The films

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The Empty Man

Dumped by the studio with no marketing, runs 137 minutes, and has a 20-minute prologue people rave about.

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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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The Old Dark House

James Whale between the two Frankensteins, having a wonderful time, and Karloff is the least of it.

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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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Trick 'r Treat

Four interlocking Halloween stories and the best anthology since Creepshow. Warner shelved it for two years.

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Troll Hunter

Norwegian students follow a poacher who turns out to hunt state-secret trolls. Deadpan and enormous.

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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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Black Sunday

Bava could not afford colour and made the best-looking gothic ever shot. Barbara Steele's face did the rest.

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Border

A Swedish customs officer who can smell guilt meets a man who smells like nothing she recognises.

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Bug

William Friedkin directing a two-hander in a motel room about shared delusion, and it is not what the trailer sold.

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Cat People

Val Lewton was told to make a film from a title and a poster. He made one about a woman afraid of her own desire.

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Ginger Snaps

The puberty metaphor made completely explicit, very funny, and unusually well acted.

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Goodnight Mommy

Austrian, cold, and it works out its own twist early enough that the dread is the point.

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High Tension

The film that named New French Extremity in the popular imagination, and its ending is still being argued about.

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Kwaidan

Four ghost stories on hand-painted sound stages, three hours long, and among the most beautiful films ever made.

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Phenomena

Jennifer Connelly communicates with insects at a Swiss boarding school, and there is a chimpanzee with a razor.

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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.

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Tenebrae

Argento's last great giallo, and the one with the three-minute crane shot up the side of a house.

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Thanksgiving

A fake trailer from Grindhouse turned into a real slasher, and it is a very good one.

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The Beyond

Almost no coherent plot and that is the argument for it. One of the bleakest endings in the genre.

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The Changeling

A widower, an empty mansion and a wheelchair coming down the stairs. Enormously effective.

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The Devil's Rejects

Rob Zombie's second film, and it turns the killers from his first into the protagonists, which should not work.

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The Night House

Rebecca Hall carrying a film about grief with unusual use of negative space.

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The Return of the Living Dead

Makes them fast and talkative. Easily the funniest film in this category, and a bleak ending under the jokes.

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Vampyr

Dreyer shooting through gauze at a plot that barely exists. Closer to a bad dream than a film.

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White Zombie

The first zombie film, made independently, with Lugosi controlling the dead on a Haitian sugar plantation.

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Wolf Creek

Three backpackers in the Australian outback. The first hour is a holiday film and it is not padding.

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As Above, So Below

A descent into the Paris catacombs that becomes a descent into hell, shot for real under the city.

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Coherence

A dinner party the night a comet passes, and reality starts to fork. Shot in one house in five nights.

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Godzilla Minus One

Seventy years on, the series returns to what it was for: the war, the guilt, and the cost.

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I Saw the Devil

A secret agent catches a serial killer, releases him, and does it again. And again.

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Mandy

Nicolas Cage, a chainsaw duel and Jóhann Jóhannsson's last score. Not for everyone and not trying to be.

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MaXXXine

The weakest of West's trilogy and still a better-shot 1985 Los Angeles than most films manage.

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Phantasm

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

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Terrifier 3

Unrated, made for very little, outgrossed studio horror, and the effects are the entire proposition.

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The Devils

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