Horror – The Magnificent 60s

Onibaba / The Hole (1964) ****

Female empowerment doesn’t come any sharper. Two women slaughter exhausted samurai trying to escape a civil war in feudal Japan, dump the corpses in a deep hole, and sell their weapons and armor for food. Into their midst comes a deserter and the action slips into the sexual jealousy mode of The Fox (1967) and then takes another sudden shift into horror. And it manages all three incarnations of the tale with dexterity.

I knew all about this film long before Seven Samurai (1954) was on my horizon. As one who scanned newspaper advertisements and read contemporary movie magazines, I was well aware – though forbidden by dint of age to see it – of its controversial nature. I wasn’t exactly privy to what the controversy involved except that it was initially banned by the censor and that British posters hinted at the controversy.

I would soon learn that “exotic” and “primitive” were code words for nudity. A double standard operated in the offices of the British censor. Until the late 1960s, the only movies that could get away with a glimpse of forbidden flesh were foreign pictures destined for an arthouse.

Coming to it now for the first time I was more aware of it as a horror movie so I wasn’t ready for the first two elements – the blatant murder of men by supposedly vulnerable women and the sexual jealousy.

An older woman (Nobuto Otawa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) share a hut in the middle of fields and make a living killing any soldiers that come their way, exchanging their loot to a dealer, Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama), for small sacks of millet. Into their lives comes deserter Hachi (Kei Sato), who brings news that the son/husband of the women is dead.

He proves useful in adding to their meager supply of food through fishing. After participating in their next killings, he also proves a more adept negotiator with Ushi and returns with a bigger bag of millet than the women ever secured plus some saki and a couple of birds.

He’s clearly got his eye on the younger woman and she responds, sneaking out for a sex. This makes the older woman furious. There’s more than jealousy at stake. If Hachi and the younger woman decide to leave together, the older woman will be unable to capture and kill any passing strangers. Perhaps hoping Hachi might be in the mood for a threesome, she attempts to seduce him but is rebuffed.

But then the older woman comes across a samurai wearing a demon mask. When he ends up down the pit, she climbs down and steals his mask, revealing the samurai’s disfigured face. She uses the mask to scare the younger woman away from Hachi, persuading her that the demon is punishment for her affair. At first it looks as if the scheme works, but the younger woman soon takes to sneaking out again at night.

But then the mask proves impossible to remove. When they finally get it off, the older woman’s face is as disfigured as the original wearer and the younger woman is convinced the older woman is actually a demon.

This is tremendously well done. In the first 10 minutes there’s no dialog as we watch the women hunt their prey. The reeds in the fields are taller than any human, and there’s a Hitchcockian element when they sway and conceal. A good chunk of the picture relies merely on facial expression. And the three changes of tone are well managed so that we move from mere murder to the sexual and then the demonic. The eeriness is hard to shift.

Hypocrisy and lust are strange bedfellows, the possessive mother-in-law loses her power, the daughter-in-law is freed by the death of her husband, bad deeds go unpunished.

Written and directed by Kaneto Shindo (The Naked Island, 1960) and based on an old Japanese legend, this is so starkly filmed, with a unique three-act structure, that you come away thinking this must be due for a remake.

Holds up very well.

Insidious: Out of The Further (2026) **** – Seen at the Cinema

I can hardly keep up with the endless permutations of the MCU never mind keeping up with the various iterations and side hustles of horror series such as The Conjuring and this. So I tend to come at these fresh, as if they are an entirely new movie and I don’t have to spare a thought for how this ties in with what’s gone before. It was only when it was over I realized I had been tensed up the entire time, my heart constantly in my mouth, such was the dexterity with which the material was handled.

And while this isn’t in the same league as this year’s horror breakouts Backrooms and Obsession, it follows a similar line in that threat rather than gore is the keyword. Perhaps the one stroke of genius is to set parts of this in a dentist’s surgery, a place where our incipient fear never goes away, probably the only medical professional whose attentions we desperately try to avoid, whether that’s because, regardless of any soothing words, treatment is accompanied by pain, or whether, mouth willingly or reluctantly open, we are inviting invasion.

Momentarily in the middle of the picture it gets stuck in low gear as exposition takes center stage and we transition from haunted house to what was previously known as the “astral plane” but here is known as “The Further”, a kind of limbo where the dead, with the right guide, can return to Earth. And they’re not planning, having regained life, to subsist on blood so that’s a mercy, and they’re not, either, the sexy teenagers who abound in the genre. They’re old and decrepit, might require tanks of oxygen to survive.

Single mom Gemma Hall (Amelia Eve) still lives in the house where her mother went mad and seemingly committed suicide in conspicuously violent fashion 20 years before. The neighbourhood is beginning to be occupied by odd types, three old crones wheeling oxygen tanks. Gemma is beset by nightmares, one of which echoes the Backrooms notion of crawling further and further into intimidating confined space, entered not through a mysterious door in a wall as with Backrooms, but in something as un-mysterious as the makeshift den concocted by daughter Maya (Island Austin).

There’s another door in the proceedings, the Red Door that formed the title of the previous episode, but to be honest, I couldn’t recall its purpose in the prequel, and fact, here, it turns out (cue another IP involving other doors denoted by other colors) not to be the only one.

One awful crone turns up at the surgery and from his mouth Gemma draws a long string of human hair and various other bits of gunge from his decrepit teeth before discovering he has two sets of gnashers. Gradually, she realizes she is a conduit to this other world, with the help of tattooist-cum-mystic Claire (Maisie Richardson-Sellers).

The exposition, always a bit dodgy, leads her to believe that she can enter The Further and get back out of it without much ado, but that’s a misconception and in quick succession three generations of Halls are caught up in the scary proceedings with the steel-fingered monster leading a gang of trapped people back to life. Gemma’s boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea), a cop, is on hand mainly to prove that you can’t trust a man to do a woman’s job.

All told, I found this riveting stuff, especially the nightmares that turned into supernatural reality and the gradual encroaching on the normal by every shade of abnormality. There were a number of standout sequences, including the long crawl behind the sofa, the excavation of the terrible mouth and the onslaught of creatures from The Further.

Sometimes in horror films, just as the main criteria of presenters of cookery shows is too ooh and aah convincingly, all the heroine has to do is provide a varied register of screams but like the main characters in Backrooms and Obsessions, Amelia Eve (The Blind, 2023) is several levels above the basic.

Director and co-writer Jacob Chase (Come Play, 2023) helps make this a banner year for horror.

Stomach-clutching.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) * – Seen at the Cinema

Pretentious rubbish. An almighty bore masquerading as a) a spoof on slash horror films and b) having something important to say while c) not coming anywhere close to achieving either. Another of the dumb propositions foisted upon us by the connivance of the film festival industry to chuck at the general public movies that hoity-toity festival progammers and audiences believe deserve wider attention.

The most annoying element of this is that the subtext is merely a variation of the Dracula hypothesis that women are sexually drawn to dangerous men who can drive them into ecstasies of fear and penetrate them with sharp weapons. Here, this is spelled out in more detail, “the heroine” only able to achieve orgasm through terror and after running terrified with her breasts bouncing around and her erect nipples visible through translucent material.

And if you can work out how anyone can walk around with a slab of metal stuck to their head, you’re better than me. Oh, and to keep the woke element happy, the killer transforms from male to female.

And while we’re at the barking mad end of the horror subgenre let’s ensure that it’s the monster who’s creating the movies from his lair deep under a lake and that everyone who appears in the movies are his creations.

This is in the Anora (2024) league for repetition. Where that was sex, sex, sex, until we got the point, and way after we had got the point, this is blood, blood, blood, gushing literally like fountains or explosions from what’s left of a body once the monster, known as Little Death (which as you’ll no doubt be aware is a sly nod to “le petit mort”, the French description of orgasm), has finished chopping off select body parts.

Too much of this film is bits of the Camp Miasma series of films, initially big hits but then fading to direct-to-video flops, and which contain little more than variations of blood, blood, blood and people being impaled or chopped up.

If there is any emotional element it’s frigid lesbian Kris (Hannah Einbinder), technically in a polyamory relationship but that’s only because she permits her female bisexual partner to regularly have sex with a male, finally managing to overcome her inhibitions, helped along by Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original star of the Camp Miasma picture who bowed out after the first episode, and now lives on an abandoned tourist attraction based on the original or the original set (I couldn’t work out which).

In between making eyes at Gillian and watching the old movies in a cinema at Camp Miasma, the full-of-herself Kris is pitching her barmy notion for a horror picture where all the characters are figments of the monster’s imagination. Actually, the movie business section is the only bit that works, although Kris fails to note the negative response from potential stars.

Given that blood is the dominant color scheme, it’s not surprising that Kris and Billy end up soaked in blood and wandering, in surreal splendour, around a service station where, with equal surreality, kids are more interested in shooting each other with water guns than any stray adults who haven’t bothered to change out of their blood-soaked Halloween costumes.

This has come at us with the glow of critical approval, but, actually beyond the very repetitive obvious and some smartass intellectual dialog, this is an over-inflated mess.

I felt sorry for Hannah Einbinder (Seekers of Infinite Love, 2026) who clearly can act but less so for X-Files star Gillian Anderson who draws too much on Sunset Boulevard (1950). Written and directed Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw The TV Glow, 2024) who should stop believing her own publicity.

Truly awful.

The Shuttered Room (1967) ***

More Straw Dogs (1971) than The Old Dark House (1963) with for good measure a side helping of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) thrown in. After a super menacing opening, a sustained sense of threat is all the fuel we get to keep the story going, the horror elements kept at bay as much as the creature imprisoned behind the titular room in a mill.

The mill’s long since been abandoned since Susannah (Carol Lynley) spent a terrifying night there as a child when the creature broke out and had to be battered into submission by Susannah’s Aunt Agatha (Flora Robson). The mill’s on a remote island and Susannah’s back aged 21 to claim her inheritance. Only trouble is her cousin Ethan (Oliver Reed) thinks he tops the line of succession to inherit the tumbledown building.

Although her uncle is long dead, her aunt lives in a tower complete with hawk and strides around in the kind of black cape previously assigned to vampires. The mill’s still got a reputation, a local worker blinded and disfigured after being attacked by a fire-breathing demon. Susannah and husband Mike (Gig Young) have the idea of turning the mill into a summer home and have come by to try it out, though Susannah’s dormant fears keep spilling over.

So while we’re waiting to either the creature to break out again or for Susannah, in the manner of all foolish heroines, to trot up the stairs and push through the door, it’s up to Ethan and his gang to attempt to terrorize the couple. Clearly never being educated about incest, Ethan sets his heart on carnal relations with cousin Susannah.

If only he could get Mike out of the way. Trouble is Mike isn’t as meek as he looks and like Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock he’s got all those tricky karate moves so that when Ethan comes after him it’s the local who ends up in the river.

But Ethan’s got a cunning plan and sets up an ambush. The gang block the road with their truck and when Mike gets out of his car to investigate is hog-bound in a fishing net, receiving a few more traditional punches to boot. To pass the time the gang commandeers his vehicle and race up to their bound captive, braking just in time.

Meanwhile, Ethan is pursuing Deborah through the mill, intent on rape. Although she manages to humiliate him by calling his bluff that just enrages him and his rage intensifies. It’s still unclear how/why the creature escaped but we know it’s on the loose because it’s previously despatched a local girl who sneaked into the mill to steal Susannah’s nylons.

So while Mike manages to escape the thugs and hit them with some more karate chops, Susannah doesn’t really need his help, the creature coming to the rescue. Beyond the creature being her sister, there’s no further explanation for her imprisonment. There is a (kind of) shock ending.

The main problem is this looks as if it’s been filmed without any rehearsal, as if the actors have been hired for their previous roles. It’s no stretch for Carol Lynley (Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1965) to come across as a somewhat vacuous blonde. Menace is Oliver Reed’s (Hannibal Brooks, 1968) middle name and Gig Young (That Touch of Mink, 1962) has always got by on a certain easy charm though the chop-suey came as a surprise.

The real achievement from director David Greene, in his debut, is to get away without much real horror. By now H.P. Lovecraft was major source of horror. This was the fourth movie out of five in the 1960s drawn from his portfolio. In the current century there’s been no shortage of adaptations. Despite the lack of genuine horror, the other ingredients make up

The Vampire Lovers (1970) ***

Should have a lot more going for it. Female empowerment for a start. This would also, in today’s terms, be called a reboot of the Dracula legend, though it does originate from a different source than Bram Stoker. Or you could look at the bold exploration of lesbianism, none of the angst of The Killing of Sister George (1968) or the lyricism of The Fox (1967). Or you could fall back on that old chestnut – a camp reinterpretation of the vampire world, where female breasts rather than necks are the prime target. At the very least, it should have set up Ingrid Pitt (Where Eagles Dare, 1968) for stardom.

And while all these hold true, it lacks the key ingredient of the horror picture, any kind of tension or imminent threat. Nor does it carry the emotional weight of Countess Dracula (1971) – also starring Pitt – a twist on Dorian Gray, of a woman trying to hold age at bay with infusions of virgin blood.

So, in the end, it comes off as little more than a commercial decision to revive a fading genre with lashings of nudity, sex and lesbianism. Director Roy Ward Baker (Moon Zero Two, 1969) brings significant style to the proceedings even though the backdrops look as if they’ve been picked from a cast-off bin.

The tale is based on a story Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, that predated Bram Stoker. On the production side, Hammer and its American rival AIP teamed up, with the latter blamed for insisting on the sexual overdose. Although on that score you could as easily point the finger at the British censor known for his liberal approach to such shenanigans.

While it’s true that Dracula, especially as interpreted by Christopher Lee in Hammer offerings, carried a sexual frisson, there was never anything more than that, allowing the audience to determine whether the vampire was ever interested in a woman except for the purpose of sucking blood from her neck. Previously, diaphanous gowns and cleavage had been the extent of the sexual element. To switch the target from the neck to the breasts is a determined commercial move.

So, basically, with a gender twist, we’re following the old story – vampire stalks victims, finds acolytes, and falls victim to a vampire hunter. In the 19^th century, the beautiful Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt), traveling with her mother, a countess (Dawn Adams), is adept at inveigling herself into high-class households where she seduces the daughters and staff of the rich. Her first victim Laura is niece to General Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing) who subsequently enlists the help of vampire hunter Baron Hartog (David Wilmer), who mistakenly believes he had rid the world of the female vampire clan.

Next for the bloody breast treatment is a Mademoiselle Perrodot (Kate O’Mara), governess to Emma (Madeleine Smith). Perrodot becomes her lover and accomplice. Carmilla is an inclusive kind of vampire and if need be will seduce any male obstacle such as Morton’s suspicious butler Renton (Harvey Hall) while sucking the blood out of any passing male of more modest means.

Carmilla has the same get-out-of-jail-free as any male of the species and can take refuge in her grave until the heat passes. However, this time she’s intent on taking Emma with her. By now Baron Hartog has filled the general in on the threat, explaining that the Karnstein clan go back to the sixteenth century, and that he has dispatched many of the breed in traditional fashion, decapitation or stake through the heart, but he had been unable to find the night-time resting place of Carmilla.

So when Carmilla heads off to Karnstein Castle with Emma, she’s not expecting vampire hunters lying in wait. This time it’s the general who does the killing, making doubly sure by both cutting off her head and driving a stake through her heart. Emma recovers.

Given that any version of Dracula was essentially a franchise, Hammer/AIP managed to keep the Karnsteins going for another two episodes, Lust for a Vampire (1971) – which gave Yutte Stensgaard a shot a stardom – and Twins of Evil (1972) starring Playboy Playmates the Collinson twins.

While The Vampire Lovers was a launching pad for Ingrid Pitt as a new top-billed femme fatale, her marquee attraction didn’t last beyond the superior Countess Dracula. However, Pitt certainly brings gusto to the part and there’s an argument that the contemporary world deserved more explicit expression of that previously restrained sexual frisson. The counter-argument is that it’s blatant sexploitation.

Kate O’Mara (The Horror of Frankenstein, 1970), a future Scream Queen, would have been an obvious contender for the main role rather than a supporting one except that she refused to take off her clothes. Madeleine Smith (Taste the Blood of Dracula, 1970) became another future Scream Queen.

With Ingrid Pitt’s physical allure to the fore that limited the involvement of Peter Cushing (Frankenstein Created Woman, 1967). The more prominent of the wannabes was Jon Finch (Macbeth, 1971).

Written by Tudor Gates (Danger: Diabolik, 1968).

Still the argument continues – groundbreaking approach to the genre or mere sexploitation.

You decide – Amazon Prime currently has this.

The Devil’s Mouth (2026) **

What you have to remember is that the streamers are stuck with the same problem as the big movie studios back in the day when Hollywood was broken up into majors (MGM, Fox, , Paramount, Columbia etc) and mini-majors (United Artists, Disney, Embassy etc). The bigger the studio the more movies – in the 1950s/1960s, for example – you were expected to churn out. You had to feed the exhibitor system and if you cut back on production, exhibitors would stop favoring your product.

But there was no way every film you made was a big-budget production helmed by a top-name director and headlined by a top male and female star. For a start, there were not enough stars to go round, though certainly far more than the paltry handful who have any marquee attraction today, and studios could not afford to turn out so many films with big budgets.

But at least they were initially fair to exhibitors and the public. The lesser productions were tabbed B-pictures and they didn’t carry the marketing weight of the bigger movies.

And when the B-picture per se disappeared, the movies that came in at the lower end of the budget scale were called “programmers.” They were movies that filled a slot, heading out into distribution as the supporting feature, or going out on a wave of advertising in the knowledge that they would not last more than one week anywhere, once word-of-mouth came out.

So the problem for the streamers is that they can’t differentiate. They don’t own up to the fact that there’s just no way they can produce a substantial number of original content features a year so that subscribers feel they’re getting a good deal. So every new film is given the same big-push treatment.

This is just a programmer and misses the shark mark by a big margin. Not only is there no attempt to beef up the narrative – if not Paris, find a way for sharks to invade New York or London, why doncha – it’s nearly half the picture before the marauder appears and unlike others in the mini-genre nobody’s taken the trouble to come up with some scientific mumbo-jumbo to explain its unlikely presence in the a bunch freshwater Thailand caves.

And none of the characters are remotely interesting or jar with each other in an interesting fashion. There’s so much whooping of delight going on that it’s about as loud as the later screams.

And I’m not sure that the cheesecake/beefcake element can sustain the picture for 100 minutes, not when the buffed bodies are, with one exception, so empty-headed. You’re waiting for the shark – c’mon already – to start whittling down their number because they’re just so annoying.

The best scene has nothing to do with sharks. Sara (Kathryn Newton) – the only character of any interest – is attacked by a swarm of jellyfish and when the camera pulls back to reveal that she’s not just being stung by one of the creatures but has swum into a whole nest of them, that strikes a sharp note. Of course, one minute she’s wailing for her life, twisting this way and that, and the next she’s safe on the boat.

You might be tempted to keep going because you want to see easily the most annoying character, the big-mouth know-it-all Max (Lana Condor), get hers. But no such luck, because she’s whining all the way to the end. When their guide does a runner, there should be tension as they have to find a way out from the maze of caves but unfortunately, they don’t appear to have a single brain cell between them. Scooby Doo would have had a better chance of solving the puzzle.

And the shark ain’t much to write home about either although he’s pretty good on the threshing front and inclined, for reasons that are soon revealed as narrative necessity, to batter his head off the cave walls. This picture is so lacking in common sense that even though one of the group has a knife they don’t think to rip out the creature’s eyes when it’s trapped in a hole in the cave.

This started life as an acclaimed screenplay called Apex so who knows what happened to it along the way. It’s perfectly possibly that one of the trapped quintet could make it big in the movie business in the future and can look and laugh at this turkey and laugh.

Kathryn Newton (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, 2026) can’t hold this together and director Jeff Wadlow (Imaginary, 2024) should have known better than to try. Debut screenwriting gig for Aja Gabel (Five Star Weekend series, 2026) and Myung Joh Wesner (Skeleton Crew series, 2024).

You know how big a fan I am of shark movies, so I don’t need much to whet my appetite. This doesn’t come close

Another dud from Amazon Prime.

The Blood Beast Terror (1968) ***

As the title suggests there’s a vampiric element, and there’s not a great deal unusual in that, Hammer having successfully revived interest in bloodsuckers. What is unusual, however, and a couple of years before that studio’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) is the idea of female empowerment. Previously, the sole purpose of a damsel in a horror picture was to lay bare a convenient bosom for a passing thirsty creature, or, have their clothing disarrayed and let out a scream when a monster pounced.

The twist here is that the vampire is a woman, Clare (Wanda Ventham), and men who are the victims except on the occasions when her father Dr Mallinger (Robert Flemyng) hypnotizes young women in order to give the creature a blood transplant. The beast exists as a creature and then morphs into Clare. For a time it looks as if Clare is merely possessed, but in reality appears much more as if she is enjoying being the beast, abandoning the enforced respectability of the times, luring men into the forest to have her rapacious way with them, the men naturally thinking they are in for a romantic tryst rather than being targeted by a predator.

*Continuing the theme of misleading the audience, this poster cleverly suggests that it’s a man who is the beast and the woman who are the victims.*

There’s a wonderful scene that gives an insight into her mindset. Her friends put on a little play. Her role is the monster, a part she seizes with relish.

It’s one of those films you have to work out backward. In standard horror fashion it leaves the twist till close to the end and it would have been far more interesting if we had discovered at the outset that Clare was the beast, leading the men for the most part a merry dance, outwitting Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) and her adoring father Dr. Mallinger (Robert Flemyng).

The inspector, faced with a growing pile of corpses drained of blood, is baffled throughout, no Sherlock Holmes clever deductions here, and it naturally would not occur to any of the males, beyond Dr Mallinger who is in on the secret, to imagine a woman capable of not just committing such crimes but of exerting such power over a man. The story glosses over the genetics, it’s a version of Frankenstein obviously, but the background to it is missing, and I can see why. There has to be some mystery.

Hitchcock could not have done a better job of misleading the audience. For a start the story is told entirely through the male perspective. And it’s set up as a murder mystery, Quennell our lead as he dances from one corpse to the other, helped along in his information accumulation by lugubrious mortuary attendant (Roy Hudd), who is, ironically, as hungry as the beast, but for normal food rather than blood, always seen devouring something. Mallinger is not a mad professor either, but a distinguished one, celebrated in his field, giving lectures and attracting proteges like Britewell (William Wilde).

*Initial British release double bill cleverly bringing together Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee –*
*though in separate pictures*.

Although his daughter acts as laboratory assistant, Mallinger is hardly aware that his daughter is sizing up every male visitor as a potential victim.

The posters give away that the creature is a giant moth, and by and large the special effects (no CGI available of course) pull this off, the creature usually just glimpsed or seen from the distance, and the possibility that Mallinger is aware of what he is harbouring apparent when he enters a cellar wearing a leather hood and carrying a whip.

Tony Tenser’s production company Tygon has acquired cult status, in part for having the temerity to take on British horror giant Hammer at the height of its powers in the 1960s, and in part from the distinction of its output, making such films as The Sorcerers (1967) with Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing as Witchfinder General (1968) and Karloff, Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele in The Crimson Cult/ The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968). Tenser ploughed a different furrow to Hammer at a time when that studio was also expanding into bigger-budgeted movies such as One Million Years B.C. (1966).

Capably not to say cleverly director by veteran Vernon Sewell (The Crimson Cult) it is miles ahead of its time and generally delivers the goods. Peter Cushing (The Skull, 1965) is excellent as usual, Robert Flemyng (The Deadly Affair, 1967) proves a more interesting scientist than usual, steering clear of any craziness.

Wanda Ventham in her first leading role provides a fascinating character study, but you have to work backwards as I said, to realize just how good she is, the way she has, for Victorian times, her father under her thumb, and the seductive glances she casts at men, not to mention the ease with which she assists her father in his diabolical experiments without him realizing why she is so enamored. Female monsters had evolved from creatures before – in Cat People (1942), Snake Woman (1961) and Hammer’s The Reptile (1966) – but this was a more rapacious example of the species. Vanessa Howard (Some Girls Do, 1969) has a small role and you can spot Scottish character actor Glynn Edwards (Zulu, 1963) and television comedian Roy Hudd in his movie debut.

Screenwriter Peter Bryan (The Brides of Dracula, 1960), something of an expert in the horror field, turns the whole genre on its head with the gender politics examined here.

Backrooms (2026) ***** – Seen at the Cinema

Cinema is my oasis of calm. I go once a week on the same day (Monday), on my own, usually sit two rows from the front so I’m not interrupted by heads or popcorn or whispering, and sit in darkness for three or four hours, occasionally longer. It’s usually a seamless procession from car park to cinema. For a number of reasons, I hadn’t managed my weekly visit for a couple of weeks so I had a lot of catching–up to do so much so that a quadruple bill was on the cards. What could possibly go wrong to disturb my tranquillity.

For a start, my regular car park was shut for maintenance. So instead of a 10-minute walk from car park to cinema I had a 25-minute trudge. Access to the cinema proved more difficult than usual. The escalator was out of action and for some reason the people who make escalators make them with bigger steps so it’s always an awkward climb. Things didn’t look any better when I settled down for my first screening. There was no sound. We were shunted out and into another movie. I can’t even be bothered to tell you how bad it.

So my day required immediate redemption. I wasn’t so sure about Backrooms given I didn’t have the same ecstatic reaction to Obsession as others.

What is so astonishing about Backrooms is the tone. It’s not like other horror films built on a soundtrack of screams and visually propelled by jump starts and gore. The two main characters are, in the main, solid and observant. Failed architect and full-time misogynist Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs a struggling furniture store. He’s separated and apt to blame others for his situation, inclined to brush aside his heavy drinking and anti-feminism.

Mary (Renate Reinsve) is his therapist with a cruel past, her mother demented and paranoid. She often appears distant even in company, separated from the real world.

Trying to find out why his electricity bills are so high, Clark passes through a wall in his basement and finds another, peculiar, world, occupied primarily by pieces of furniture, in places stacked to the ceiling, or sinking at an angle into the floor as if the floor was sand, or disappearing into the ceiling. There are a host of corridors and doorways, some horizontal, some vertical, some sloping.

Using his architectural skills, Clark scopes out the labyrinthine space. He takes his findings to Mary who thinks he’s gone off his rocker. Clark enrols his two assistants to help him investigate the space further. But they come to a bad end. Shadows lurk, someone strong pulls on the end of a rope.

Eventually, Mary investigates her missing client and discovers this parallel world where people appear as only part of what they are, as if the maze remembers them in a different way.

There are some nods to horror but mostly this is psychological sci fi. It’s the unexplainable. Even scientists can’t explain it, relying on the experiences of those who returned to build up their knowledge of the other world.

But because director Kane Parsons in his debut is so restrained this has more of the hypnotic air of Last Year at Marienbad (1960) than anything in contemporary horror or sci fi. In the Alain Resnais film repeated dialog and repeated visuals did most of the work, but here it’s the endlessness, the implacability of the otherworld. Even the otherworldliness is understated, inanimate objects creating the disjointed mood. It’s like Planet of the Apes (1968) where escapee Charlton Heston discovers at the climax that he hasn’t escaped at all. Or Seconds (1966) where Rock Hudson can’t even escape.

One of the problems facing any sci fi or horror picture is the necessity to maintain the logic of the situation. Too often, a director or screenwriter, chasing another thrill, just slips out of the world they have created. That doesn’t happen here. This remains implacably, ruthlessly, logical so, although we have travelled through this strange world, we are no clearer at the end as to how it came into being or its purpose or how to avoid its trap.

There are no heroes and no heroics. Depending on your personality, the back rooms might provide succor. Or they might not.

It’s rare that you’d find two Oscar-nominated actors turning up in a low-budget horror picture. The impassive Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value, 2025) comes off better than the more emotional Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave, 2014) but there’s not much between them. I’m sure the film’s unexpected box office success will stir demand for a sequel, but I hope not, for as it stands it’s every bit as outstanding a venture as the best of sci fi. Written by the director and Will Soodik, also making his movie debut.

If only Steven Spielberg had shown an ounce of this originality in Disclosure Day.

All hail Kane Parsons.

Burke and Hare (1972) **

There’s probably a thesis to be written about how Hammer subverted the traditional horror picture by inserting lashings of nudity. The studio’s female vampire trilogy, beginning with The Vampire Lovers (1970), was presumably made with an eye on attracting bigger box office rather than upending the status quo and taking the exceptionally feminist approach of making females the predators. Although in the first of the series, men were the eye candy, for the second and third it appeared to make more sense for the prey to be disrobed females, a double whammy, if you like, of female nudity.

That formula then appeared to be applied to any movie roughly in the horror genre, sometimes, as here, with just awful results. Young starlets who might previously have been expected to restrict their titillation to cleavage, were now going all-in. It helps if for no apparent narrative function you can set half the tale in a brothel and also ensure part of the attraction of such premises is voyeurism, peep-holes through which the clientele can view a couple having sex.

Two of the damsels on ample display were Francoise Pascal, hitherto one of those trapped into risque roles such as School for Sex (1969), and Yutte Stensgaard, who’s marquee value appeared to have been terminated despite all her nudity in Lust for a Vampire (1971) and now reduced to a supporting role.

Apologies for concentrating on the licentious, but the movie has little more to offer. Burke and Hare preceded Dr Jekyll as Edinburgh’s most famous villains, but it’s hard to get worked up about their activities. Audiences were inured to grave-robbing since without an steady supply of body parts Frankenstein would have struggled to make his monsters.

The idea of people donating their bodies to medical science was hardly a hidden secret in the 1970s and the idea that you could build a movie exposing the hypocrisy of doctors seeking to use corpses for anatomy lesson seems far-fetched. There was no law against using corpses. As eminent surgeon Dr Knox (Harry Andrews) explains in supercilious tones it was not a crime to cut open a dead body.

*It was more customary to pair one horror film with another but since the producers didn’t have another one to hand they latched onto a western.*

So we are left with our graverobbing tag team of Burke (Derren Nesbitt) and Hare (Glynn Edwards) and various other low lifes in Edinburgh in the 1820s whose main preoccupation seems to managing a Scottish accent. There’s little that’s particularly gruesome about the graverobbing and given the victims are all dead a complete lack of gore. Even the one legitimate opportunity to add frisson, the extraction of a heart by Dr Knox during a class, is ignored.

Graverobbing, however, doesn’t supply all the needs of Dr Knox, so our pair resort to murder. That has the specific advantage of delivering fresher corpses. Suffocation is the murderer’s tool, since already slashed bodies might suggest even to Dr Knox that the corpses had met a different kind of end.

Where does the brothel fit into all this you might wonder? Is Dr Knox a regular? ‘Fraid not. For our entrance to the brothel we have to rely on sketchily-drawn medical students. Sex worker Marie (Francoise Pascal) ends up on Dr Knox’s slab after an unwelcome encounter with Burke. At some point, a little bit of detective work takes over, as Marie’s medical student lover is not satisfied with the post mortem declaring she died of alcohol poisoning.

But since you hardly care about any of these characters, it’s more like a documentary with sex and nudity thrown in.

Derren Nesbitt (Where Eagles Dare, 1968) didn’t enhance his reputation but Glynn Edwards rolled out another of his sneaky characters that provided a lifetime of supporting roles.

Directed by Vernon Sewel; (Curse of the Crimson Altar, 1968) from a script by historian Ernle Bradford making his debut.

A bit better than Orgy of the Dead (1965) but not by much.

The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) ***

Fanboys these days wouldn’t accept the sudden shift in the series without some far-fetched backstory. But in those days audiences never seemed to question why the new iteration of Frankenstein was less than half the age of the previous one (Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, 1969). Call this a remake or a reimagining or just trying to pull a fast one on a loyal moviegoer.

In fact, this goes pretty much back to basics – and beyond the addition of sex and gore it’s claimed in some quarters to be little more than a retread of The Curse of Frankenstein(1957) – and without Peter Cushing to provide chilling gravitas. Instead, Hammer have corralled in a younger rising star in Ralph Bates – who had made his movie debut in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and would form part of the studio’s horror stock company for the next few years – and in keeping with his age taken us back to the teenage Frankenstein, besting schoolmasters with his arrogance and scientific brain, before dropping out of university to concentrate on experiments with human life.

By this point he’s bumped off his father to inherit the fortune he requires to kit out his castle with the most modern equipment, including the not-so-advanced vat of acid. This time out there’s no suspicious cops breathing down his neck. And while there also no compromised youngsters representing innocence, his medical colleague goes along so easily with the ghastly experiments that his innocence would be called into question.

The tale is exceptionally lean, with none of the moral complexity of its predecessor. Primarily, the focus is on the baron building his monster piece by piece with the help of corpses delivered by unctuous graverobber (Dennis Price) though in an unusual gender twist for the period it’s his wife (Joan Rice) who does the actual work of digging up the graves.

Theoretically, there’s some sexual tension between Frankenstein’s mistress, housemaid Alys (Kate O’Mara). and the high-born Elizabeth (Veronica Carlson) who takes up residence with him after she’s left destitute following the death of her father.

Elizabeth had turned down over a dozen marriage proposals while waiting for Frankenstein to get down on bended knee, but he shows little interest in her and seems to thoroughly enjoy humiliating her by allowing her to stay but only as an employee.

Anyone who gets in Victor’s way ends up in the vat or is thrown to the monster. The monster (Dave Prowse) is the best thing in it. He looks like a real person, huge, tall and strong, and doesn’t react well to being chained up, preferring to go on a murderous rampage. No time is spent enlisting audience sympathy for any of the characters.

There’s an excellent twist at the end where the monster ends up in the vat, therefore relieving the authorities of anyone to blame for the serial killing, and priming, I would have thought, a sequel with Bates – Cushing returned in 1974 with Prowse again as the monster, though this Cushing appears to have managed to escape from the burning house in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. Go figure.

It was a big ask to expect Ralph Bates to step into the shoes of Peter Cushing. The movie is better viewed as Hammer’s attempt to revitalize its various horror franchises, and having dipped its toes into the world of the female vampire it would shortly invest in lesbian vampires and a sex-change Dr Jekyll (a concept light years ahead of its time).

None of the women auditioning for the title of Hammer Scream Queen have much to offer beyond cleavage. Kate O’Mara (The Vampire Lovers, 1970) has the better part, given she has the sense to try her hand at blackmail, but she’s generally insipid. In acting terms, Veronica Carlson hasn’t improved on Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. It doesn’t take much for Dennis Price to steal the show.

So, mostly a series of scientific experiments with a modest amount of gore and none of the nudity Hammer threw into the revamped female vampire series.

I was surprised to find I preferred Michael Carreras’ take on the legend in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed rather than that of writer-director Jimmy Sangster (Lust for a Vampire, 1971) making his directorial debut but with a bigger reputation as a writer among the horror cognoscenti. Hammer continued playing its role in blooding rising stars -this time round its Jon Finch (Frenzy, 1972).

I’ve seen this described as a parody but I didn’t find much to laugh about.