Horror films of the 1970s

WATCHdeep cut

Delirium

A Vietnam veteran, a vigilante group and a plot that gives up. Not the Lamberto Bava one.

WATCHdeep cut

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.

WATCHobscure

I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses

A Canadian courtroom drama about a real murder. Its presence on the list is inexplicable.

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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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Fight for Your Life

A home invasion built entirely on racial abuse. Genuinely hard to watch and not for craft reasons.

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Frozen Scream

Every line is dubbed, including scenes with nobody talking. Almost hypnotically incompetent.

WATCHobscure

Mardi Gras Massacre

An Aztec-obsessed killer in New Orleans. A Blood Feast remake in all but name, and slower.

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The Witch Who Came from the Sea

Millie Perkins is extraordinary in it. A sad film about incest and memory, banned as a gore film.

Franco women-in-prison, made fast and cheap. On the list for the category rather than the content.

WATCHobscure

Axe

68 minutes, shot in nine days, and oddly melancholy for something on a banned list.

WATCHcult

Don't Look in the Basement

An asylum where you cannot tell staff from patients. Shot in twelve days in Texas and quite effective.

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Human Experiments

A women-in-prison film with a brainwashing subplot. Linda Haynes deserved better material.

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Island of Death

Mastorakis watched Texas Chain Saw, counted the perversions and wrote a list. It shows.

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Let's Scare Jessica to Death

A woman fresh out of a psychiatric hospital moves to a Connecticut farmhouse, and the film never confirms what is real.

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Long Weekend

A couple with a failing marriage treat a beach with contempt. Nothing supernatural happens.

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Messiah of Evil

A California coastal town waiting for a blood moon, made by the writers of American Graffiti, and it looks like nothing else.

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SS Experiment Camp

Notorious in Britain almost entirely for its poster. The film is inert.

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The Werewolf and the Yeti

Paul Naschy in the Himalayas. On the list almost certainly because somebody read the title and stopped.

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Don't Go in the House

A man with a flamethrower and a steel room. The mother is the point and the film knows it.

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Deep River Savages

The first Italian cannibal film. A Man Called Horse relocated to Thailand with mondo bolted on.

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Death Line

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

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Late Night Trains

Last House on a train, scored by Ennio Morricone, which is a sentence that should not be true.

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Lisa and the Devil

Bava given complete freedom, and the film is a dream nobody can escape, including the producer.

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The Beast in Heat

Nazisploitation at its most worthless. On the list for good reason and worth nobody's evening.

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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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The Toolbox Murders

The first fifteen minutes are notorious. The remaining seventy are a different and much duller film.

WATCHcult

Alucarda

Mexican nunsploitation with an actual argument, and everybody in it screams for eighty minutes.

cult

Gestapo's Last Orgy

Nazisploitation, and the tag exists because the shelf gets documented, not because this is worth time.

WATCHcult

Killer Nun

Anita Ekberg as a morphine-addicted nun in a hospital. Nunsploitation with an actual performance in it.

WATCHcult

Snuff

A dull Manson knock-off with a fake murder stapled on the end and a marketing campaign of hired protesters.

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The Cannibal Man

Almost no cannibalism. A slaughterhouse worker, a body count and Franco-era Spanish class rage.

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Hatchet for the Honeymoon

Bava's first-person portrait of a killer who murders brides to recover a childhood memory. Genuinely strange.

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Daughters of Darkness

Elizabeth Báthory in an empty Ostend hotel out of season, and it is the most elegant vampire film ever made.

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House

Toho asked their ad director what would scare children. He asked his eleven-year-old daughter and filmed her answers.

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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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Who Can Kill a Child?

Opens with eight minutes of real famine footage, then asks its title question literally.

WATCHknown

Phase IV

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

WATCHknown

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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The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue

Zombies caused by an agricultural radiation device, shot in the Lake District. Much better than it sounds.

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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.

WATCHknown

The Sentinel

A model moves into a Brooklyn brownstone that turns out to be the gateway to Hell, guarded by a blind priest.

known

Thriller: A Cruel Picture

Banned outright in Sweden. The coldest film in this category and the one Kill Bill is built from.

WATCHknown

Burnt Offerings

A family rents a summer house that heals itself by consuming them. Karen Black, Oliver Reed and Bette Davis.

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Death Trap

Hooper's follow-up to Chain Saw, shot entirely on a sound stage lit in red. A hotel, a scythe and a crocodile.

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Martin

Romero's own favourite. A vampire film in which there may be no vampire, only a disturbed boy with razor blades.

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Prophecy

Mercury poisoning produces a mutant bear in the Maine woods, and it is angrier about logging than most activists.

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The Driller Killer

Ferrara's debut, and mostly a film about being broke in New York. The sleeve got it prosecuted.

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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.

WATCHknown

Vampire Circus

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

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A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

Fulci's best giallo, a fever of LSD dreams and a murder that may not have happened.

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Faces of Death

A mondo compilation whose most famous scenes are staged. Sold as real and marketed on being banned.

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Flesh for Frankenstein

Shot in 3D with Udo Kier and a spleen. Warhol's name on it, Paul Morrissey's film.

WATCHknown

Torso

The giallo at its most slasher-like, and the last act is a genuine masterclass in silent suspense.

known

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.

WATCHknown

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

A Czech surrealist film about a thirteen-year-old girl, vampires and menstruation, and it is not what that sounds like.

WATCHknown

Don't Torture a Duckling

Fulci's best film, and it is about a village killing the wrong person.

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Prisoner of the Cannibal God

Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach in New Guinea. Real animal deaths, which is why it stays notorious.

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Rabid

Cronenberg's second feature, with an experimental skin graft, a stinger in an armpit, and a plague across Montreal.

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What Have You Done to Solange?

The most upsetting giallo, and the one with an actual moral centre.

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Four Flies on Grey Velvet

The third of Argento's Animal Trilogy, and the least seen because it was legally locked away for decades.

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Shivers

Publicly funded, debated in the Canadian parliament, and filmed with complete clinical calm.

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The Brood

Cronenberg's divorce, filmed. The angriest thing he ever made and he has said so.

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The Cat o' Nine Tails

The middle of Argento's Animal Trilogy, and the one he liked least. A blind man and a reporter chase a killer.

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A Bay of Blood

The hinge between giallo and slasher. Friday the 13th Part 2 lifts two murders almost shot for shot.

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Piranha

Joe Dante's Jaws cash-in, written by John Sayles, and it is far smarter and funnier than it needed to be.

WATCHknown

Phantasm

A tall undertaker, a flying silver sphere, and a film that runs entirely on dream logic. Don Coscarelli was 23.

known

The Devils

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

WATCHknown

Zombie Flesh Eaters

A zombie fights a shark. There is also an eye and a splinter. Fulci's most purely entertaining film.

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The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

Argento's debut, and the film that turned the giallo into an export industry.

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Deep Red

Argento's best. Goblin's score does half the work and is fully aware of it.

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I Spit on Your Grave

Ebert gave it zero stars and called it "a vile bag of garbage". Clover argued the camera is with her throughout. Both cases are live.

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The Hills Have Eyes

A nuclear family against a family mutated by nuclear testing. By the end there is no difference in method.

WATCHcanon

Black Christmas

Four years before Halloween and still the most frightening film in the category.

WATCHcanon

Dawn of the Dead

The best zombie film ever made, set in a shopping mall, and much funnier than people remember.

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Suspiria

Barely a plot and possibly the most beautiful horror film ever shot.

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The Last House on the Left

Craven remaking Bergman on no money. To avoid fainting, keep repeating: it's only a movie.

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The Wicker Man

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

WATCHcanon

Don't Look Now

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

WATCHcanon

Deliverance

Not marketed as horror and the founding text of an entire horror subgenre.

WATCHcanon

The Omen

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

WATCHcanon

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Almost bloodless and completely unbearable. Heat, noise and exhaustion doing all the work.

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Eraserhead

Five years of weekend shooting, and it is about being a father and being terrified of it.

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Carrie

De Palma's split screens, a bucket of blood, and the last thirty seconds that made an entire genre of ending.

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Alien

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

WATCHcanon

Halloween

Cost 300,000 dollars, took 70 million, and contains almost no blood at all.

WATCHcanon

Jaws

The mechanical shark did not work, so Spielberg shot around it and accidentally made the best one.

WATCHcanon

The Exorcist

Ten Academy Award nominations and ambulances outside cinemas. Still the commercial ceiling for horror.