The films

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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 ever Academy Award for 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.