The 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.