Carnival of Souls (1962)ĭreamlike terror on a tiny budget, from the neglected Herk Harvey, whose masterstroke was deploying the derelict Mormon amusement park in Saltair, Utah as a halfway-house between life and death. The pendulum of the title is a giant swinging blade, kept in the torture chamber in which Medina believes his wife (Barbara Steele) was accidentally buried alive. ![]() With the king of horror, Vincent Price, as the nobleman Nicholas Medina, his tormented performance is made all the more terrifying by Les Baxter’s screechingly haunting score. The torture chamber of a mentally unstable 16th-century Spanish nobleman is a setting rife with horror potential, and this loose adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s story pulls no punches. Deborah Kerr is perfectly cast as the repressed nanny who may or may not be projecting her own fears onto her wards. Prestige horror: a pristine distillation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw into unsettlingly ambiguous cinema. Hitchcock welcomes us in with a ticklish story of petty larceny, then slashes up the screen with a comfort-shattering attack on convention. A whole genre was born here, but few of its directors know how to keep twisting the knife with such mutinous verve. Christopher Lee plays the bloodthirsty Count, all curdling terror and knowing humour, while Peter Cushing provides solid support as Abraham Van Helsing. There have been countless imitations but none can lay a blood-stained glove on Terence Fisher’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s chilling novel. Fate clicks into place with an implacable certainty. We’re dealing with regicide, spirit prophecies, severed heads. ![]() ![]() Throne of Blood (1957)Īn honorary horror film, because Kurosawa places crisp, chilling stress on Macbeth’s supernatural elements – the title says it all. MR James’s “Casting the Runes” provided the delectably sinister plot – a curse is passed from body to body, often by subterfuge – and Jacques Tourneur fashioned a British occult chiller around it, whose sly wit and aura of dread are unsurpassed. Les Diaboliques (1955)Ī put-upon wife and her girlfriend conspire to murder her awful husband – but why, when the swimming pool in which they dumped the body is drained, is there no trace of him? Still one of the most clammily satisfying horror-mysteries of all time, utterly un-dated, with Henri-Georges Clouzot making expertly menacing use of the gloomy school in which the events increasingly spiral. The scene where the children float away from Mitchum down the river is justly famed his howl of rage as they escape are almost as terrifying as the hymns he sings as he relentlessly tracks them down. There is little more frightening in cinema than the sight of Robert Mitchum’s smoothly deranged serial killer, hoving into view, love and hate fighting their battle for superiority in the tattoos across his fingers.Ĭharles Laughton’s only film as director was savaged on its release now it is an acknowledged masterpiece, its stark cinematography and truly creepy themes utterly compelling.
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