British horror films

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Penda's Fen

A BBC play about a repressed vicar's son in the English countryside, and it is one of the strangest things ever broadcast.

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Exposé

The only British film on the DPP list. A novelist, a typist and Fiona Richmond in a farmhouse.

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Possum

A disgraced puppeteer returns to his childhood home carrying a bag he cannot get rid of.

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A Field in England

Deserters in the English Civil War eat mushrooms and dig for treasure while reality dissolves. Shot in black and white in twelve days.

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A Dark Song

A grieving mother and an occultist doing a months-long ritual properly. The tedium is deliberate.

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Enys Men

A lone woman on a Cornish island in 1973, a flower, a standing stone, and time coming apart.

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Sightseers

A caravan holiday across the English Midlands turns into a killing spree, and it is a very bleak comedy about class and resentment.

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Censor

A BBFC examiner during the video nasties panic starts to come apart. Essential viewing for this site specifically.

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Death Line

Descendants of collapsed tunnel workers living under Russell Square, and Donald Pleasence steals it.

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The Legend of Hell House

Richard Matheson adapting himself. Colder and nastier than The Haunting, and nearly as good.

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Berberian Sound Studio

A meek British sound engineer comes apart while dubbing an Italian horror film he can hear but never see.

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In the Earth

A scientist and a guide walk into a forest during a pandemic and find a man, and a spirit, that do not want them to leave.

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Kill List

Starts as a kitchen-sink drama about money, ends somewhere else entirely. The turn is brutal.

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Tales from the Crypt

Amicus adapting the EC Comics, with Joan Collins menaced by a killer Santa and Peter Cushing as a wronged dustman.

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The Plague of the Zombies

Hammer's only zombie film, set in a Cornish village, and it beat Romero to the mass grave by two years.

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Xtro

A British alien-abduction film so incoherent and disturbing it has never been fully explained, by anyone, including its director.

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Phase IV

Saul Bass's only feature. The ants are shot like a nature documentary and it is deeply strange.

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The Blood on Satan's Claw

Something is dug up in a field and the village children form a cult. One third of the unholy trinity.

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Quatermass and the Pit

A Martian spacecraft under a London tube station, and it explains the Devil.

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Saint Maud

A palliative nurse decides she has been called. Morfydd Clark is terrifying and the last shot is a gut punch.

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Theatre of Blood

Vincent Price as a hammy actor murdering the critics who denied him an award, each death staged from Shakespeare.

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The House That Dripped Blood

Four stories tied to one house, written by Robert Bloch, with Christopher Lee and a very young Jon Pertwee joke.

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Ravenous

A Sierra Nevada fort in 1847, cannibalism as manifest destiny, and a score unlike any other.

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The Devil Rides Out

Christopher Lee as the hero for once, and the best script Hammer ever filmed.

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Twins of Evil

Peter Cushing as a witch-hunter who is worse than the vampires, and the Collinson twins were Playboy's first.

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Vampire Circus

A plague-quarantined village visited by a travelling circus, and it is the strangest film Hammer made.

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Witchfinder General

Vincent Price with the camp switched off, torturing people in English summer sunshine.

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Host

Shot over lockdown on Zoom in twelve weeks, runs 56 minutes, and is better than it has any right to be.

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In Fabric

A haunted red dress moves from customer to customer through a nightmarish department store.

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Night of the Demon

The runic parchment, the smoke on the railway line, and a monster the producer added against the director's wishes.

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Possessor

Brandon Cronenberg working the family seam without embarrassment. The practical effects are appalling in the right way.

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The Abominable Dr. Phibes

Vincent Price murders the surgeons who let his wife die, each death based on the plagues of Egypt. A gorgeous, deranged art deco comedy.

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The Curse of the Werewolf

Hammer's only werewolf film, Oliver Reed's first lead, and the transformation is largely his face.

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Under the Shadow

Tehran during the War of the Cities, a djinn, and a mother the state has already stripped of options.

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Dead of Night

The British portmanteau that every anthology since has copied, and the ventriloquist episode has never been bettered.

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His House

A South Sudanese couple in British asylum housing. The haunting and the bureaucracy are the same thing.

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Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper's space-vampire epic, adapted from Colin Wilson, and it is completely insane in the best way.

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Men

Alex Garland being about as subtle as a church door. The final sequence is remarkable regardless.

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The Company of Wolves

Angela Carter adapting herself. Nested fairy tales about what adults tell girls about men.

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The Lodge

Two children snowed in with their father's new partner, who has a history with a cult.

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The Masque of the Red Death

The best of Corman's Poe cycle, shot by Nicolas Roeg on sets left over from Becket.

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Apostle

Gareth Evans doing folk horror with the fight choreography left in. Much nastier than expected.

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Two coroners, one body, one basement. A masterclass in escalating a single location.

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Village of the Damned

Blonde children with glowing eyes and no interest in you. Efficient, cold, 77 minutes.

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The Innocents

The Turn of the Screw done perfectly, and it never once tells you whether the ghosts are real.

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Triangle

A yacht, a storm, an ocean liner, and a loop that keeps folding back on a single mother.

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The Devils

Ken Russell's best film, cut in every territory it has ever played, and still not properly released.

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The Ritual

Four men, a Swedish forest, and a creature design worth waiting for.

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The Haunting

Shows you nothing for two hours and is more frightening than anything that shows you everything.

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The Curse of Frankenstein

The film that made Hammer, made in colour, with blood that looks like blood.

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The Monkey

Osgood Perkins doing King as a gore comedy. The deaths are elaborate and the film is laughing.

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Dog Soldiers

A squad on exercise in the Highlands versus werewolves, and it is closer to a war film than to horror.

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Peeping Tom

Ended Powell's career in Britain because it puts the audience behind the camera and knows it.

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Repulsion

Polanski's first English film. A flat, a woman, and hands coming out of the walls.

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Candyman

Philip Glass wrote the score believing it was an art film. That mistake is why it sounds like nothing else.

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Horror of Dracula

Christopher Lee plays Dracula as a physical threat rather than a foreign gentleman, and it is over in 82 minutes.

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The Descent

Six women, an uncharted cave, and a group dynamic already poisoned before anything goes wrong.

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The Wicker Man

A musical about a policeman with no sense of humour. The best British horror film ever made.

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Angel Heart

Mickey Rourke hunts a missing crooner for a client called Louis Cyphre, and the answer is the worst possible one.

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Hellraiser

Clive Barker adapting his own novella, and the Cenobites are on screen for about eight minutes.

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Sinister

The super-8 reels are the film. Everything between them is a man in an office not turning the lights on.

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1408

John Cusack alone in a hotel room for most of the running time, and it is the best single-location King film.

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Don't Look Now

Grief, Venice, and an edit that keeps showing you the ending before you can read it.

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Event Horizon

A haunted house film in space, hated on release, and the studio destroyed roughly thirty minutes of it.

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28 Years Later

Boyle and Garland back together, shot largely on iPhones rigged in arrays. Stranger than the sequel anybody expected.

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An American Werewolf in London

Rick Baker won the first Academy Award for Best Makeup for a transformation that hurts to watch.

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The Omen

A film about a man realising his son is not his. Jerry Goldsmith won the Oscar and earned it.

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Annihilation

No villain at all, only a process. The last twenty minutes are the closest film has come to Lovecraft.

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28 Days Later

Shot on DV, made them fast, and restarted the whole genre for fifteen years.

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The Substance

Body horror about how the industry treats women over fifty, with Demi Moore doing the bravest work of her career.

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Alien

A haunted house film in space, and the crew are contractors arguing about bonuses.

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The Shining

King hated it. Everyone else was right. The geography of the hotel is deliberately impossible.