The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies Part 4

Ellison's film was by no means a cla.s.sic of the genre, but it was a compelling account of the final stages of a complete psychological breakdown. The allusions to mental illness would cause much heated debate when the film went to video release, but the gore-mongers of 1980 felt cheated too much in the way of disco and an absence of b.l.o.o.d.y carnage.

AWOMAN IS SEEN chasing through the woods; she plunges into a stream and then disappears. Soon after, she is recorded as yet another missing person. A shift in scene introduces four young campers, Craig, Peter, Ingrid and Joanie, trekking through this vast wilderness in search of a weekend of fun-filled adventure. As they hike through the woods, someone armed with a sharp spike has set about the slaughter of the other visitors to the area. Very soon, they will face the same nightmare as they encounter a dense part of the forest that becomes appreciably darker with each pa.s.sing step. With the sense of isolation becoming more obvious, something appears in the shadows brandishing a machete and carves up young Craig. The rest of the group flee into the forest with the maniac murderer in close pursuit.

James Bryan's film has been placed among the worst films in the genre and yet it has still managed to acquire something of a cult reputation. The story was highly derivative of the previous year's Just Before Dawn but on this occasion failed to offer the obligatory twist to the closing proceedings. Further to this, the acting left much to be desired along with a predictable plot beset by just too many gaping holes. The killer was given little in the way of background and the dubious make-up job certainly didn't do him any favours. However, for all of its failings Don't Go in the Woods Alone contained a series of expertly crafted shocks in addition to a collection of grisly kill scenes which led to an appallingly gruesome finale. While some of the photography gave away the fact Hank Zinman was still learning his trade, the tracking across this mountainous terrain certainly made up for this failing, being pleasant on the eye yet providing an ever so threatening backdrop. The film was released to video in the early 1980s, and may have pa.s.sed unnoticed if it hadn't made it to the UK's list of video nasties before being banned under the stipulations of the Video Recordings Act. Up until its uncut release in 2007, it was considered a video rarity.

TWELVE THOUSAND YEARS ago, tribe members Gar (Crackers Phinn) and Tra (Barbara Bain) were banished for ritually cannibalizing their kinsmen's children in the hope of gaining eternal youth. Before they were set free, the ageing queen of the tribe cursed them to walk the earth for all eternity; the only way that they can retain their youth is to continue to consume human flesh. After a long line of killing sprees lasting nigh on one hundred and twenty centuries, Gar leaves the Los Angeles park that he and Tra have made their home, and in a very short s.p.a.ce of time finds an apartment, meets and marries an attractive young lady (Linnea Quigley,) who gives birth to their daughter Bondi (Tamara Taylor). When she becomes a teenager, Bondi runs away from home. No longer able to endure the instability of her family life, she falls into the hands of a gang of rapists, in what are the most disturbing scenes of the film. When she escapes, thanks to her father's magic amulet, she joins two other runaways who by a strange coincidence live with the sister of the cave dwellers. Bondi now learns she is to be sacrificed and then devoured to allow Gar and Tra preserve their eternal life. When their plan is discovered zombie-like creatures rise from the earth and Gar and Tra acquire laser beam eyes in what will be the build up to the final showdown.

Lawrence David Foldes had only just turned twenty when he directed this rather ambitious film, so maybe his lack of experience can be forgiven. Don't Go Near the Park, which has also gone by the names Curse of the Living Dead, Nightstalker and Sanctuary for Evil, was a very amateur-looking production, blighted by unconvincing make-up, inadequate use of lighting and acting on a par with so many of these exploitative ventures. The story-line defied belief in its lack of coherence and culminated in a finale that its audience would never have been able to predict. The t.i.tle of the film was evocative of two other reasonably successful exploitation features, Don't Go in the House (1980) and Don't Look in the Bas.e.m.e.nt (1972); unfortunately, it did not begin to compare. Fans of horror scream queen Linnea Quigley will be delighted to see one of her earlier scantily clad appearances, in a career that continues to this very day. For Foldes this would be his skeleton in the closet as he moved on to new projects and gained experience that took him on to far greater things. While the gore effects were not particularly convincing, their excess, which focused on lacerated stomachs and their entrails being torn from them, gave the film an element of lasting notoriety. These scenes of course meant that when Foldes' film found its way into the UK in 1983 it was registered as a video nasty in the November of that year, not to be removed from the offending list until July 1985. It would be over twenty years before it would be seen in its entirety, following its release to DVD in 2006 in what had become, if only for a while, a more tolerant Britain.

CHARLOTTE BEALE (ROSIE Holotik) leaves her position as a hospital supervisor to join a secluded private mental inst.i.tution, headed by a Dr Stevens. His approach to therapy is somewhat radical in that he allows the psychologically disturbed to confront their inner demons and hopefully cure themselves. Before she arrives to take up her new role, Dr Stevens is murdered. The strict Dr Geraldine Masters (Annabelle Weenick) attempts to calm the patients with the help of Sam (Bill McGhee), a lobotomized giant whose mind is that of a child, manifested by his fixation for chocolate ice-lollies. When she arrives, her welcome from Dr Masters isn't the most cordial and she learns she will be sharing her accommodation with the inmates. To make matters worse her skimpy nurse's outfit also leaves nothing to the imagination. As she sleeps at night, the patients can be heard roaming freely around her bed. Among them are the nymphomaniac Allysson, who also has homicidal tendencies; Harriet, a woman haunted by the death of her child in a horrendous accident; the Sergeant who blames himself for the death of his platoon; Judge Cameron, a man with delusions of power and an unsettling predilection for an a.s.sortment of axes; and Danny whose insanity triggers the murders that follow. Each of them begins to test her sanity, pushing her to the brink in the hallways and confined stairways that lead to secreted pa.s.sageways and other hidden parts of this inst.i.tution. Nurse Beal comes to realize there is something seriously wrong here, but what will she find on her one visit to the bas.e.m.e.nt?

Sherald Brownrigg's low-budget exploitation shocker was originally ent.i.tled The Forgotten, and has also gone by the name Death Ward 13, but Don't Look in the Bas.e.m.e.nt proved a little more apt on its release to the drive-ins. This well-plotted film cleverly escalated the atmosphere, thriving on the air of obsessive madness, using unusually well-lit scenes whose starkness conspired to unsettle the viewer. The film wasn't exceptionally gory, largely because the slaughterhouse entrails Brownrigg had hoped to use started to rot due to the heat on the set. The stench was to prove a little too much for the cast and crew. Maybe it was the stench, but this piece of exploitation was cited as a video nasty in the August of 1984 as word spread of its release to video some eighteen months before in February 1983. It was removed from the list in December 1985 and released uncut in 2005. Although this version is unavoidably grainy, it couldn't disguise the gorgeous former Playboy Playmate, Rosie Holotik, who made it to that magazine's cover in April 1972.

IN A LONDON backstreet, a parked car reveals a man dressed as Santa Claus (John Ashton) getting rather aroused with a female acquaintance (Maria Eldridge). Before he can consummate his pa.s.sion, he realizes someone is prying on them and gets out of the vehicle, preparing for a confrontation. It never happens, for as he turns to face the offending peeping tom he immediately falls to the ground, the victim of an unidentified killer's blade. His female companion is the next to confront the a.s.sa.s.sin's sharpened implement. Shortly afterwards with a fancy dress party in full swing, another Santa (Laurence Harrington) is killed by a spear when it is driven through his head. The brooding Chief Inspector Harris (Edmund Purdom) and Sergeant Powell (Mark Jones) are immediately a.s.signed to the investigation, but they are baffled by the lack of evidence.

The murders continue as an aspiring newspaper reporter, Giles (Alan Lake), begins to take an unhealthy interest in the case. While he follows his own line of enquiry, Gerry (Kevin Lloyd), a p.o.r.n magazine photographer, focuses his lens on a model named Sharon (Pat Astley) posing in nothing but a Santa robe, thigh high boots and skimpy panties. When the police spot the t.i.tillating shoot, the pair is forced to make their escape into the London night. The terrified Sharon stumbles into a darkened alleyway only to be set upon by the killer, who wastes little time in slashing a razor across her exposed b.r.e.a.s.t.s. However, she manages to survive, only to be arrested for indecent exposure. Sometime later, in a sleazy strip club another Santa (Wilfred Corlett) engages a stripper (Kelly Baker) hidden away in the privacy of a booth. Before she can settle to her routine, he is butchered before her very eyes. We eventually learn that as a child the killer witnessed his father dressed as Santa canoodling with a party guest, before murdering his mother.

This sleazy mix of murder and gory splatter epitomized d.i.c.k Randall's low-budget approach to exploitative filmmaking, yet at the outset there were high hopes that it would be a lucrative successor to his chainsaw terror, Pieces (1982). Sadly, Don't Open Till Christmas turned out to be a problematic endeavour, running to almost two years in production. Lead actor Edmund Purdom and former s.e.x film director Derek Ford, the film's writer, both resigned from the director's chair leaving the film's editor and former s.e.x cinema owner Ray Selfe to bring this troubled feature to completion, but even he was unable to retain any sense of coherent narrative. The quality of the acting once again begged many questions, but the gore factor more than made up for these shortcomings, as the male victims were roasted, gouged, shot, stabbed, speared and, in a grimy toilet scene, castrated. In the repressed Britain of 1985, such a scene was only going to add to the film's difficult history and before it could be released in any format, it was subject to a substantial amount of editing, as was the scene involving the scantily clad Pat Astley. For all of its failings Randall's film was an intriguing glimpse of the sordid underbelly that the authorities in the UK tried to keep hidden from public view, but for those that so desired it was there ready to be found.

THE AGEING DORMITORY, Morgan Meadows Hall, has been condemned and is being made ready for the bulldozers. Joanne Murray (Laura Lapinski) and her friends have the unenviable task of removing the desks, beds and other paraphernalia over the Christmas holiday period. One of the girls, Debbie (Daphne Zuniga), learns her grandmother is ill and has to return home with her parents. However, before they leave the school Debbie's head is crushed off-screen by a car and her parents are seen to die at the hands of a mysterious killer, all of which takes place in less than thirty seconds. The next day the crazy looking John Hemmit (Woody Roll) is spotted loitering around the school premises. Soon after Bobby Lee Tremble (Dennis Ely) arrives, claiming to be interested in buying the old desks, but his attention seems drawn towards Joanne. As night falls, caretaker (Jake Jones) comes face to face with the prowler and gets a drill to the back of his head, in what is without doubt the goriest scene in the movie. The friends become seriously concerned when both the power and the phone lines are cut off. One by one, they are hunted down in the darkness leading to an intense climax that carries a surprise of its own.

The name The Dorm that Dripped Blood still evokes memories of Amicus's memorable portmanteau terrors made between 1964 and 1973, but this was another standard slasher movie, which crammed in virtually every cliche known to this strain of eighties-styled horror movie. Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow's Death Dorm college project was hopelessly underfinanced, culminating in the low-budget production values that have come to typify the genre. However, their efforts were rewarded when it was granted a limited theatrical release, albeit with much editing by the distributor. Carpenter and Obrow's concerns with the budget and a lackl.u.s.tre plot meant much of the earlier part of the film was spent exploring the bas.e.m.e.nt with flashlights, after they had immediately grabbed the audience's attention with a quite brutal series of murders. The slaughter would eventually resume with the head in the pressure cooker that has since been used on both the lurid cover to the video and the 2003 DVD release, and the body count would rise to a lofty ten before the killer's ident.i.ty was finally revealed. The shadows and point-of-view killer shots certainly worked to raise the tension, as did Chris Young's atmospheric score that would see him embark upon an incredibly successful career. Carpenter and Obrow would continue to nurture their writing and directorial skills to produce the more successful The Power (1984) and then The Kindred (1987). The diminutive student backing and limited cinematic release would make The Dorm that Dripped Blood one of the more obscure entries from the period, but its notoriety was guaranteed when it was prosecuted by the DPP to join the list of offensive video nasties in October 1983 following its release to video in June 1982. It was removed from the list in September 1985 but ten seconds of cuts to the drilling of the caretaker have still never been made officially available in the UK.

IN THE YEAR 1957 the locals of a quiet suburb in the town of Moorhigh have discovered Dr Rendell's dark secret that he and his son, Evan Jr., nicknamed "Dr Giggles" owing to his hideous laugh, have been ripping out the hearts of their patients in a macabre attempt to return the doctor's dead wife to life. The townspeople take it on themselves to put an end to the doctor's heinous practice and Evan Jr. is carted off to the asylum.

Thirty-five years later Evan Jr. (Larry Drake) escapes the inst.i.tution in which he has spent nearly his entire life. In his bid for freedom, he performs a heart removal in front of the inmates, and then continues on his way to avenge the trauma inflicted by his hometown, just like Michael Myers before him. The Rendell family home is now dilapidated, having been deserted these thirty-five years past. With revenge in mind, the nervously giggling Rendell Jr. now a.s.sumes his father's position and takes up residence in the abandoned house.

Teenager Jennifer (Holly Marie Combs) is ailed by an undiagnosed heart condition and her life has just gone even further downhill: her father, Tom (Cliff De Young), has moved his girlfriend Tamara (Mich.e.l.le Johnson) into their home. With the school term now at an end Jennifer and her boyfriend Max (Glenn Quinn), along with a group of friends, seek out some teenage kicks at the Rendell house, not realizing Jr. is back in town. For them it's now too late; true to the slasher trope of the 1980s Rendell takes the group out one by one, this time using an array of medical instruments, each of which are only ever used once, surely in the interests of hygiene, and then begins his house calls, saving Jennifer for his final piece of surgery. The gore certainly splatters across the screen, with shredded flesh ripped and torn by this vile a.s.semblage of implements, and in the spirit of Freddie Kreuger a mocking repartee of jokes accompanies each gruesome murder. The darkly comedic carnage brings death by blood pressure cuff, bladed thermometer, suffocation in the form of bandaging, castration, poisoning, lethal injections and a bizarre rotating drill inserted into the nasal cavity. Rendell Jr.'s imaginative quest for revenge knows no bounds.

With Dr Giggles, Manny Coto produced a mean-spirited film reminiscent of the formulaic excess of the early eighties frenzy for slashers, but his proliferation of wickedly humorous one-liners insisted it was not to be taken too seriously. The film was unapologetic in acknowledging its grisly predecessors, again and again it has to be said, with Larry Drake excelling in the lead role as the deranged Rendell Jr. Dr Giggles never claimed to be original; rather, it was an unashamed homage to the films that had made the slasher genre so special for so much of the 1980s. A two-issue comic book adaptation of the film ensued, published by Dark Horse Comics, which varied to the version that finally appeared on screen due to it being based on an earlier draft of the script. Queen's Brian May also stepped in to produce the score.

AGROUP OF CHILDREN are watched as they happily play together, all except one. Lam appears a little withdrawn and bullied by his stepfamily; he also has a tendency to spy upon his parents as they make love and then catches glances of his stepsister as she takes a bath. He grows up to become a disturbed brooding individual, dogged by s.e.xual inadequacy. He drives his taxi through rain-swept nights and then returns to the home of his stepsister to spend a little too much time alone in his room. While Lam and his family continue with their everyday lives, the police are investigating the discovery of a series of horribly disfigured bodies. By chance, a gruesome snapshot is found; then Lam's tale begins to unfold using a sequence of flashbacks from the moment when he is arrested in a photography shop. Lam is another crusader with a message from G.o.d to remove the fallen women from the streets of Hong Kong. The scenes depicting his interrogation are brutal as the police extract his grisly confession. Battered and bruised Lam begins to reveal his murderous obsession, which he has seen fit to capture on videotape and in the hundreds of shocking photographs he had hidden away detailing dismemberment, mutilation and necrophilia. As payment for his appalling catalogue of crimes, Lam suffers at the merciless hands of the authorities and his own stepbrothers and sisters.

Hong Kong's celebrated Danny Lee made his directorial debut in a stylish movie that would have major bearing on the course of the region's burgeoning film industry. His feature was based on a series of murders that terrorized Hong Kong in 1982, perpetrated by the former colony's only convicted serial killer. A technician in a photo lab had processed one of Lam's rolls of film and was shocked to find images of what appeared to be a woman's mutilated breast; this turned out to be one of hundreds of similarly disgusting photographs depicting lacerations, body parts and alleged necrophilia. After several days of violent interrogation taxi driver Lam Gor-Yu admitted to this crime and then continued in his revelations on his murder of three other girls, each of whom he considered "bad and filthy". He attempted to justify his actions by claiming his orders had come from G.o.d. He was later sentenced to lifelong imprisonment.

Both Lee and his co-director Hin Sing "Billy" Tang worked with their cameraman Kin Fai Miu to fashion a series of haunting flashbacks that were swathed in exaggerated blues and reds to forge a sense of dread in Lam's shadow-laden world and ensured every single frame taken in his room was meticulously considered. There was plenty of blood of guts on show in Dr Lamb, but the violence and brutality was nowhere near as excessive as the splatter observed in the following year's The Untold Story. This, however, would not save their work from the scrutiny of the Hong Kong censors, who were only prepared to give it a Category III rating when several even more extreme shots were edited. There is, however, a very rare Spanish videotape which is alleged to contain the original uncut version, but its graphic scenes apparently only run to an extra fifteen seconds. Such was the impact of Dr Lamb, the flashback structure would be repeated in The Untold Story and the team's scenes of rape and mutilation would be copied in Otto Chan Juk Tiu's gore-drenched Diary of a Serial Killer (1995). With the demise of the American slasher and Italian splatter, the age of the extreme Hong Kong Category III was now about to dawn.

WHEN JONATHAN HARKER (John Van Eyssen) arrives at the castle of Count Dracula, he comes upon a luscious young woman who claims she is being held prisoner. Before Harker can attend to her needs, the Count makes his first appearance and brusquely ushers the fatigued Harker to his room. In the confinement of his locked chambers, Harker begins to write his journal and we learn he has journeyed to Klausenberg to put an end to the evil Count's reign of terror. In the days that follow, he again encounters the young woman and as she begs for help, her demeanour begins to change. To Harker's shock, she becomes feral and sinks her teeth into his neck just as an enraged Dracula emerges from the shadows, baring his fangs. Soon after awakening the next day, he makes preparations and then armed with a stake he descends into the crypts beneath the castle. There he finds the coffins of Dracula and the temptress that gorged on his neck. He wastes no time in impaling the woman, but is too late to deal with Dracula, for the evil Count has already risen and is ready to defend himself.

In the weeks that follow, Dr Van Helsing makes his way to Klausenberg. There he is presented with Harker's journal and then at the castle discovers his friend has been killed by the Count. He returns to tell Arthur Holmwood and his wife Mina, the brother and sister-in-law of Harker's fiancee Lucy Holmwood. Lucy appears to be ill, but as Dracula descends onto her terrace, we learn she too has fallen to this vampiric curse. Although Van Helsing does all he can to save the girl he knows she now belongs to the Count, giving him no option but to drive a stake through her heart. Van Helsing now has to return to Dracula's castle in an effort to trace the Count's coffin, but Mina too has been cursed by his deathly bite. Although Van Helsing and Arthur do all they can to watch over the ailing girl, Dracula enters her room and once again savours her blood. However, the Count knows he must return to the security of his castle before sunrise and in his desperation tries to bury Mina, still barely alive, in the grounds adjacent to the crypts. Thankfully, Van Helsing and Arthur manage to thwart him, leading to a fateful altercation in the castle. When all seems lost, Van Helsing, in one of horror cinema's most iconic moments, drags the curtain open to allow the sunlight to pour into the room; he then uses candlesticks to create a cross and forces Dracula into its glare. There is no hope for the Count as he crumbles into dust and as he does, Mina is seen to recover. As the film comes to an end, Dracula's ashes are blown away in the wind, leaving only his ring to remind us of his wicked reign.

While there were many changes to Bram Stoker's original novel of 1897, Jimmy Sangster created a script that captured the essence of the Dracula myth as it pitted the venerable good against the very personification of evil. Under Terence Fisher's splendid direction both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing excelled, bringing a menace and charm to their roles as they led to one of Hammer's most memorable finales. Bernard Robinson's set designs enhanced the Gothic milieu, as the mists seen drifting across the graveyards worked to intensify the film's foreboding allure. Along with its predecessor, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), this set the tone for Hammer's success for the next twenty years, combining the Count's bloodthirsty l.u.s.t with a s.e.xual chemistry never before seen in cinema. Dracula was to have a major influence on the exploitation boom of the 1970s, paving the way for the eroticized flow of blood that immersed the extreme cinema of those years. To modern eyes, these b.l.o.o.d.y scenes appear somewhat tame, but in its day many of these scenes would have been considered unusually shocking.

When the film was released to the theatres of the United States as Horror of Dracula, certain scenes had been removed, most notably the onset of the impaled Harker's decomposition, which had already been censored in the UK. A considerable part of Count Dracula's putrefaction as he met his end was also consigned to the cutting room floor, only to be seen by audiences in South East Asia. In the forthcoming years Christopher Lee would return to this role on a further six occasions while Peter Cushing was to play the part of one of the Van Helsing family four more times. Lee had followed in the footsteps of Bela Lugosi, creating a monster for a whole new generation.

DIRECTOR ABEL FERRARA a.s.sumed the lead role in his film The Driller Killer, to give a crude but nonetheless effective performance as Reno Miller, a struggling New York painter. Reno's world is slowly disintegrating and as it collapses, so his sense of frustration begins to intensify. Early in the film, he denies knowing a derelict in a church who it turns out is really his father; his constant sarcasm provokes arguments with all and sundry; he is behind on the rent on his flea-bitten apartment and has bills that he can never pay. In this grimy downtrodden part of Manhattan this man is being pushed to the very edge and his deteriorating state of mind isn't helped by his roommates, Carol (Carolyn Marz) and the drug-addicted Pamela (Baybi Day). They are on show to provide an element of sleazy eroticism, with their s.e.xual proclivity and lesbian frolickery, which was a rare sight for the general cinema-goer in the late 1970s. To make matters worse, just as he is trying to complete his masterpiece a punk rock band moves in nearby. The noise gets louder and louder and Reno's frustration begins to turn to rage. Even as he sleeps, his dreams are plagued by blood-strewn imagery and the deafening sound of drills. When he finally snaps he doesn't take it out on the band; instead he cuts loose, murdering the down and outs in the surrounding area with a recently purchased cordless drill. The first gets it in the chest with Reno gleefully laughing. With the filter on the camera's lens now glazed in scarlet, this night becomes one of slaughter as the vagrants are drilled down one by one. The following day an infuriated Reno bores a derelict's hands into a wall, in a scene of suffering symbolic of a mock crucifixion; he then delivers his victim to eternal salvation. When his painting fails to sell to Dalton, a gay gallery owner, Carol packs her bags and leaves him, condemning Reno to the inescapable maws of insanity. Dressed in black with lips smeared in blood red, an unstable Reno then invites Dalton over to his apartment. Reno's new image is striking but it will be the last Dalton ever gets to see. With Pamela dispatched off screen Reno's drill-crazy trail leads to Carol and her estranged husband for what will be a nail-biting conclusion.

Abel Ferrara's low-budget psychodrama has been described as "a bargain bas.e.m.e.nt Taxi Driver", a sensationalized observation of a man's descent into madness, in essence the victim of a decaying urban landscape very similar to Eloy de la Iglesia's Cannibal Man (1972). The budget was such he had to film in his own Union Square apartment and shoot on the surrounding streets. While not regarded as a true slasher picture, the extremes in violence leading to the climactic finale have rarely failed to excite that breed of horror connoisseur seeking an objectionably dark movie, and there is a notable absence of light in these grimy locales. This film makes you aware of the violence contained in this grisly horror, without needing to supply a body count of blood-soaked torsos. The soundtrack was also a blast back to a singular moment in history, the late seventies New York punk scene led by the Ramones, New York Dolls, Television and Patti Smith.

Although well received on its American release in 1979, it was to provoke unprecedented concern in the UK, and was duly hounded by the country's self-appointed moral guardians. This was primarily due to Vipco's advertising campaign, which in 1982 endorsed the shocking image of a man being drilled through the forehead by the Driller Killer. The British public were rarely privy to such graphic imagery and as a result the film was d.a.m.ned by the wrong kind of attention. There were numerous complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency and further opposition in the national press. National outrage backed by the tabloid press was quick to blame The Driller Killer and its bloodthirsty ilk for a decline in social values, which was ironically fundamental to Ferrara's original narrative. Few of its persecutors would have ever seen the film, but the attention grabbing sensationalism of the advertising campaign had completely backfired. According to Mike Bor, the Princ.i.p.al Examiner for the British Board of Film Cla.s.sification: "The Driller Killer was almost single-handedly responsible for the Video Recordings Act 1984". The film was listed as a video nasty and banned in the UK. It wasn't until 2002 that this movie was officially released uncut to what by then was a new generation of horror enthusiasts in the UK.

IN THE OPENING sequence of Jody Dwyer's Dying Breed, the early nineteenth-century Tasmanian legend Alexander "The Pieman" Pearce escapes his penal colony confinement to seek refuge in the island's forests and turns to cannibalism. Almost two hundred years later four young adventurers arrive on the island, one of whom, Nina, is solely intent on carrying on with the research her sister started prior to her death eight years ago while looking for the last remaining Tasmanian Tiger, a species acknowledged to have become extinct in the first part of the twentieth century. In a similar way to Wolf Creek (2005), there are references to missing backpackers and the local inhabitants are just as unsettling. Nina and her companions soon discover that her sister was yet another victim of the cannibalistic inbred descendants of Alexander Pearce. This family will do all that it takes to ensure the survival of their deviant bloodline, resulting in a desperate fight for survival for these young explorers.

First-time film director Dwyer explored the legends from Tasmania's past, and twisted them very subtly for his own purposes. The real Pearce, after being sentenced in Ireland to penal transportation for the theft of six pairs of shoes, had escaped with seven other prisoners and when captured admitted to cannibalizing some of his fellow escapees as a means of survival. The judge refused to believe his grisly tale and he was again imprisoned only to escape with another inmate, whom he also readily consumed. This time he was convicted and was hung in July 1824. His fictional descendants have much in common with the inbred terrors of Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Ma.s.sacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Wrong Turn (2003), with Rebecca (Melanie Vallejo) strung up and savagely dismembered in a way that was reminiscent of Ruggero Deodato's hugely controversial Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Dwyer was very a.s.sured in his direction, affording his tale a pace and then raising the tension amidst the ominous backdrop of this verdant forest, before delivering the visual torment that has become intrinsic to the modern-day horror movie. The cast would include the already prolific writer and actor of Saw (2004), Leigh Whannell, as Nina's boyfriend Nat, who true to form made a convincing addition to a film, which was h.e.l.l-bent on becoming ever more vile as it journeyed deeper into this eerie terrain. The excruciating sequence with the bear trap in the mineshaft compounded by the close-in shots detailing a pickaxe to the head would delight the slavering gore-mongers, but the film's notoriety was ensured when the promotional poster was censored by an Australian company specializing in bus shelter advertising. Its depiction of a half-eaten pie, containing an eyeball and the remains of a finger, was just a little too much for them to stomach.

A DARK, GREEN-TINTED moon hangs over the Louisiana Bayou as Clara Wood (Roberta Collins) wanders the streets after being dismissed from the town's brothel. The downtrodden girl had refused a dubious proposition for s.e.x from a sodomy-loving punter known as Buck (Robert Englund) and now makes her way through the misty swamp to the secluded Starlight Hotel. The place it has to be said has seen better days. When she enters the rundown reception area, she is met by the maniacal owner Judd (Neville Brand) and his pet crocodile languishing in the swamp close to the porch. Judd, we soon learn, has severe difficulties in being able to communicate with ordinary people. When he discovers Clara worked as a prost.i.tute, he flies into a maddened rage and attacks her with a pitchfork before feeding her to the crocodile. It isn't long before an irritable couple and their daughter arrive at the hotel. They have to watch as their pet dog is devoured by the crocodile. So follows Harvey Wood (Mel Ferrer) and his daughter, who are looking for his missing daughter, Clara, the prost.i.tute seen at the beginning of the film. They are accompanied by the local sheriff. Each will eventually meet their fate at the hands of the psychotic Judd and his insatiable pet.

There is little in the way of plot to Tobe Hooper's low-budget follow-up to The Texas Chain Saw Ma.s.sacre (1974); rather, the viewer is presented with a raw and nasty nightmare d.a.m.ned by an overriding sense of inevitability. The cheap sets and swampland mists enhance the unsettling atmosphere in a tale based on the ma.s.s murderer Joe Ball, who it is alleged in the 1930s fed over twenty of his female victims to the alligators in his bar. True to its exploitative nature, Hooper's film has been pa.s.sed off under a variety of different names, including Death Trap, Horror Hotel, Horror Hotel Ma.s.sacre, Legend of the Bayou, Murder on the Bayou, Le Crocodile de la Mort and Starlight Slaughter, and has also been marketed as his lost movie.

In the United Kingdom on its 1978 release, it was censored to make it palatable for a British audience, but managed to get into the country as an uncut video in July 1982. With Mary Whitehouse taking a personal dislike to the movie, it was predictably listed as a video nasty in July 1983, but was later removed in December 1985 following several unsuccessful prosecutions. When it was again released to video in 1992 a total of twenty-five seconds were removed to limit the film's excessive violence.

KAI (ANTHONY WONG Chau-Sang) is deep into his s.e.x with the boss's wife. When his boss catches him in the act, he is threatened with castration. This doesn't seem to bother Kai; he slaughters his boss and his a.s.sociates along with his wife and then flees to South Africa. Ten years later, still in his self-imposed exile, he endures a lowly existence as a poorly-paid employee in a Chinese restaurant. While trying to buy meat for the restaurant from a Zulu tribe he rapes an unconscious woman, who we learn is infected with the Ebola virus. His frustrations begin to mount in the restaurant and once again his temper gets the better of him and he murders his boss and his wife after raping her. His sick mind then tries to hide the evidence of his crime; he chops up their dead bodies and turns them into hamburgers, which he offers for sale in the restaurant. The virus begins to spread. As the police dragnet begins to close, he returns to his native Hong Kong and continues in his scurrilous activities. The Ebola epidemic begins to hit the streets of Hong Kong.

The opening sequences to Herman Yau's The Ebola Syndrome feature a violent intensity rarely experienced in western cinema; this is gruesome B-movie horror all the way from Hong Kong, inspired by its twisted predecessors Dr Lamb (1992) and The Untold Story (1993). Although some of the s.e.x is suggestive, the rape scenes are horribly brutal; the enigmatic Kai is at heart one vicious individual. The gore levels are the equal of anything the South East Asian film industry has to offer, which includes a series of highly innovative scenes as bodies are butchered to make hamburgers and eyes are avariciously chewed out of a living head. The depiction of the Ebola virus is probably the most disturbing element in this film; for the infected their lives will become one of unfathomable horror. However, Yau's film, although controversial, manages to play out as a macabre comedy with Anthony Wong shining in his portrayal of the demented Kai.

IN THE REMOTE community of Paddock County, North California, a killer freely stalks the homes of the local female residents, chopping them up with a sharpened axe. When a dead body is discovered in the ceiling of a local tavern, the sheriff dismisses it as suicide. This lax att.i.tude only encourages the killer as he wantonly plies his brutal trade, even during the hours of daylight. One of them of particular note takes place in a car wash, in a violent episode inflicted by a figure whose face remains hidden by a white mask, not unlike that worn by Michael Myers. The sheriff displays little interest in the escalating severity of the murders, still choosing to play their significance down. A series of red herrings are thrown into the proceedings, including the creepy pastor and a newly arrived pianist. The most likely suspect remains young Gerald, who is enamoured by Lilly, the cute heroine of the proceedings. As the body count continues to rise, they take it on themselves to investigate these crimes and are certain they know the killer's ident.i.ty. Then it becomes their turn as the killer begins to prey upon them. This game of cat and mouse reaches absolute fever pitch when the film comes to the most abrupt of ends, with the killer's ident.i.ty having only just been very subtly disclosed.

Jose Ramon Larraz had already carved a reputation with his lesbian Vampyres movie in 1975. Edge of the Axe continued his a.s.sociation with horror, this time with a modest low-budget slasher, produced when these films had fallen from favour. His direction, while slow between kills, was carried out with gusto, thus affording the attacks an unbearable degree of ferocity and in their wake dissipated an unsettling ambience across an isolated town firmly caught in the grip of fear. The photography shone throughout, savouring the kill and then surprising the audience with some quite beautiful backdrops. The director had a reputation for casting and using the camera's lens to adorn his films with some rather beautiful women; Edge of the Axe was no exception. However, contrary to the slasher trope, these girls remained fully clothed, which duly caused howls of derision among the genre's teenage addicts. Visually Larraz's killer was reminiscent of Michael Myers in Halloween and as with this psychopath before him prowled though this film with a disturbing air of menace. The BBFC removed a reported twenty-six seconds of footage when they gave it an "18" certificate, making certain murder scenes appear awkward, suggesting individual frames had gone missing; this appears all the more likely when comparing the ease with which the camera flows during the remainder of the film. Over twenty years later conjecture continues as to whether an unedited gory version of Edge of the Axe actually does exist.

IN A DARKENED room, an intimidating voice (Hector Alterio) instructs a lone man (Manolo Solo) to sit down and attach himself to an electrically wired chair, which stands in the beam of a single spotlight. His air of confidence gives the impression he is willingly partic.i.p.ating in a scientific experiment; this seems all the more likely when his arms begin to bleed and he appears completely unaffected by the flow of blood. However, just beyond the shaft of light he begins to become aware of a build up of indiscernible noise, which as it increases in intensity starts to undermine his self-a.s.surance. As his ordeal persists the resonance becomes more threatening, but the darkness continues to veil its mysterious source. As the fall of the light becomes more focused, his imagination conspires to deceive his mind, yet still he fights to retain his composure. A hand then seizes his shoulder. He turns to be confronted by a masked figure adorned in a butcher's ap.r.o.n and then to his horror realizes a severed finger has been placed on his head. Tearing the wires from his body, he breaks free of the chair.

While all of this has been going on the taunting somewhere in the background has continued without relent. The masked menace now stands astride him; it is obvious something is seriously amiss. In only a matter of minutes, his situation has gone through a drastic change as laughter is heard from an audience obscured by the shadows. The man at the centre of the experiment withdraws to the apparent safety of his chair as a stream of blood drips onto his body. His would-be a.s.sailant then uncovers a severed head, and tosses it into his lap. Reeling in terror, he then has a gun forced against his head. In the darkness, a group of excited onlookers steadily count down to zero. At the allotted moment, the gun goes off and the man crumples to the floor. There he lies, dead. Light suddenly floods the room as the camera draws back to reveal it is almost empty. The man in the mask is seen as he is ushered away, his face wracked in self-recriminating torment.

A year after its release the highly original El Tren de la Bruja, which has also been pa.s.sed off as Spook House, became the recipient of the Grand Prize for Best European fantasy short film at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival and also gained recognition as the Best Spanish Short at the San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival. It is hard to believe this intense piece of storytelling was completed in only two days. Koldo Serra would eventually move on into a successful career in television, and his film could well have drifted into complete obscurity if it had not been for the impact of Eli Roth's Hostel (2005). There are many who believe this short feature provided the inspiration for Roth's blockbuster. Unlike Roth, Serra kept his audience guessing, refusing to make it clear as to whether this was truly an experiment, or, as in Hostel, it was really a sinister game of torture and death to entertain those of incomparable affluence. Rather than relying on the graphic nature espoused by its successor, Serra made adept use of light and sound to create a sense of atmosphere and ultimately instil in both his audience and the protagonists on screen a sense of fear. He also had the good fortune to attract an actor of the calibre of Manolo Solo, who in only eighteen minutes endured a remarkable transformation in character.

To kako, or Evil as it was billed outside its native Greece, was the country's first encounter with the zombie apocalypse. When three construction workers stumble upon a hidden cave, they are attacked by an unseen force that rushes towards them in a sequence, which invites comparison with Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981). Although the team manage to escape the cave, none of them can remember what actually happened down there and it is obvious something in their demeanour has changed. As evening falls, the three go their separate ways only to undergo a shocking metamorphosis to rise as zombie-like creatures with an insatiable need to feed upon human flesh, turning their victims within seconds into the walking dead. In a few short days, the entire city of Athens falls to the ensuing carnage, while a few survivors try to escape this mindless bloodthirsty frenzy, leading to a truly dark finale that is rarely observed in American zombie cinema.

There was some genuine humour observed in this film, some of which was inspired by Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992), but it was essentially a brutally violent offering very much in the mould of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002). With a hopelessly limited budget, Yorgos Noussias's effects team returned to the seminal Dawn of the Dead (1978) in blowing away zombies' heads, and then dishing up decapitations and disembowelments galore as they set out to annihilate anything that lived. His film moved at a fast pace even though the zombies can only shuffle through the Athens streets tracked by inventive camera work and split-screen editing. The cast eagerly embraced their roles, insisting the viewer roots for their escape from this infernal nightmare, but the denouement seeks to disturb, offering a doom-ridden finale. Noussias returned with more backing for a highly praised prequel, Evil In the Time of Heroes (2009), starring Billy Zane, in which many of the actors apparently worked without pay.

THE EVIL DEAD was first introduced as a virtually unknown feature in 1978 ent.i.tled Within the Woods, created with the purpose of enticing potential investors to fund Sam Raimi's idea for a horror movie. This short film had similarities with the motion picture it later sp.a.w.ned and included among the cast one Bruce Campbell. The Evil Dead was Raimi's debut as a director and although its comic book-styled horror proved hugely controversial, he immediately distinguished himself, making an extraordinarily powerful movie with a very restrictive budget.

Five college kids, Ash (Bruce Campbell), his girlfriend Linda (Betsy Baker) and their friends Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss), Scott (Hal Delrich) and Sh.e.l.ly (Sarah York), spend the night in an isolated mountain cabin set in a deep forest. The cabin is strangely similar to the refuge shown in the cla.s.sic Norwegian terror of 1958, Lake of the Dead (De Ddes Tjern), directed by Kre Bergstrm. As they make themselves comfortable, they find an ageing tome scribed in hieroglyphics sitting beside a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The tape, recorded by a professor of archaeology, warns of the evil incantations entered in the Sumerian "Book of the Dead", and their power to invoke a malevolent force hidden in the woods. This force has but one desire, to possess and then corrupt those that it encounters. Once the malignancy has taken hold there is only one way it can ever be exorcized, by bodily dismemberment.

The students foolishly take little heed of the professor's warning and all too soon the evil in the woods begins to sweep around the cabin, with Sh.e.l.ly the first to be affected. She is transformed into a murderous crone. Poor Cheryl is then lured into the woods; chasing through the darkness she stumbles and is horrifically tree-raped by a demonically possessed branch. This single incident would in time arouse the wrath of censors across the globe and a.s.sure the film's notoriety. It is now the students realize there is no escape; the bridge leading back to town has been torn down. One by one each of them falls foul of this destructive presence, and turns into a deranged abomination. When Linda succ.u.mbs to the evil force, Ash can't bring himself to take the chainsaw to her neck, so instead he buries her in the woods. This isn't the best idea he has ever had and when she returns the evil within has become so much more intense. Blasting and chopping, Ash makes it all the way to the shattering finale when he catches sight of "The Book of the Dead" falling into the fire. As the flames destroy the book, its demonic creations are seen to disintegrate. He now staggers to the door, the sole survivor of this frenzied a.s.sault. As he gathers his thoughts in the calm of the early morning light, the evil once again rises from the earth. Gathering pace through the woods its malevolence bears down on Ash, who turns to the camera, his face wracked in terror, just before the screen goes black.

Despite the limited resources and the eighteen months of filming, Sam Raimi produced a fast-paced shocker that terrified his audience and ultimately proved a milestone in horror cinema. The outrageous overacting combined with the excessive gore saw this comic book-styled extravaganza push back the boundaries, and all for $375,000. However, by inadvertently challenging the acceptability of such violent excess, Raimi alarmed the distributors and in due course provoked the censors. There were major concerns regarding the misogyny in the tree rape, a scene Raimi has since admitted he regrets. The film's graphic penchant for violence and gore caused many American distributors to stay well away from its excessive premise and not until the Cannes Film Festival did The Evil Dead acquire a distributor. The film was championed by Stephen King but predictably ran into serious difficulties in the UK, even though it was duly recognized for its parody of horror and almost pa.s.sed uncut, but was then burdened by even more problems in Germany. Its inevitable inclusion on the list of video nasties, with Sam Raimi prepared to defend his film in an English Court of Law, further added to its notoriety and generated an enthusiastic following on the black market. A heavily edited version was later made available in 1992 but in recent years Anchor Bay Entertainment has been able to release the film unrated.

The film was followed by the sequels, Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, with a third in the planning for 2013. A stage musical has also been produced along with a comic book adaptation published by Dark Horse.

AGROUP OF SPANISH monks accompanied by well-armed Conquistadors make their way along a southern Californian beach as their cohorts unload crates from the incoming rowboats. Their path takes them to a hooded figure bearing a sword. This man is Lorenzo Esteban, a heretic exiled from his native Spain and excommunicated from the Catholic church who has at his beck and call a fanatical set of followers. He refuses to renounce his pursuit of evil and is soon after seen rousing his frenzied disciples. As their chant rises to an impa.s.sioned crescendo, Esteban stands behind a partially clad young woman, raises his sword and brings it down to remove her head, which flies through the air to land, as the scene changes, as a football in the present day of 1981.

In a military academy a game of football is taking place and well-intentioned Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard) is about to hand victory to the opposition. This will gain him even more abuse from a bullying gang led by Bubba (Don Stark). Stanley is an easy target, a downtrodden orphan whose clumsy ways have made him an outcast at West Andover Academy. Here he is humiliated by Bubba and his lamebrain a.s.sociates, and suffers similar torment from the teaching staff, the coach, the colonel, as well as the reverend. As a punishment Stanley is sent to the chapel to clean a darkened cellar; there he finds a book in a secret room that details the Black Ma.s.s. The book, written in an age-old language, is revealed to be a journal kept by the evil Esteban. Stanley becomes obsessed with this and the other strange artefacts hidden away in this old room and uses a computer to translate the incantations. In so doing, he unleashes an evil force to take revenge on those who have for such a long time plagued him. Estaban returns to possess Stanley's body and as he once again seizes hold of his sword to inflict a bloodthirsty carnage, a pack of murderous wild boars pour forth from the bowels of the earth. For the last ten minutes of this film, Stanley enjoys his moment only to be d.a.m.ned to an eternity locked in the computer's memory.

This was the beginning of Eric Weston's time in the film and television industry and Evilspeak also known as Evilspeaks and Computer Murders, proved a rather amusing gorefest. While his movie adopts so many of the accepted cliches of the day, following on from the bullying observed in Carrie (1976) he introduces a new monster, a home computer that becomes the villainous tool of the piece. This was at a time long ago when such technology was only just beginning to encroach on our everyday lives. From Joseph Garofalo's script ent.i.tled "The Foundling", Eric Weston brought in the possessed computer and then shot his film over a three-week period, in a condemned South Central Los Angeles church, which burned to the ground only three days later.

Clint Howard had already been in film and television for eighteen years when Evilspeak went into production, but this was his first major role in a performance that had the audience firmly on his side. His murderous display was the gore-monger's delight and when it was released uncut to video in August 1983 it was eagerly snapped up. However, when the Video Recordings Act entered the statute books its excessive finale coupled with Satanic themes saw it banned as a video nasty in March 1984. It wasn't to see release to video until 1987, when the BBFC insisted on a mult.i.tude of edits running to over three and a half minutes, beginning with the prologue's decapitation. There then followed edits to a neck breaking in the bas.e.m.e.nt, the boars' attack in the bathroom and the subsequent devouring of guts, the reverend's nail to the head, Stanley splattering the head of one of his teachers and the boars consuming the students, along with numerous other decapitations. The BBFC's stipulations were to diminish so much of the impact of Weston's original idea; but in 2004, an extended version of the film was released, thankfully restoring every single moment of gore.

THE OPENING SCENES reveal a suspiciously paranoid Paul Martin (Udo Keir) putting on a pair of rubber gloves before having s.e.x with his girlfriend Suzanne (Fiona Richmond). Following the success of his first novel, Paul has withdrawn to a quiet house in the Ess.e.x countryside in the hope of bringing his next work to completion. His agent needs another bestseller and hires a beautiful secretary, Linda (Linda Hayden), to work with the self-possessed writer. Linda is a highly s.e.xed young woman and, when away from her employer's instruction, is taken to openly masturbating in the fields that surround the house and is seen to have an enflamed lesbian encounter with the statuesque Suzanne. There is, however, something very strange about Linda and it isn't wise to cross her path as two youths discover after they have raped her. As the body count begins to rise, Paul learns to his cost that he has made a huge mistake in bringing the psychotic Linda into his home.

Expose, which has also a.s.sumed the names Trauma and The House on Straw Hill, played as a psychological thriller and with its profusion of s.e.x and violence was counted as part of that decade's l.u.s.t for cinematic exploitation. Partly financed by adult entertainment and property mogul Paul Raymond, the publicity surrounding the film promised "Nothing, but nothing, is left to the imagination . . . ", casting British s.e.x queen Fiona Richmond in her first major role. Although her part in the script was secondary to that of Linda Hayden, Richmond's popularity in Raymond's line of top-shelf men's magazines automatically gave her the bigger billing. Hayden, whose acting ability throughout surpa.s.sed her colleagues', later distanced herself from the film as she pursued a successful career in the theatre and national television. Her role was reminiscent of Susan George in Straw Dogs (1971), with her murderous revenge on the low-life rapists coming two years before Camille Keaton's b.l.o.o.d.y reprisal in I Spit on Your Grave (1978).

The low ceilings were matched only by the diminutive budget, but the house afforded the film a claustrophobic feel, while the miles of open fields evoked a sense of hopeless isolation, allowing director James Kenelm Clarke to focus on the development of his characters and expound his plot by way of a series of highly compelling scenes. By modern standards, the violence appears tame, but the throat slitting, along with the b.l.o.o.d.y shotgun murders and the slashing of the naked Fiona Richmond in the shower as the blood poured across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, down past her v.a.g.i.n.a, were a cause for concern among the authorities. On its initial cinematic release, over three minutes were removed from both the s.e.x scenes and stabbings to make it suitable for distribution as an "X"-rated feature. Following the video explosion of the early 1980s, an unedited version made its way into the country around March 1984 only to be almost immediately banned as a video nasty. The current DVD release is still missing fifty-one seconds, with edits to the rape scene, which still contains a suggestion that Linda was seen to be enjoying her ordeal, as well as the blood dripping onto Suzanne's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Expose remains a popular entry for horror enthusiasts on these sh.o.r.es, but it is has been largely neglected across the rest of the world. It is in essence a very British affair, albeit mean-spirited, trying to find a place among the more exotic Euro-exploitation of the mid-1970s.

AMURDEROUS RAPIST stalks the night of Miami in search of the vulnerable, abusing them with sordid telephone calls before dispatching them with an array of oh-so-familiar sharpened weapons. While the calls are not quite as sinister as those that terrorized Black Christmas (1974), they still serve as a chilling calling card. A woman's dead body is soon discovered in swampland and then Debbie Ormsley (Gwen Lewis) and her boyfriend Jeff (Timothy Hawkins) are butchered in the privacy of her home. Local news reporter Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes) begins to suspect her neighbour, Stanley Herbert (John DiSanti), whose behaviour has become strangely erratic. The killings continue with Herbert seemingly leaving evidence for Jane to discover. No one will listen to her, and to make matters worse Jane fears for her defenceless younger sister, Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The child's psychosomatic injuries have left her deaf, blind and mute as a result of her abduction several years before. Jane will discover facets of her own hitherto undisclosed personality before this game of cat and mouse is skilfully drawn to its climactic finale.

Eyes of a Stranger would be director Ken Wiederhorn's second horror movie following Shock Waves (1977), which only ever saw very limited release; he later returned to frighten his audiences with Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988) and seven episodes of Freddy's Nightmares between 1989 and 1990. Here, Wiederhorn managed to create a suspense-charged movie very much in the Hitchc.o.c.k vein containing key elements of the brutality and voyeuristic sleaze that had already enticed the growing army of fans for this kill-crazed cinematic experience. The filming techniques and cleverly staged lighting combined to leave a grimly washed out tone, which reflected his movie's intentionally disreputable character. This was never more so in evidence than when the killer's distorted image was observed pressed up against the gla.s.s of the shower prior to Wiederhorn building the tension to deliver his feature's closing scenes. The violence was excessive, particularly during the episode when a woman was attacked and then raped in her own apartment, followed by the blood bath in a lovers' lane washed down with the memorable head in the fish-tank. On its release, much of Tom Savini's expertise was once again censored, which was to dilute so much of the film's vicious impact. The uncut version was recently released in Warner's Twisted Terror Collection, giving horror fans the chance to see Wiederhorn and Savini's grand design just as it should have been three decades before. Eyes of a Stranger will also be remembered for a young Jennifer Jason Leigh, who in her first major role in film produced a highly credible performance.

DR GeNESSIER, TO his friends and a.s.sociates, is a highly reputable skin graft surgeon; his bas.e.m.e.nt surgery, however, hides a terrible secret. Young girls have also been going missing on the streets of Paris. The culprit it turns out is the doctor's daughter, Louise, who by day works as an a.s.sistant at the family clinic. She scours the streets of Paris looking to befriend young girls, before leading them to their macabre fate in the lower echelons of her father's remote mansion. Once the doctor has incapacitated these hapless girls, he surgically removes their facial skin then transplants the tissue onto the face of his other daughter, Christiane. The unfortunate girl has been horribly disfigured in an accident some time before, an incident for which her father was responsible. The scars are so unsightly she is forced to hide herself away in the darkened manse and secrete her injuries behind a white mask. In his search for perfection, the guilt ridden Dr Genessier continues to fail and more young girls soon lose their lives.

Les Yeux Sans Visage represented a first for French cinema; up until this time, no one else in the country had seriously considered making a horror movie. British horror films such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958) had already proved very popular with French filmgoers and in their wake Jules Borkon looked to profit from this recent wave of grisly interest. His director, Georges Franju, was always at odds with those who looked upon his film as little more than a horror movie; his vision, he insisted, was one of "anguish". The abhorrence detailed in each skin graft was reminiscent of the many incarnations of the Frankenstein creation, but the more discerning would have also distinguished a similar pathos between the so-called monster of the Universal years and that of Christiane.

Splatter purists would be disappointed by an appreciable lack of blood in evidence in the doctor's bas.e.m.e.nt; but in its day this would have been far too much for the squeamish French censors. Its premise, however, still worked to disturb and was intensified by the cinematography of Eugene Schufftans. He was inspired by the darker elements of German expressionism, imparting the Villa Genessier an air of tenebrous despair, with superlative use of light and shadow, to create the impression that this was a prison from which there was no hope of escape. For all of his craft, Schufftans would be rebuked by French reviewers, who were now drawn to the new wave and tired of what were considered outmoded techniques. Franju, in turn, employed a subtlety to shape a nightmarish air that echoed the truly reprehensible nature of Genessier's misguided toil. Only when necessary did he deign to shock. You can only imagine the dismay felt by his audience as the doctor sliced into the beauteous faces of his many victims. The seeming success of the operation would have momentarily served to a.s.suage this jolt to the senses, only to see the anguish to which Franju referred fracture Christiane's delicate features as they tear apart only weeks after her operation. These scenes ingeniously reflect the cruelty of the Genessier described in Jean Redon's original novel, a trait Franju had to play very carefully so as not to offend the censors in both France and Germany. The result, however, was one of heartbreak for the distraught Christiane, whose tragedy was cast at the very centre of this morbid drama.

On its release, the film suffered almost universal critical rejection. Members of the audience in both France and Edinburgh were witnessed to faint at the abominable scenes in bas.e.m.e.nt surgery, a situation upon which modern-day promoters would now readily seize. Only the London Observer was appreciative of its artistic merits. For the American release of 1962, the film was drastically edited. It was conferred the indignity of an English-language dub, and ret.i.tled The Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus. Further to this, shots of the grafting process were removed together with a series of minor scenes alluding to Doctor Genessier's humanity, particularly his care for a small child at his clinic. This revised feature was only ever conferred a limited theatrical run, and was given little if any recognition. As the years pa.s.sed, film historians began to acknowledge the true worth in Franju's film, finally understanding its nuances, and filmmakers of repute such as John Carpenter, Jesus Franco and John Woo would soon attest