as our hero, Sir James Forbes, holding the sanity of the afflicted village together with a mixture of aristocratic authority, courageous practicality and humane concern that he should have had bottled and sold to lesser horror movie protagonists. As in his role as Professor Quatermass in the definitive BBC version of “Quatermass & The Pit”, Morell is a joy to watch here, his stirring delivery of the script’s frequently absurd dialogue and his character’s vigorous, two-fisted approach to the action marking him out as the best leading man Hammer ever had, Peter Cushing notwithstanding. I really wish they could have cast him in more leading roles.

More than anything else, my love of British horror films probably crystalised during the scene in which Sir James and his younger doctor friend are busy doing the washing up after dinner (and oh what a sterling example of a Victorian peer he is - elbow deep in suds without complaint in the middle of a mysterious plague outbreak, rather than leaving the women/servants to get on with it while he sees to more ‘important’ matters - good chap), when the following exchange transpires;

“But we must have a body to examine, we can’t possibly work without one!”
“If you’re thinking of applying for an exhumation, I can tell you now --”
“Apply for nothing, we’ll dig one up.”
“We’ll WHAT?”
“Dig one up – that one they buried today will do, nice and fresh.”
“But we can’t just start --”
“Why not? There’s a full moon, couldn’t be better. We’ll start off about midnight.”

Amazing. And joy is heaped upon joy when said escapade sees Sir James being very politely arrested by Michael Ripper as the local copper – “and on what charge, Constable?”, “ooh let’s see.. graverobbing I should think, Sir”.

By its very nature, the script for “Plague..” is stranger, more imaginative and more action-packed than your average mid-sixties Hammer, its tale of the decadent squire of a small Cornish village importing Haitian voodoo to help resurrect a new workforce for his ailing tin mine so batty, it’s hard to do anything else but just sit back and accept it in stunned good humour, especially as relatively authentic-sounding voudoun drums start to pound ceaselessly on the soundtrack, and the iconic oatmeal-faced, cassock-clad zombies start to march abroad on the barren moors, menacing the classically nightgowned Diane Clare in an astounding bit of cracked cross-cultural exchange, at least two years before George Romero brought our modern conception of ‘zombies’ to the masses.

More than just a great, fun horror movie though, “Plague…” has a heavy, potent atmosphere too it that just slays me - the doomed, fog-drenched village with its dilapidated stone cottages, the sodden, swampy woodland surrounding it and the rusty machinery of the obsolete tin mines – one has the feeling Sir James and friends are fighting not just against an evil weirdo and the fears of a superstitious peasantry, but against a whole tide of cosmic lethargy and empathy, threatening to drag this benighted corner of England literally back into the ground, food for the tunnel-dwelling zombies who trudge away eternally to the hypnotic beat of out-of-place Caribbean drums - a perfect, mindless proletariat, kept alive to serve the needs of industry until their rotting flesh literally falls from their bones.

As much as I love the exquisite production designs of Bray-era Hammer, this film has somewhat altogether different going on. Something thick and sulphurous, something more in tune with the atavistic, rural, subversive horrors of “Blood On Satan’s Claw” and “The Wicker Man”; something, in other words, that is more in tune with morbid teenage layabouts like me about ten years ago, staying up past their bedtime, smoking pot, letting the poorly tuned in images flicker before their eyes…

The first time I saw that scene – yeah, THE scene, the one everyone remembers from this movie - where Jacqueline Pearce rises from her grave, I was absolutely stunned, I could barely move or speak. Her dead eyes, her evil, Mona Lisa-like smile, the way Morell makes a grab for that shovel…. here, essentially, is EVERYTHING that defines the modern horror film, compressed into one, primal, heart-stopping sequence.
I could wax lyrical on that scene for pages, but thankfully you’ll be spared that, as the sequence has been immortalised for all time (well, for a few months at the very least) on Youtube, for you to experience yourself and draw your own conclusions;

#14The Wicker Man(Robin Hardy, 1973)

“After all, what girl would not prefer the child of a sun god to that of some acne-scarred artisan?”

Spiritually and philosophically the very opposite of “The Devil Rides Out”, it says a lot for the diversity found within the supposedly monolithic structure of ‘The British Horror Film’ that both it and “The Wicker Man” – moralistic Christian diatribe and open-ended meditation on sexual freedom and atavistic pagan belief respectively – can be cheerfully discussed in the same breath.

(It is doubly curious that Christopher Lee, who was the main driving force in persuading Hammer to adapt “..Rides Out”, also agreed to appear in “The Wicker Man” free of charge, and has frequently talked it up as being the best film he ever acted in. I dunno - maybe he just digs movies about opposing belief systems or something?)

Anyway, after so many years of dedicated fandom, discussion, re-evaluation, praise, canonisation, restoration, re-release and lunatic comedy remake, it’s difficult to know how to go about trying to find something new to say about Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s utterly unique film.

More than any other entry on this list, “The Wicker Man”s classification as a horror film is tenuous at best. I will count it as one, because it was funded and initially released as horror, because it stars Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt, and because it is hard to know what else do with a film that’s basically a drama about comparative religion. Plus, the film’s overriding atmosphere of otherness and paranoia, the incorporation of recognisable witchcraft imagery, the buxom barmaids, sinister aristocrat and grizzled peasants clearly left over from a Hammer gothic - above all the constant commingling of eroticism with fear – all of these things point to a horror film.

But at the same time, there have been occasions when I have found myself arguing strongly that “The Wicker Man” is NOT a horror film (usually when trying to persuade non-horror fans to watch it and/or take it seriously). In its pronounced lack of either graphic violence or any element of the supernatural, the film’s ‘realism’ must have been a daring decision for Hardy and Shaffer, and if “The Wicker Man”s swift descent into a couple of decades of distribution purgatory was the initial result of their bravery, they can at least be proud that it is this same approach that forty-plus years later sees their film reaching a wider audience, and attracting wider critical attention, than any other British ‘horror’ film ever made. And deservedly so, perhaps. As with previous entries on this list, I’m sure I don’t have to waste time trying to summarise the myriad qualities of “The Wicker Man”. In every respect, it is a true one-off, and the very fact it exists at all, let alone in such vivid, intelligent and beautiful form, is a profound achievement for all concerned. Such is the film’s overriding atmosphere, the long history of whispered rumour and supplementary lore surrounding it, that every screening, whether at home, on TV or in the cinema, seems to take on a ritualistic quality – devotees glancing at new initiates, trying to gauge their reaction. Talk about a ‘cult film’.

These days, it’s easy to take it for granted that the film’s sympathies (and by extension, ours) lie with the islanders. Certainly I’ve never had any problem choosing between Lord Summerisle’s wholesome, open-minded approach to life and Sgt. Howie’s dogmatic, self-destructive puritanism. But I’ll never forget the time I watched the film with a friend who afterwards insisted in no uncertain terms that Howie is the hero of the film, and that the islanders are an insane, repugnant aberration. And, of course, he was right – as appealing as the easy-going lifestyle of the islanders may seem, are they not essentially still fulfilling the obligations as every gang of mad cultists in b-movie history, kidnapping a man and committing murder to appease their strange Gods, as their resources dwindle and their desperation grows…? The unswervable ambiguity of “The Wicker Man”, and the stresses it places on our implicit belief systems, could easily be seen by handing out a questionnaire to a cinema audience as the sun sets in the final shot: do you believe their harvest will return? Answer Y or N.

I love too the fact that I have seen the film in various different formats over the years – bootleg VHS, TV broadcast, cinema screening, several different DVDs – and I’m sure that I’ve never seen exactly the same film twice. “The Wicker Man” exists in so many different cuts that I never know whether the action will take place over three days or two, whether or not we’ll get to see Willow’s full dance, or Lord Summerisle reciting Walt Whitman as slugs fuck in the graveyard (a particularly rare inclusion). I’m sure on at least one occasion I’ve seen an establishing scene in which Sgt. Howie prays in a church on the mainland, but then again, maybe I imagined it. I’ve not yet watched the latest DVD copy I’ve gotten hold of, so who knows, maybe it will have some shots in it I’ve never seen before, and maybe other bits will be missing? I’m sure I could google “Wicker Man alternate versions” and sort the whole thing out for good, but y’know, I prefer the mystery. Whatever you do to this film, its central vision remains. Even after they (allegedly) burned the negatives and/or buried them somewhere under the newly constructed M3, Lord Summerisle and his people have lived on, popping up as a free gift in Sunday newspapers, being eulogised in ‘Sight & Sound’ and screened at the NFT, casting a questioning shadow across our modern way of life.

Oh, and a soundtrack loaded with hits certainly helps too! Paul Giovanni should be driving around in whatever the folky equivalent of a solid gold Cadillac is for the tunes he managed to cram into this movie.