The Horror, The Horror!

Carpenter- still in his golden era- serves up a step-by-step guide on how to make the perfect slasher movie. Stylish, succinct, and very scary- "Halloween" ticks all the right boxes. Bonus marks for the note perfect piano/synth offensive of the haunting soundtrack theme.

Robert Wise's elegant piece is a triumph of soft-sell horror. A good old fashioned ghost story, an eerie atmosphere of sustained threat and some gently understated performances and direction make this first-rate stuff. Quite the opposite of the recent re-make, which I'd advise you to avoid like the plague.

To call Jean Rollin's movies idiosyncratic is an understatement of pretty major proportions.

The second of Roger Corman's attempts to bring the hallucinatory, gothic tales of Edgar Allen Poe to the big screen. This one is my favourite, thanks mainly to some wonderfully atmospheric cinematography from soon-to-be-auteur Nic Roeg, a suitably maniacal central performance from Vincent Price as the nefarious Prospero, Jane Asher as the token damsel-in-distress and a sublime vision of the final masquerade sequence which doesn't disgrace the source text. Excellent stuff; Corman manages to even out-Hammer the Hammer Studio.

Argento's paean to his nation's foremost art form comes replete with his trademark blood and guts, a faceless, whispering killer in black gloves and undeniable technical brilliance. Also has one of the strongest central visual motifs I can remember in cinema, with his heroine bound and gagged and forced to watch the bloody murders of the killer via a set of pins taped under each eyelid.

Not strictly a horror movie, I suppose, but not strictly ANYTHING for that matter. Michael Mann's second directorial stab (after the potent thriller "Thief") is a real audience divider. Despite the flaws (and lashings of dry ice), I have to admit to being a fan. The cast is sturdy (Ian McKellen's Jewish doctor, Scott Glenn's mystical swordsman, Jurgen Prochnow's weary officer, Gabriel Byrne's SS gobshite) and it raises some interesting questions, not least about leadership and war. Some of the fascism/fantasy elements of the recent and brilliant "Pan's Labyrinth" reminded me quite strongly of parts of Mann's early opus. In one scene a hideous demon promises McKellen's doctor that he will kill Hitler and disband the Third Reich if he'll let him loose from the Keep in which he is imprisoned. Decisions, decisions, Sir Ian!

Italio-Horror: The Next Generation. Lamberto (son of Mario) Bava made a decent debut stab with this gleefully unpretentious splatter movie which has more in common with American zombie movies than the Italian horror tradition exemplified by his father.
Dario Argento chipped in with the screenplay (and an atmospheric opening track from his band, "Goblin"), which involves the mayhem which occurs when the violence shown onscreen in a Berlin cinema pours out into the audience in the form of the hideous, titular demons.
Absurdly visceral in its horror- heads are severed, eyes gouged, throats ripped open- "Demons" delivers the goods as far as die-hard horror fans go.
If you can stomach the gore, theres plenty of fun to be had: in the risible, foul-mouthed dialogue of characters such as "Tony The Pimp" and theres even a car chase sequence to the strains of Go West's "We Close Our Eyes". Heh, small wonder Lamberto rates it as his personal favourite.

Grace Jones' appearance in a movie is enough alone to spark fear in many moviegoers (remember "View To A Kill"?). This pulpy treat -involving a nightclub rife with vampirism- was omnipresent in the eighties yet disappeared with nary a trace shortly afterwards. Maybe- like the lady herself has proved recently- it's due a revival.

Wicked battle-royale between Lance Henriksen's gravel-voiced detective and Brion James' marvellously OTT psychopath, "Meat Cleaver" Max Jenke (allegedly the late star's favourite of all his roles). Has absolutely zilch to do with any of the other movies in the "House" franchise and is possibly all the better for it. Similar to Wes Craven's "Shocker" in some scenes, this has a memorable bit where Brion James (whose terrifying, cackling napper adorned some of the movie's posters) boasts "all that did was give me a hard-on!" after suffering the electric chair. A top loony villain indeed.

My pal Soutar had this early eighties chiller on video (under the UK title "House of Evil") and has an excellent shock-ending I can vividly remember. Foolishly, a screenshot of said ending was used on the cover of the video box in a pre-"Spoiler Alert!" era. The rest of it fares pretty well as a genre flick (and isn't as lurid as the US promotional campaign makes out), and was apparantly championed by Quentin Tarantino on his many film tours.