The films

WATCHcult

Matango

Toho's mushroom people, made by the Godzilla team, and it is far bleaker than its reputation.

WATCHcult

Piggy

Spanish, a bullied teenager, and a moral problem she is left holding alone.

WATCHcult

The Dark and the Wicked

Bryan Bertino's bleakest film. Two siblings return to the family farm as their father dies and something takes the household apart.

WATCHcult

The House of the Devil

Ti West made a 1983 film in 2009, on 16mm, and the first hour is a girl walking around a house alone.

WATCHcult

The Untold Story

A Macau restaurateur and the pork buns. Anthony Wong won Best Actor for it, which tells you about Hong Kong in 1993.

WATCHcult

Trouble Every Day

Claire Denis made a vampire film with no vampires, and it was booed at Cannes.

WATCHcult

Uzumaki

A town becomes obsessed with spirals. Junji Ito adapted before his manga had finished.

WATCHcult

Berberian Sound Studio

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

WATCHcult

Daughters of Darkness

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

WATCHcult

House

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

WATCHcult

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.

WATCHcult

Kill List

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

WATCHcult

No One Will Save You

A woman alone in a farmhouse fends off an alien home invasion, with almost no dialogue in the entire film.

WATCHcult

Sting

A girl raises a spider that fell from space in a New York apartment block, and it grows.

WATCHcult

Tales from the Crypt

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

WATCHcult

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.

WATCHcult

The Sadness

Taiwanese, and among the most extreme things released this decade. Go in warned.

WATCHcult

The Uninvited

The first Hollywood ghost film to play it entirely straight. Almost nothing has aged.

WATCHcult

The Wretched

A teenager suspects the woman next door is a witch wearing the neighbours' skins. A word-of-mouth streaming hit.

WATCHcult

When Animals Dream

A Danish coming-of-age werewolf film, and the transformation is puberty in a fishing village that already knows.

WATCHcult

When Evil Lurks

Argentinian, merciless, and it establishes early that the film will not spare anybody. It means it.

WATCHcult

Who Can Kill a Child?

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

WATCHcult

Xtro

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

WATCHknown

Blood Feast

The first gore film. Shot in four days for 24,500 dollars and it looks it, which is half the appeal.

WATCHknown

Cemetery Man

The last great Italian horror film, and it is a romantic comedy about a man who shoots the dead for a living.

WATCHknown

La Llorona

A Guatemalan dictator on trial for genocide is haunted in his own home. The weeping woman as historical reckoning.

WATCHknown

Mr. Vampire

Hopping Chinese vampires, a Taoist priest, and sticky rice as a medical treatment. It invented a whole genre.

WATCHknown

Night of the Comet

A comet turns most of Los Angeles to dust, and two Valley girls inherit the city.

WATCHknown

Phase IV

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

WATCHknown

Sleepless

Argento's late return to the giallo, with Max von Sydow as a retired detective and a genuine nursery-rhyme killer.

WATCHknown

Stage Fright

A killer in a giant owl mask trapped in a theatre with a dance troupe. Michele Soavi's debut and the best late giallo.

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.

WATCHknown

The Devil's Bath

Austrian, based on real 18th-century court records, and about a form of despair almost nobody has filmed.

WATCHknown

The Innkeepers

Ti West's other 1970s-feeling film, about two clerks working the last weekend of a haunted hotel.

WATCHknown

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue

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

WATCHknown

The Love Witch

Shot on 35mm to look exactly like 1969, written and designed by one person, and very funny.