The films

WATCHobscure

Blood Rites

Andy Milligan shooting in Staten Island with a hand-held Auricon. An acquired taste nobody acquires.

WATCHcult

Jigoku

A student's guilt drags everyone he knows into a Buddhist hell, and the last third is that hell in detail.

WATCHcult

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

Brazil's first horror film, made by a man who invented himself as a character and played him for fifty years.

WATCHcult

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

A plane crash, an alien blob, and the single most striking red sky in Japanese genre film. Tarantino borrowed it.

WATCHcult

Love Camp 7

The film that started the nazisploitation cycle. Lee Frost, a backlot, and no defence available.

WATCHcult

Night of the Bloody Apes

A luchadora, a heart transplant from a gorilla, and real open-heart surgery footage spliced in.

WATCHcult

Kill, Baby... Kill!

A Carpathian village, a dead girl with a white ball, and Fellini borrowed the image wholesale.

WATCHcult

Matango

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

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.

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

Kuroneko

Two women murdered by samurai return as cats bound by a promise to drink the blood of every samurai they meet.

WATCHknown

Quatermass and the Pit

A Martian spacecraft under a London tube station, and it explains the Devil.

WATCHknown

The Devil Rides Out

Christopher Lee as the hero for once, and the best script Hammer ever filmed.

WATCHknown

Witchfinder General

Vincent Price with the camp switched off, torturing people in English summer sunshine.

WATCHknown

The Curse of the Werewolf

Hammer's only werewolf film, Oliver Reed's first lead, and the transformation is largely his face.

WATCHknown

The Girl Who Knew Too Much

Bava's proto-giallo, the film that invented the template, shot in gorgeous black and white in Rome.

WATCHknown

Black Sabbath

Three Bava stories introduced by Boris Karloff, and the middle one is the most frightening thing Bava shot.

WATCHknown

Carnival of Souls

Made for 33,000 dollars by an industrial film-maker in Kansas, and it looks like a dream somebody had.

WATCHknown

The Masque of the Red Death

The best of Corman's Poe cycle, shot by Nicolas Roeg on sets left over from Becket.

WATCHknown

Onibaba

Two women murder soldiers in a sea of susuki grass in fourteenth-century Japan. The grass is the antagonist.

WATCHknown

Blood and Black Lace

The giallo template, and still the best-looking film in the category.

WATCHknown

Village of the Damned

Blonde children with glowing eyes and no interest in you. Efficient, cold, 77 minutes.

WATCHknown

The Innocents

The Turn of the Screw done perfectly, and it never once tells you whether the ghosts are real.

WATCHknown

Black Sunday

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

WATCHknown

Kwaidan

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

WATCHknown

The Haunting

Shows you nothing for two hours and is more frightening than anything that shows you everything.

WATCHknown

Viy

The only horror film made in the Soviet Union, and the last twenty minutes are extraordinary.

WATCHcanon

Peeping Tom

Ended Powell's career in Britain because it puts the audience behind the camera and knows it.

WATCHcanon

Repulsion

Polanski's first English film. A flat, a woman, and hands coming out of the walls.

WATCHcanon

Eyes Without a Face

A surgeon steals faces for his disfigured daughter. Filmed with a tenderness that makes it far worse.

WATCHcanon

Rosemary's Baby

A film about a woman whose body and doctor and husband are all making decisions without her.

WATCHcanon

Night of the Living Dead

Invented the modern zombie, lost its own copyright, and has one of the bleakest endings ever filmed.

WATCHcanon

The Birds

No score, no explanation, no resolution. Hitchcock withholding everything and getting away with it.