The films

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Hatchet for the Honeymoon

Bava's first-person portrait of a killer who murders brides to recover a childhood memory. Genuinely strange.

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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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Cemetery Man

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

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The Devil's Bath

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

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The Innkeepers

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

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Dead & Buried

Eerie, well made, and completely undeserving of the list. Stan Winston's effects.

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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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The Blackcoat's Daughter

Oz Perkins' debut. Glacial, wintry, and the timeline is doing something you will only spot late.

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Martin

Romero's own favourite. A vampire film in which there may be no vampire, only a disturbed boy with razor blades.

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Session 9

Shot in a real abandoned asylum, and the building does most of the work.

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The Driller Killer

Ferrara's debut, and mostly a film about being broke in New York. The sleeve got it prosecuted.

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The Vast of Night

A radio DJ and a switchboard operator in 1950s New Mexico chase a signal across one night. Shot for almost nothing.

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A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

Fulci's best giallo, a fever of LSD dreams and a murder that may not have happened.

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In Fabric

A haunted red dress moves from customer to customer through a nightmarish department store.

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Relic

Dementia as a house that grows corridors. The last ten minutes are unexpectedly tender.

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Save the Green Planet!

A man convinced aliens are infiltrating Earth kidnaps a CEO to torture the truth out of him. Nothing prepares you for where it goes.

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Strange Darling

Told out of order in six chapters, shot on 35mm by Giovanni Ribisi. The structure is the whole trick.

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The Endless

Two brothers return to the UFO death cult they escaped, and time is looping in the hills.

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Watcher

An American in Bucharest who cannot speak the language and is not being believed. Quietly excellent.

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Cure

A detective investigating identical murders committed by unconnected people who cannot say why.

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Maniac

Joe Spinell wrote himself the lead and Tom Savini blew his own head off on camera.

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May

A lonely young woman decides that if she cannot find a whole person to love, she will assemble one.

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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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Santa Sangre

Jodorowsky's most coherent film, which is a comparative statement. A circus, an armless mother and a son who lends her his hands.

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The Girl Who Knew Too Much

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

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Woman of the Hour

Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, about the serial killer who appeared on The Dating Game mid-spree.

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A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

An Iranian vampire western shot in California, in Farsi, in black and white. Nothing else looks like it.

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Creep

Two actors, a cabin and a camera. Mark Duplass is the most unsettling thing in modern horror.

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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.

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Suicide Club

Fifty-four schoolgirls hold hands and step in front of a train in the first three minutes.

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Cuckoo

A German alpine resort, Hunter Schafer, and Dan Stevens doing an accent. Deeply strange.

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The Chaser

A former detective running an escort agency works out that his missing women all went to the same client.

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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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Carnival of Souls

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

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Ichi the Killer

Miike at his most gleefully unpleasant, and the sickbag handed out at Toronto was a marketing stunt that worked.