The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies Part 7

BARBARA (JUDITH O'DEA) and her brother have gone to visit the grave of a family friend but as they walk through the cemetery, they become aware that they are being followed by a dishevelled figure, whom they at first believe is just wanting to pay respect to his departed loved ones. He is joined by more of his unkempt kind and it becomes increasingly obvious the brother and sister are in serious trouble. While Barbara manages to escape from the growing horde, her previously jocular brother is not so fortunate. Alone, she arrives at a rural house, where she meets the calming presence of Ben (Duane Jones). When they enter the house, they find a family hidden away in the bas.e.m.e.nt, whose daughter is obviously in desperate need of a doctor. With the threat of this ravenous zombie plague spiralling out of control, they set to work boarding up the house in the hope of surviving the night. Occasional broadcasts reveal the extent of the situation. The whole of the US has been besieged by droves of flesh-eating zombies returned from the grave by the radiation emitted from a crashed s.p.a.ce probe. The tension among those barricaded in the farmhouse now begins to mount. As the dead begin to descend on this claustrophobic refuge, the isolated survivors learn the zombies can be killed by a blow to the head. Will this knowledge give them the chance to survive or will their own bickering be the death of them?

Inspired by Richard Matheson's tale I am Legend written in 1954, George A. Romero scripted his landmark Night of the Living Dead, which was originally scheduled to see release as the more provocative Night of the Flesh Eaters. It was his very first feature film, and launched him into an incredible career that was to redefine the American horror movie industry and became the model for low-budget filmmakers. As with so many films of its ilk, his feature struggled to raise the necessary capital, which meant he could only afford black and white film stock. This actually enhanced the appeal in his film and made the scenes of murder and zombie cannibalism all the more effective. Unlike so much of its bloodthirsty offspring, Night of the Living Dead's ingeniously ill-lit displays of flesh-eating appeared suggestive, leaving much to the viewer's fetid imagination. When it was released to theatres, its explicit content soon gave considerable cause for concern, but not before the sight of emaciated aunts and uncles rising from their eternal slumber, and then engaging in scenes of gratuitous cannibalism, had been shown at a Sat.u.r.day afternoon matinee premiere on October 1, 1968, at the Fulton Theatre in Pittsburgh. The youngsters in the theatre were shocked into silence, others reduced to tears; this downbeat portrayal wasn't the kind of entertainment to which they had become accustomed and was a far cry from Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein (1948). A month later, the voluntary MPAA film rating system was introduced, although it should be said this was not as a direct consequence of Romero's endeavours. His film eventually did receive the acclaim it was due and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry as a film acknowledged to be "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". Night of the Living Dead's initial release in the UK in 1969 came with an "X" certificate and substantial edits to the trowel murder and the removal of all the scenes revelling in the devouring of human flesh. Eleven years later, it was seen in British cinemas as Romero had originally intended and since 1987 has been kept this way for its subsequent releases to video and DVD.

Its significance in relation to the horror movies that emerged during the 1970s cannot be underestimated, for without Romero there may never have been cinema screens awash with shambling flesh-eating zombies. The apocalypse had never been so disturbing, and would continue to be so as a series of directors followed in his cataclysmic path. There are those who insist a considerable part of its legacy is derived from the presentation of a black actor in the lead role at a time when civil rights tensions across the United States were running high. The gunning down of unknown actor Duane Jones' character Ben, after what was apparently the film's climax, has continued to generate much debate, having been cited as a condemnation of American att.i.tudes towards race. Romero has always insisted Jones was the best actor to audition for the part and it was never his intention to produce a feature with an underlying social commentary. The sequels would follow to complete what appeared to be a "dead trilogy" with the hugely influential Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). These were later succeeded by Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009). Night of the Living Dead has also gone through two remakes; the first in 1990 was directed by special-effects genius Tom Savini and the second was released in 3-D in 2006 but had no affiliation with Romero.

THE CAMERA SETS the mood as the film opens, panning across the night of the Boston skyline. The scene switches to the Jack-n-Jill Day Care Center where the children are heading for home. One of the teachers, Anne Barron (Meb Boden), is waiting on a roundabout when a figure wearing leather motorcycle gear and a blacked-out helmet strides in her direction. A knife is drawn, an arm is raised before her body is slashed and then her head is hacked off; her discarded remains are later found in a back alley. Lieutenant Judd Austin (Leonard Mann) and his partner Detective Taj (Joseph R. Sicari) are promptly a.s.signed to the case. This is the second reported decapitation in the s.p.a.ce of a week, the first being found in a duck pond and Anne's head being left in a bucket of water. Anne was also a night student, studying Anthropology at Wendell College, which leads Lieutenant Austin to question Professor Vincent Millett (Drew Snyder), who had been Anne's tutor. He appears to have something of a reputation among his female students and we soon learn from one of Anne's friends, Kim Morrison (Elizabeth Barnitz), that she was rather furtive about a particular liaison. Not long after, Kim's decapitated head is found at the bottom of a fish tank. A waitress (Karen MacDonald) is revealed as the next victim. When the owner of the restaurant where she works arrives the following morning, he finds his eatery in utter chaos. As he tidies the tables and chairs, two builders arrive and ask for something to eat. He warms a large saucepan filled with stew and presents them with his culinary creation. As they tuck into their food, one of the builders finds a hair in his bowl. Another head would later surface in a toilet as the merciless butcher continued in his slaughter of the women of Wendell College, with Austin desperately trying to solve the case.

Night School was filmed in Boston during the fall of 1980, with a small budget and tight production schedule, by Ken Hughes, the director of Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang (1968). These constraints were of little concern to Hughes, whose feature paid homage to the giallo while exhibiting so many traits of the inc.u.mbent slasher that had already begun to emerge. His film played out as a murder mystery and was not without its moments of humour, yet it was inspired by the legacy of Psycho (1960) and dared to include a rather tense shower scene. Cinematographer Mark Irwin's working relationship with Hughes proved vital in creating the chill evident in so many of these set pieces. His bleak outlook would soon attract the attention of David Cronenberg and would lead to an invitation to add his touch to Scanners (1981) and then Videodrome (1983), before branching out into television, doc.u.mentaries and substantially more in the way of film. While Night School has been criticized for employing a miscellany of styles, certain scenes raised the interest of Dario Argento, who used them to even greater effect in Tenebrae (1982). Hughes' movie will also be remembered for the film debut of a young Rachel Ward, who was to return to the genre two years later in the backwoods slasher The Final Terror.

The film was released in the United Kingdom as Terror Eyes and the unedited video was issued in February 1983. While the decapitations were carried out off screen, the film was still considered a video nasty, largely due to the blood-soaked scenes as the killer hacked through a white tiled room and the girl being threatened by a knife in the restaurant. In June 1985, the film was removed from the banned list when over a minute was cut from two offending scenes. It has, however, yet to see release to DVD.

BLACKIE (FLAVIO BUCCI) and his drug-addicted accomplice Curly (Gianfranco De Gra.s.si) are seen robbing a Santa Claus before embarking on a train travelling south from Germany to Verona. On board they meet a strange but alluring middle-cla.s.s lady (Macha Meril). Two school friends, Laura (Marina Bertie) and Margaret (Irene Miracle), are also destined for Verona; there they intend to spend Christmas with Margaret's family. When the girls are asked to leave their compartment and take a different train they find themselves trapped in a darkened cabin by the thuggish duo and the woman, who proves the most s.a.d.i.s.tic of the three. She coerces the girls into confessing to their s.e.xual encounters and then encourages Curly to rape Laura, before the eyes of peeping tom. The virginal young girl is so tight the frustrated Curly forces a knife between the legs. When he hesitates, the strange woman inflicts the final deathblow. Margaret then manages to break free only to climb from the toilet window before throwing herself to her death.

As the trauma on the train continues, a Christmas Eve party takes place at the house of Margaret's parents. On Christmas morning, they go to the station to meet the girls to see three strangers walking along the platform. One of them, the lady of the group, has badly injured her ankle. The couple invite them to their home to allow her time to recover; it is, after all, the season of good will. The father soon after discovers his daughter should have been arriving on the same train and Curly is wearing a tie that his wife knows was purchased as a Christmas present. The grief-stricken father soon exacts his revenge, repeatedly stabbing and beating the heroin-addicted rapist and then hunting down Blackie with a shotgun. Only the conniving lady survives his revenge-filled carnage, pleading she was at the mercy of these scurrilous villains.

Aldo Lado had debuted four years before with the acclaimed thriller Short Night of the Gla.s.s Dolls (1971) and then followed with the giallo Who Saw her Die (1972). L'Ultimo Treno della Notte is a variation on Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972), moving from a leisurely paced opening to an intense brutality before the final violent confrontation between the distressed father and those who have abused his beloved daughter. Lado, a.s.sisted by his cinematographer Gabor Pogany, imbued the train with an insular air that became ever more acute as the girls realize the gravity of their terrifying situation. Craven's violence was appreciably stronger than that observed here, but there is a darker potent evident in Lado's direction. The producers feared his film would be persecuted by the authorities following its rejection by the Italian Board of Censorship and insisted it be burned. Lado wasn't prepared to have his work discarded in such a fashion and offered to cut certain frames, but was careful not to damage the impact of his film. In Italy, the giallo had already cultivated an eager audience, but here Lado chose an exploitative vein with elements of the Eurosleaze that was beginning to arouse the American market; a sleaze attested by the mysterious woman's predilection for p.o.r.nographic images. It was she who proved the true deviant of this gathering, as Lado has maintained how those of influence and the affluent manipulate the less fortunate in society, invariably to fulfil their own perverse ends. His social commentary failed to impress the UK's licensing body when it was submitted for certification as Late Night Trains in 1976. When it was distributed across the country as a video in November 1981, following a previous issue that had almost a minute of violence removed, it survived unscathed until July 1983, when it was then banned as a video nasty. It was later removed from the list in March 1984 to see release without cuts in 2008 when the BBFC announced changes in both media awareness and public knowledge of film styles had reduced the impact and potential for harm from the film's scenes of s.e.xual a.s.sault, which to their mind now appeared dated. Lado's film has also gone by the names Don't Ride on Late Night Trains, Last Stop on the Night Train and Torture Train.

CARING PARENTS BILL (Gary Baxley) and Anna Lynch (Kay Kimler) have arranged for their three-year-old son Billy to be looked after by his Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell), while they travel to the west coast on a visit to their parents. As they negotiate a mountain incline, the brakes on their car suddenly fail and they plummet down the mountainside into a fast-flowing river. Director William Asher was very keen to emphasize the severity of these death scenes, which presaged the terrors to come.

Since the death of his parents on that day fourteen years ago, Billy (Jimmy McNichol) has been raised by his Aunt Cheryl. As Billy makes plans for college and dates his teenage girlfriend Julie, he is unaware of his aunt's possessive nature and the lengths to which her incestuous desires will go to keep him under her wing. She has little time for young Julie and is far from happy about his plans to make a new life in Denver. Billy returns home one afternoon to find Cheryl covered in blood, clutching a kitchen knife. He has no reason to disbelieve her claims that the television repairman, Phil Brody, has tried to rape her. He isn't aware that Brody rejected his aunt's salacious advances and then paid the price.

The police investigation led by the bigoted Lieutenant Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson), ably accompanied by Sergeant Cook (Britt Leach), reveals a h.o.m.os.e.xual love affair between Brody and Billy's basketball coach Tom Landers (Steve Eastin). This casts increasing doubt on Aunt Cheryl's claims of self-defence, but creates a connection between Billy and Brody. The h.o.m.ophobic Carlson looks to pin the murder on young Billy, convinced that the killing was brought about by the intrigue of a h.o.m.os.e.xual love triangle. As the lieutenant continues to hara.s.s the teenage boy, Cheryl's obsessive nature becomes increasingly volatile and so the violence escalates.

Night Warning, which also went by the names Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, Momma's Boy, Thrilled to Death and The Evil Protege, was an uncompromising attempt to examine the delicate issues of incestuous infatuation and h.o.m.ophobia in those unenlightened days when the slasher was enjoying its first wave of blood and guts. William Asher certainly made his mark in creating this cult attraction and would continue to direct in television, but never made another horror movie. As with many creators before him, he had cashed in on the moment but brought together an interesting cast, which saw Bill Bixby at an early point in his career, with the true star of the piece being Susan Tyrrell. In the confines of this dreary little house, she played a part that brought the audience face to face with an insanity rarely observed in films of the early 1980s. Her role was instrumental in the nomination for the Saturn Awards Best Low Budget Horror Film for 1982, although due to delays in production it didn't see release until the early months of 1983.

While there was a series of gory scenes later on in this film, which involved a tree trunk decapitation and then several stabbings as well as a severed hand, Asher's film has never been considered as being a particularly gruesome affair. However, its gritty cinematography aroused the British tabloids, and following its release to video in April 1983 it was registered as a video nasty. It was eventually dropped from the list in December 1985, but has yet to be granted approval for issue in the United Kingdom. The continuing ban has inherently fuelled the film's cult status, and it is yet to see release to the DVD format. It is, however, accepted that the BBFC would look favourably on any plans to resubmit its content for certification.

FILMED OVER AN eight-week period in Italy and Spain, Nightmare City was originally ent.i.tled Incubo Sulla Citta Contaminate, and has since gone by the names City of the Walking Dead and Nightmare of a Contaminated City as well as Invasion of the Atomic Zombies. Umberto Lenzi's low-budget zombie movie is a possible precursor to the virus-infected creatures running amok in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) and was certainly an early example of a military backed a.s.sault on the zombie host, which for the duration of this film was capable of moving at considerable speed.

While reporter Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) waits at the airport to interview a scientist, he looks on as a Hercules is forced to land. He can't believe his eyes when the disembarking pa.s.sengers turn out to be a horde of mutated, blood-drinking zombies, akin to the ghouls of horrors past. Only hours ago when their flight took to the skies these were a set of people. Now contaminated by the scientist exposed to radiation, which accounts for their burned faces, they have become a murderous mob. Ma.s.s slaughter ensues as these blood-crazed fiends rampage across the city. In an attempt to escape to safety, Miller and his wife must cross this imperilled region. However, with the military on one side and the contaminants beginning to spread across the other, this is going to be no easy ride. If these ferocious killers are going to survive, they will need as much blood as they can sink their teeth into to replace their damaged red blood cells. For the gore fan, Lenzi's movie is a cheap action-packed zombie flick which, to be fair, contains more than its share of suspense. The violence is typically excessive, although Lenzi has always been keen to extol the social undercurrent to his film, particularly the notion of the psychological impact of a city under siege, torn between a powerless military and its mindless a.s.sailants.

The scene in a television studio during the filming of a dance show featuring spandex-clad beauties contains another kind of social relevance, and has been frequently criticized for its misogynistic content. There seems to be a rare delight taken in the exploitative carnage that ensues, which includes an unbelievable breast-gorging sequence. These women, as with the other female victims, are repeatedly stabbed as their blood flows freely across the screen, they have their b.r.e.a.s.t.s sliced off, eyes gouged and, if that's not enough, have their clothes torn from their nubile young bodies. When they are not tearing women apart these zombies are shown to have a capacity for guns, knives and any other form of weaponry upon which they can lay their gnarled hands. They then employ this a.r.s.enal as they lacerate their quarry as an entree for satiating themselves upon the blood that inevitably spills forth.

The Groundhog Day conclusion continues to frustrate many fans of this film. As the couple make their escape clutching onto the helicopter's swaying rope, Miller's wife Anna plunges to her death. Mortified Dean screams in anguish, only to wake up in the safety of his bed. The cycle begins as he journeys to the airport to meet a similar appointment, and a Hercules is again seen to come in to land.

GEORGE TATUM HAS only recently been released from the mental inst.i.tution to which he has been admitted following his dubious doctor's belief he has the cure to his violent bouts of psychosis. His doctor is convinced that a new miracle drug will help Tatum return to a normal life. George's normal way of life takes him to a Times Square s.e.x show where he soon begins to lose his grasp on the sleazy world around him and as his eyes roll and mouth begins to foam; he falls unconscious to the floor. This unnerving episode impels George to a better life in Florida, but he is still very seriously disturbed. Although Florida offers him a far warmer clime, he is still unable to escape the hallucinatory nightmares that have plagued him for so many years. They eventually reveal he murdered his father with an axe when he discovered him cavorting with a prost.i.tute; at the time, he was still only a child. Back at the mental facility, the medical staff have become gravely concerned for they have come to realize they have made a serious error of judgement; the drug will never cure George's deep-rooted psychosis. Far away in Florida George has started to stalk a family, a single mother he looks upon as being neglectful and her young family. One of the children tries to tell his mother he has seen a man loitering around the house, but she refuses to believe him until the phone calls begin, which leads to a shocking climax, as history is seen to repeat itself.

From the outset former experimental film director Romano Scavolini sought to unsettle his audience using a rather creepy introductory sequence that suggested this would be a psychological terror, but not without a fair degree of violence. In a similar way to John Carpenter's work three years before on Halloween, he developed a technique designed to focus at length on a particular object then drawing back to pan around the room, thus creating the impression that there was a malfeasance lurking only just out of sight. In this way, he cleverly augmented the tension without having to rely entirely on cold-blooded brutality, but when it did come, it was truly shocking, culminating in the climatic double axe murder that has become the stuff of slasher legend. Baird Stafford's portrayal of George Tatum has been placed on a par with William l.u.s.tig's infamous Maniac (1980) and John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). When Stafford undertook this role, he was never entirely sure if George's medication was the cure to his psychosis or, as was equally likely, the cause of his problems. This he tried to encapsulate in his interpretation of his director's script, resulting in a rather convincing depiction of a man who had completely lost his mind.

Savolini's film, which has also been ent.i.tled Blood Splash and Nightmare, aroused the attention of the British censors partly owing to the use of several gimmicks, which included a vomit bag being supplied with the video on its release in May 1982 along with a compet.i.tion to guess the weight of a brain in a jar. In the July of 1983, the film was banned as a video nasty and remained there to become one of the DPP's thirty-nine. In 1984 David Grant of Oppidan, the video company that had first released Nightmares in a Damaged Brain prior to the ban, was jailed for eighteen months, although later reduced to twelve, for releasing a version of the film in its uncut form. To this day, the complete brutality originally presented in this film has never been officially made available in the UK.

A COUPLE OF YOUNG girls amble into a remote desert oasis, only to bid a hasty retreat as the living dead begin to rise from the sand. The only survivor of a ferocious World War II desert battle reveals he knows that over $6 million of gold is still buried in the same oasis. His avaricious partner, who wants to keep the booty for himself, then takes a syringe and kills the man who had once been his friend. The veteran's son Robert (Manuel Gelin) soon after reads his father's diaries and learns of the gold bullion. He convinces his friends to journey with him to Africa to retrieve this long-lost treasure trove. Even though they have been warned to stay away from the area, the group set up camp little realizing the gold is guarded by a horde of zombie German soldiers who had been tasked almost forty years before with transporting their cargo by convoy through the desert. When night falls, this putrescent detachment once again rises from their slumber to defend their riches, with the infiltrators forced to stave off an unrelenting attack.

Jesus Franco's mesmeric addition to the zombie craze of the early eighties has been described as one of the worst zombie movies ever made, probably only saved by the battle between the British and German soldiers seen early on in the film. These scenes were spliced from Alfreddo Rizzo's 1971 war film The Gardens of the Devil, originally I Giardini de Diavlo. For the most part, his pacing appears slow and uneventful, but Franco has a reputation for being a sleaze-monger and a veritable master of exploitation. When the zombies rise from their desert graveyard each one of this desirable cast of young women are subjected to the slavering atrophied hordes in customary Franco style, while their male counterparts are summarily dealt with almost as an afterthought. This band of zombies is not necessarily interested in human brains; their cannibalistic urges will settle for any old blood and guts, which isn't always in copious supply. The make-up used on the lead zombies proved quite effective, particularly the idea of having a worm attached to their emaciated faces. The charred n.a.z.i uniforms added to the final effect as the long-awaited zombie resurrection from the shifting sand dunes supplied a much needed atmospheric menace. Among its many names, Franco's film has been released as Blood Sucking n.a.z.i Zombies.

THE CAMERA TRAINS on the eye of a raven as it reflects the magnificence of an opera house; this will not be the last time the raven is seen in Dario Argento's film. As the cast rehea.r.s.e for an avant-garde performance of Verdi's opera Macbeth, Betty is informed of the death of the lofty lead actress, which gives her the opportunity to step into the limelight in the role of Lady Macbeth. On the opening night, a stagehand is killed when a lighting rig falls to the ground as a shady figure is observed making his way into an empty box in the opera house. As the killer watches Betty from the shadows an attendant insists that he must leave, but is impaled with a coat hook in response. Thankfully, Betty knows nothing of these events and excels to the rapturous applause of the audience. After the performance, she decides to leave the back-stage party to celebrate at the palatial home of her boyfriend's uncle. When her boyfriend, Stefan, leaves her reclining on the bed, Betty is seized from behind by a giallo-inspired masked figure adorned in black leather gloves, who wastes no time in tying her to a pillar, taping her mouth, and then placing needles directly beneath her eyes, making it impossible for her to risk closing them. She has no choice but to watch as the killer drives a blade up into Stefan's throat and on through his mouth. As he falls dead to the floor Betty is untied, but the hooded killer is far from finished; his s.a.d.i.s.tic obsession will have her watch more of those who have been close to her die horribly at his hands.

Dario Argento's visually stylish Opera, released in the United Sates as Terror at the Opera, traversed the line between the traditional giallo and the decade's fading slasher. While the gloved a.s.sa.s.sin wielded his sharpened knife from the shadows, the customary clues and red herrings of the genre were no longer as prominent. Rather, Argento looked to concentrate on heightening the tension, cleverly using flashbacks and precarious edits to unhinge his audience as Betty's traumatized past gradually came to the fore. As ever, Argento's death scenes were resplendent in their originality, with the slow-motion gunshot to the eye before the keyhole acquiring an immediate notoriety upon the film's release. Throughout the movie, the desire to destroy the eye created an intensity that exceeded anything he and his fellow Italian directors had so far attempted. Many of these graphic images were the work of Sergio Stivaletti and his stomach-churning special effects, which were every bit as shocking as Luis Bunuel's surreal eye-slicing first seen in Un Chien Andalou (1929). This intensity appeared to be Argento's response to the frustration he felt at those in his audience who closed their eyes as they sought to avoid the more grisly aspects in his films. In placing needles so close to Betty's eyes, she was never given the chance to take her eyes away from the knifeman as he swiftly slaughtered her beloved Stefan.

Under Argento's experienced direction, Ronnie Taylor's cinematography used point-of-view shots to sweep through the corridors and stairways of the film's various sets, exacerbating the tension as Betty's distressing past began to catch up with her. On its cinematic release in the UK, over thirty seconds of Argento's film had to be removed, which included Santini's skewered tongue, the knife ripping into Stefan's neck and mouth followed by the repeated stabbing, and finally the close-ups detailing the killer forcing a pair of scissors into the wardrobe girl's mouth.

AS MARK LEWIS (Carl Boehm) attempts to solicit a prost.i.tute, she has no knowledge that he is cunningly filming her using a camera concealed within his coat. The images on screen are detailed from the camera's perspective, a technique pioneered by the cinema of the early 1930s. With the subject captured in such close proximity an unsettling degree of tension is created, which, to Powell's credit, mounts as she escorts Lewis to her home. Even the voyeur of the day would have been shocked by the images of fear-stricken contortions wracking the face of a girl knowing she is about to die. Alone he later savours the film, surrounding himself with the sights and sounds of terror, his fresh-faced shyness concealing the monster within.

The reclusive murderer works with a film crew, with ambitions of making his own films. When he is not at the studio, he is discreetly snapping candid photographs of glamour models, which he trades to a local p.o.r.nographer. His double life continues at home, where acting as the landlord he rents out part of what once was his father's house, while posing as a tenant. Although withdrawn, he cannot help but be fascinated by the engaging Helen (Anna Ma.s.sey). He eventually confides in her, describing how his father used him as a psychological guinea pig, wilfully experimenting on the stimuli and effects of fear. Little does she realize Mark is tormented by his father's experimentation, obsessed with the behavioural aspects of fear, specifically the visible impression on the human face.

His sordid compulsion remains unabated and a murderous display ensues, this time at the studio. When the body is discovered, the police are quick to link the two killings, each victim having died with a look of stark terror etched into their faces. Mark soon falls under suspicion. Tailed by the police he is traced to the building where he takes photographs of a pin-up model, which ends in her death before his lethal tripod. Two versions of this scene were shot, one of which is credited as being the very first female nude scene in a major British motion feature. The model becomes yet another victim of Mark's macabre fixation.

With the police in hot pursuit, Mark discovers Helen watching one of his self-styled doc.u.mentaries. He rants about his quest to make movies encapsulating the fear in his victims by using a mirror on his camera. Facing the distinct possibility of a life behind bars, Mark brings his life's work to an appropriate conclusion, killing himself as he did the other girls, impaled by a knife attached to one of the camera's tripod legs. His camera still runs, providing a fitting finale for this gruesome doc.u.mentary. While there are those who once considered this a vile piece of voyeurism, which unfortunately led to his demise as an eminent director, Powell's psychological masterpiece has since acquired a huge following. Finally recognized for its true worth, it is lauded as being very much ahead of its time. The camera work is a.s.sured throughout, guiding the audience through these sleazy scenes, warranting their eyes never leave the screen. He later noted in his autobiography, "I make a film that n.o.body wants to see and then, thirty years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it." With att.i.tudes becoming more permissive during the 1970s, the critics' view of his film went through a radical transformation. It also attracted the attention of Martin Scorsese, who was very appreciative of its relevance. When it was released on US television it was given the less emotive t.i.tle of Face of Fear.

The sympathetic portrayal would be one of many comparisons drawn with fellow British director, Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Psycho, released only a few months later. It would also have an unprecedented effect on some of the more vivid slasher films that terrorized cinemas towards the end of the 1970s. As with the many deranged killers plying their ruthless trade in these films, Powell's lead was twisted by a murderous voyeuristic mania. The point-of-view technique used to such lurid effect in Peeping Tom would eventually be popularized by some the more influential slasher movies, princ.i.p.ally Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978), and continued with Man Bites Dog (1992), The Last Horror Movie (2003) and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) along with The Blair Witch Project (1999).

WHILE THERE ARE those who think Andrey Iskanov created the most graphically violent film ever to see the light of day, he remains resolute in his belief Philosophy of a Knife should not be looked upon as a horror movie, and maintains his aversion for the violence seen everyday across the globe. In four hours, much of it shot in black and white, narrated in two, two-hour episodes, he doc.u.ments the disturbing history of a research laboratory created by the military police of the Imperial j.a.panese Army based in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, in what was j.a.panese-occupied China between 1937 and 1945. The facility was developed to research epidemic prevention and weapons of ma.s.s destruction. Within the complex, a unit of the chemical and biological warfare research team ascended to notoriety, to become known as the iniquitous Unit 731. The members of this unit conducted torturous and deathly experiments on Soviet, Chinese and, towards the end of the war, American prisoners. They were later prosecuted by the Soviet authorities and convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In this avant-garde terror, Iskanov leaves nothing to the imagination in a four-hour feature that depicts humanity at its most despicable. Such is the sensitivity of this dark moment in history the director was investigated by the Russian Federal Security Service. They carried out a comprehensive search of his residence, removed doc.u.ments and film footage to determine just how he had learned about biological weaponry, and at the same time identify his source of information. Soon after his arrest, he was imprisoned in a military base. Here he was locked in a cell without a toilet and was forced to endure long periods of intensive interrogation, where he divulged much of his research material had gone back to the United States. We are left to wonder if the Russian authorities were concerned he knew a little too much, but was saved when he claimed his studies went only as far as 1956. Both those with a historical perspective and the gore mongers will find themselves both fascinated and repulsed by this film, which contains an estimated thirty minutes of contemplative snowfall. This seeming tranquillity, however, is overwhelmed by the horrific onslaught as vivisections and dissections are carried out without anaesthetic, while this butchery carries on a soldier is skinned alive, a foetus torn from its mother's womb, a face burned by X-rays, and one unfortunate has her teeth removed in an agonizing mockery of dentistry. This film's catalogue of atrocities appears to go on and on without end. Such has been the impact of his abominable epic, Iskanov has been the recipient of the highest praise and the most severe criticism for creating a film that is even more explicit than Tun Fei Mou's controversial Men Behind the Sun (1988), which had previously recalled this moment from the past that for many should remain dead and buried.

WAY BACK IN the 1940s a young boy is caught by his mother as he a.s.sembles a puzzle of a naked woman. When she takes his puzzle away, he loses his temper and drives an axe into her head. The film moves forward forty years to a university campus in Boston where a crazy has taken to chain-sawing the body parts of the young female students, before stealing away with certain pieces of their anatomy as he leaves the b.l.o.o.d.y entrails for the scrutiny of the authorities. Lt. Bracken (Christopher George) has been a.s.signed to the case; he has arranged with the Dean for agent Mary Riggs (Lynda Day George) to work under cover as a tennis coach. Together with a young student, Kendall (Ian Sera), they try to track down the killer, whose audacity extends to stalking a half-naked student into a lift while trying to hide his over-sized chainsaw.

Juan Piquer Simon was another Spanish master of low-budget exploitative cinema and true to the genre wasted little time in exposing his nubile young cast and throwing in some rather graphic violence and gore, too much of it to the sound of the dis...o...b..at! When a girl was stripped naked, you just knew she was lined up for the next kill as this psycho obsessed over their delightfully ripened body parts. There were plenty of suspects, including the creepy looking gardener, the Professor of Anatomy and even the Dean along with numerous red herrings, but Pieces has only ever been regarded as a piece of Euro trash produced to cash in on the American slasher market. Its nonsensical script would never elevate it to being a true horror movie and even the excess of blood failed to convince its eager audience, but Simon's direction did create a sense of sinister atmosphere and a mounting claustrophobic unease as the killer moved in for his prey. Thirty years later, these severed body parts still continue to raise a smile.

FOR THE FIRST part of Paul Ziller's film, a group of teenage pledges endure endless initiation rituals as they seek to enter a college fraternity during "h.e.l.l Week", one of them strictly against his mother's advice. Amidst the scenes of semi-nakedness, there is a series of amusing episodes along with much talk about hazing and the meaning of the college fraternity. The comedic element should have come to a halt when Acid Sid climbed from the toilet to begin killing the cast, but his entrance understandably detracted from what was to follow. Twenty years before in 1968, a young hippie fraternity pledge was accidentally burned to death in a tub of acid. Now his unforgiving corpse returns to savour his revenge on "h.e.l.l Week". His retribution begins when his spirit possesses one of the pledges, who appears to have killed one of the fraternity brothers. Minutes later Acid Sid explodes from the stomach of another pledge as the body count once again begins to rise.

As a blizzard raged at Rutgers University, New Jersey, in the January of 1988, Paul Ziller with very little money attempted to direct a movie that was to take him away from his recent work in p.o.r.nography, with Anthrax's Joey Belladonna starring as the young Sidney "Acid Sid" Snyder. As with so many cinematic hopefuls, he chose to put together a slasher feature, a phenomenon that by then had run its course. The wind and driving snow were to make the shoot far more difficult than it should have been, but would add to the film's impact, as the cast played out countless scenes in falling temperatures that later felt the wrath of the censors. By the end of the 1980s blood and guts were fine, as were bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but the two were never to be shown together in the same shot. Pledge Night would go on to acquire cult status as Paul Ziller's career ascended to new heights, seeing him move forward to work in both film and television.

FROM HIS CAR, Mark (Sam Neill) looks out at his home city, a place that we learn, through the imagery of the landscape, has come to trouble him. His wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) rushes to meet him, but this isn't a joyous reunion. Mark has arrived home too early from an undisclosed trip abroad where cash has been exchanged with a covert government organization. At first, Anna's behaviour appears strange and then Mark discovers that while he has been away his wife has become involved with another man and their son is being cared for by their friend Margie. At first, she will not reveal her lover's ident.i.ty, but as their incessant rowing escalates into violence in a restaurant, she discloses that for the past year a man named Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) has been her sinister paramour. When the two come face to face in another violent confrontation, Mark realises the two lovers have not seen one another for quite some time. As their marriage steadily deteriorates, the mental states of both Anna and Mark are affected. Anna sees herself as the maker of her own evil and is later seen embraced by the tentacles of a Lovecraftian ent.i.ty. Mark in turn borders on possessive madness, which manifests itself in the vision of his son's teacher, who is the image of his tormented wife. She embodies the innocent creature she once was. His wife, however, has another nasty surprise in store for her estranged husband as his world of clandestine espionage clashes head on with the horrors of their marital discord.

While Possession contains a series of exceptional gory and violent episodes, in particular, Anna's slicing of her own neck with an electric carving knife and her miscarriage in the underground station, the unsettling surrealism that haunts this film distances it from many accepted perceptions as to the elements that const.i.tute a horror movie. Andrzej Zulawski's film could be interpreted as a reaction to the frustration he endured at seeing his brutal historical feature Diabel (1972) censored by his country's government. He left Poland for France and then returned home to have yet another film withdrawn before it had seen completion. His crisis deepened when his own marriage broke down and was captured in the two hours that told the tale of Anna and Mark's torturous separation in the divided city of Cold War Berlin. The bleak landscape that drew Zulawski close to the edge of rationality is reflected in the barbed wire of the Berlin Wall and the encroaching presence of the anonymous security guards. Under his direction, Bruno Nuytten's unnerving camera work appears exceptionally nimble, as it moves from scene to scene in the decaying apartments of this oppressive cityscape.

Zulawski had admired the work of Dario Argento, but now the master of horror cinema returned the compliment, lauding this a.s.sault on the senses for its vision and then captured its essence in his next film Tenebrae (1982). The performance of Isabelle Adjani was such that she went on to win a Best Actress award at Cannes that year as well as the Cesar Award again for Best Actress and succeeded in re-launching a career which had been tempestuous up until then. Zulawski could also call upon special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who had previously worked on Deep Red (1975) before moving on to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and then Alien (1979), in the creation of the slime-ridden monster. In 1987 when Poland was beginning to shrug off decades of repression, Zulawski was invited back to his homeland to complete his unfinished science fiction film of ten years before, Na Srebrnym Globie or The Silver Globe, which saw release in 1988, although it remains largely unknown in English-speaking countries. Unfortunately, the controversial nature of Possession resulted in it being butchered in the United States, reduced to an incomprehensible eighty-one minutes. For a challenging art house movie of this kind, its reception in France was somewhat modest, and on its release to VHS in the UK in the September of 1982 it not surprisingly attracted the wrong kind of attention and was banned as a video nasty in September 1983. Twelve months later, it was cleared by a jury of obscenity in a jury trial and was subsequently removed from the list. It was finally released uncut in the UK in 1999, but still runs to only 119 minutes, unlike its European counterpart which contains an extra four minutes of footage.

WAY BACK IN the 1940s a forest fire swept through a Colorado forest and burned to death a community of gypsies. One of the children, however, managed to survive. Almost forty years later, a couple of elderly campers become temporarily lost in the vastness of the same forest. While the wife walks down to the lake, her husband takes out an axe and begins to chop firewood. When the wife returns she finds her beloved's decapitated body. Her screams can be heard echoing through the trees as the screen begins to fade.

It's a beautiful day and half a dozen teenagers you've seen their type before in countless slasher features arrive in the forest, having travelled for hours in their van. They are welcomed by the Park Sheriff before setting off to enjoy the surrounding woodland. As they head deeper into the overgrown forest, it becomes apparent they are not alone. Point-of-view shots and the sound of someone gasping for breath reveal they are being followed by an unsettling presence. After tracking the group for almost an hour the killer begins to bring them down in scenes that reveal a considerable element of carefully manipulated suspense and culminate in another decapitation by axe, the customary hacking of the throat, and a sleeping bag suffocation. This leads to the slow-motion-styled final girl chase by a hermitic man through the woods, a man who is now in need of company. Only in the final few minutes of this film would the audience get to see the giant gypsy's badly burned features; his appearance was indeed disturbing and the denouement refused to bring the closure for which the viewers would have hoped.

The Prey has been criticized, along with many other films of this ilk, for jumping on the Friday the 13th bandwagon, but was actually shot during 1978. It wasn't released until June 1984 and lasted a little more than a week in the drive-in theatres across the United States, reaping in its wake rather negative reviews. The pacing proved too slow for the slasher audiences of the day, with an abundance of unnecessary woodland stock footage used as padding. To the director's credit, his use of gore was impressive, but it was strewn just too late in a seemingly prolonged movie. The film was then cut by fifteen minutes, because the distributors felt such a movie could not hold the audience's interest for more than eighty minutes. Rather than edit the unnecessary stock footage, the opening sequence explaining the killer's unfortunate past was left on the cutting room floor. The Prey was released to video in 1988 but the original cut has never been seen, nor is it known to exist. Edwin Brown would soon return to a more gainful career in directing p.o.r.n movies.

WELL-HEELED SUSAN Stevenson's (Ursula Andress) husband has vanished without trace on an island somewhere off the coast of New Guinea. Accompanied by a respected anthropologist (Stacy Keach) and her scheming brother (Antonio Marsina) they journey to the island to determine his fate. Susan and her brother have only one concern: the location of the uranium deposits that her husband was reported to have found. As the party make their way through the verdant jungles of the island, Susan is saved from a native attack by a newcomer, Manolo (Claudio Ca.s.sinelli). It now becomes obvious Susan's husband has abandoned his quest for the uranium and gone in search of a tribe living on a remote mountain called Ra Ra Me, Mountain of the Cannibal G.o.d. Manolo has to take the lead when the anthropologist falls into a ravine, but he is unable to save Susan's brother when they are cornered by natives. Manolo and Susan are taken away as prisoners as the natives disembowel her brother's body and cook his carca.s.s over the flames of their fire. The natives believe Susan to be a G.o.ddess, and there on the mountain she would have remained if Manolo hadn't outwitted their captors and killed one of them allowing the pair to make their escape.

Former giallo director Sergio Martino's La Montagna del dio Cannibale, also known as The Mountain of the Cannibal G.o.d and Slave of the Cannibal G.o.d, resembled a matinee adventure movie of the period, but contained the additional spice of the comely Ursula Andress along with gory scenes of native cannibalism. While the exploits of this cannibal tribe was not as shocking as their counterparts in Cannibal Holocaust (1980), the uncut version of this film was not without its share of violence and nudity, which included an exposed brain and the topless Andress. Martino's film acquired a degree of notoriety when it was added to the list of video nasties in November 1983 after being released to video in 1981 as Prisoner of the Cannibal G.o.d; this was because of many scenes of animal cruelty. It was later removed from the list in May 1985, but its latest release in the UK still has over two minutes of edits to the offending scenes of thirty years past.

AS FOUR CHILDREN play a game of hide and seek in an abandoned building, young Robin wants to join in. However, the four youngsters have something else in mind and seek to intimidate her. As she is forced against a window ledge to escape their taunts, she loses her balance and falls, plummeting several storeys to her death. The children Wendy, Nick, Jude and Kelly vow solemnly never to tell anyone about what has happened, but someone hidden in the shadows has seen everything. Robin's father (Leslie Nielsen) and the police deduce that Robin was the victim of a known s.e.x offender and they set out to track him down.

Six years later Robin's sister Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her brother Alex (Michael Tough) stand beside their parents at their sister Robin's grave. Shortly afterwards those who had been present when poor Robin fell to her death receive the first of a series of disturbing phone calls, warning of the horrors that will transpire on their forthcoming prom night. The call causes considerable alarm to Kelly, while Jude and Wendy simply laugh it off, believing it to be nothing more than a prank. Unbeknown to them, the man who was arrested that day, Leonard Murch, has escaped the asylum that has kept him from the world for the last six years. His scarred body has never recovered from the burns he received that day as the police pursued his car. Like Michael Myers before him, he heads back to the town where it all happened to mete out his revenge on what will be his victims' prom night, the anniversary of Robin's death. In accordance with the rules being laid down for this emerging genre, Kim will find herself stalked as the final girl, while her friends are slaughtered in the corridors of their school at the hands of a masked machete-wielding maniac.

For Liverpool-born Paul Lynch this was an early episode in what was to become a highly successful directorial career in both film and television. It was also early days for the slasher movie, but his film became an archetype for what followed, embracing so many of the aspects that are now a.s.sociated with the genre. In the hope of securing extensive distribution, Lynch minimized the gore and, in the spirit of John Carpenter's Halloween, chose dimly lit settings in the execution of his murders. In leaving much to the audience's imagination, he kept them hooked until the very last. He had encountered many problems while at the negotiating table as he hoped to realize sufficient financial backing for this feature; only when Jamie Lee Curtis agreed to take the lead role did the money finally come his way. Paramount had shown an interest in the distribution of Prom Night, but were only prepared to put it into 300 theatres, while Avco Emba.s.sy Pictures were prepared to open in over 1,200 theatres, which would see Lynch's film go on to generate $14 million. As the consultation continued, Paramount chose instead to release Friday the 13th.

Such was the success of the film, three sequels were later released: h.e.l.lo Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987), Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990) and Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1992). A re-imagined Prom Night was made for $20 million in 2008, which invited almost universal derision from the critics, yet still went on to make in excess of $43 million.

IN A DARKENED Phoenix hotel room, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and her lover Sam Loomis (John Gavin) squabble over their future. Marion wants to marry, but Sam does not have the money to support her. On returning to the office where she works, Marion impulsively takes off with $40,000 from a property sale. On the second night of her journey to Sam's hometown, the rain pours heavily making it impossible to see the road clearly. After turning off the highway she spots the Bates Motel, overshadowed by an old house, inspired by Edward Hopper's "The House by the Railroad"; she decides to take shelter for the night. There she is greeted by the reserved proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). She signs in under the name Marie Samuels, hoping to avoid attracting the unwanted attention of the police. As she chats with Norman, a man who appears dominated by his ageing mother, she resolves to return to Phoenix with the money. However, she feels it best she spends the night at the motel. Before retiring to bed, she prepares to take a shower. In a lingering moment of voyeuristic perversity, Norman removes a picture from the wall and peers through a peephole, which allows him to watch as Marion undresses. Once she enters the shower, the bathroom door opens. In the film's pivotal scene, the obscured figure of an old woman pulls back the shower curtain. She reveals a large kitchen knife, and as the blade lifts and strikes so follows one of the most memorable scenes in the history of film, made even more terrifying by composer Bernard Herrmann's fervently screeching string section. Hitchc.o.c.k had shocked his audience in more ways than one, having killed off his main character and star name at such an early stage in the film.

A week later Marion's sister, Lila, arrives at Sam's store in Fairvale to bring him the bad news that Marion has disappeared. Together with a private detective, Milton Arbogast, they begin searching the area and eventually come across the Bates Motel. Just as he nears the top of the stairs of the house, Arbogast becomes another victim of the old woman's blade. Hitchc.o.c.k's film now races to its shocking climax. With Lila exploring the house looking for the whereabouts of her murdered sister, Norman heads upstairs. Lila takes the opportunity to slip through the cellar door and makes her way down the steps to a storage room where she sees an old woman sitting in a chair facing away to the wall. When she swings the chair around, she reveals an emaciated corpse dressed in the clothes of an old woman. Hitchc.o.c.k continues with another highly acclaimed shot, focusing on a single point as a bare light bulb swings from side to side, exposing young Norman dressed in his mother's clothing.

During the epilogue, Lila, Sam and the sheriff wait to hear from a psychiatrist who has been called to examine Norman. The psychiatrist has listened to the whole story, but not from the mouth of Norman, for he no longer exists; rather, it has come from his mother who has a.s.sumed complete control of his mind.

Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Psycho carried a theatre poster clearly stipulating a "no late admission" policy, for what was billed as a psychological thriller. His film would go on to set a new standard in horror cinema, one that has been much emulated but rarely matched. It has also been considered the first true slasher movie. Adapted from the Robert Bloch's novel of the same name, published in 1959, it was based on the crimes of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein. Hitchc.o.c.k's magnum opus initially garnered mixed reviews, but with subsequent box office success and popular acclaim, it went on to receive four Academy Award nominations.

Executives at Paramount were not pleased with Hitchc.o.c.k's choice of subject matter, insisting it was "too repulsive" and were categorical in their refusal to advance him the necessary funding. The director decided to film Psycho as quickly and cheaply as he could, offering to finance the film himself and shoot it at Universal-International as long as Paramount would act as distributor. He also deferred his director's fee of $250,000 for a 60 per cent ownership of the film negative. This eventually proved acceptable to Paramount. However, he was then confronted by resistance from producer Herbert Coleman and Shamley Productions executive Joan Harrison, who had major doubts as to the viability of such a film. Further budget reductions forced Hitchc.o.c.k to film in black and white; this would lessen the b.l.o.o.d.y impact of the shower scene, but would allow him to play with a thematic use of black and white motifs to express the changes in his film's tone. This thematic approach was inspired by George Clouzot's innovative use of black and white in Les Diaboliques (1955), a film for which Hitchc.o.c.k had much admiration, and as with Psycho had forbidden late entry.

There were episodes in Psycho that proved a direct challenge to the Motion Picture Production Code in the representation of s.e.xuality and violence, with Sam and Marion shown very early in the film sharing the same bed, and Marion wearing only her underwear. The censors claimed they could see one of Leigh's b.r.e.a.s.t.s as well as her stand-in's b.u.t.tocks. Amazingly another cause of concern was Marion's flushing of the toilet, with the torn toilet paper being fully visible. Further criticism came after the film's release, from those who felt it encouraged other filmmakers, as would be evidenced by Herschel G. Lewis and William Castle, who wasted little time in hurling bucket loads of blood and guts across the cinema screen. Psycho was to usher in a generation of slashers, none of which, however, would ever be the match of Norman Bates.

Three sequels followed, Psycho II (1983), Psycho III (1986) and Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), the last being a part-prequel television movie, with a remake of the original in 1998.

THE REMINGTON FAMILY members have gathered together at the mansion of their elderly aunts to celebrate their birthday. There is no hiding the fact that they all have a strong dislike of one another, but goodwill ensues because the family fortune is at stake. After the evening meal, the aunts open a present sent by an estranged family member who has an uncanny affiliation with the dark arts. As soon as the aunts open the package, they are possessed by demons and turned into flesh-eating monsters. One of their shocked guests is killed immediately at the table, as the rest scatter to find a place to hide in the mansion's endless rooms and corridors. The cackling aunts begin their search in this bloodthirsty game of hide and seek.

With precious little in the way of money, Emmanuel Kervyn directed a movie that drew upon the slapstick violence of The Evil Dead (1981) and pre-empted the visceral craziness of Peter Jackson's Braindead by almost four years. As with Jackson's cast, Kervyn made absolutely no attempt to create a likeable crowd, thus there was a delirium to the antic.i.p.ation of these imaginative kills. Rather than a.s.sembling his country's finest actors, the director lavished his funds on the splatter, hacking off one man's limbs before impaling him on a pike, leading to a rotund fellow having his backside chewed off and, in probably the film's most shocking scene, luring and then s.a.d.i.s.tically dismembering the aunts' young niece. The torture would continue and in a rather poignant episode, the wicked aunts trap a priest with a shotgun and give him the choice of suicide and eternal d.a.m.nation or the tortures they will duly inflict on him. As the aunts gleefully tossed their avaricious relatives' body parts around the hallways of their home there was no denying the black humour underlying the b.l.o.o.d.y carnage. Many versions of Kervyn's film have been heavily censored, but its fans insist the only way to enjoy its content is with the excess remaining entirely intact, as evidenced in the European version.

WHILE WORKING IN Austria, eccentric medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) synthesizes a serum with properties that can resurrect the dead. He returns to America and locates in the town of Arkham, Ma.s.sachusetts, where he takes a place at the Miskatonic University. In the bas.e.m.e.nt of a house that he rents with Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), he continues in his bizarre experimentation to perfect his eerie green concoction. The girl of Dan's dreams, Megan (Barbara Crampton) cannot shake her sense of disquiet in the presence of the obsessive Herbert, which is compounded when her cat disappears and then turns up dead in his refrigerator. Dan later sees the cat very much alive and in throes of violently sinking its claws into Herbert. The pair are once again forced to kill the shrieking creature. Herbert now recognizes a kindred spirit in Dan and invites him to work alongside him, which takes their research to the town's morgue with typically disastrous consequences. Very soon, with Herbert's helping hand, the dead are seen to rise from the slab, which results in b.l.o.o.d.y mayhem as the envious Dr Carl Hill (David Gale) attempts to steal West's formula.

Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Herbert West: Re-Animator, the blend of horror and comedy in Stuart Gordon's film went on to draw favourable comparisons with Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981), particularly in its graphic use of comic book-styled excess. While his movie excelled in its craft, the film as a whole refused to take itself too seriously and brought to celluloid the cult figure of Jeffrey Combs playing the most deranged scientist since Victor Frankenstein. Combs' portrayal of the compulsive West has enthralled audiences for more than a quarter of a century and his reckless experimentation gave them just what they wanted as a series of cadavers stumbled out of control to splash 24 gallons of fake blood across the screen. There were many enthusiasts of the time, who considered this one of the goriest films to come out of this visceral decade. Special effects man John Naulin had never had to use so much blood on any of his previous films and found himself a little more involved in the creation of the corpse designs than he would have liked, using photographs of actual cadavers shot in his local mortuary.

Stuart's love of the works of H. P. Lovecraft would see him go on to make several other films featuring the writer's deathly tales, including From Beyond (1986), Castle Freak (1995) and Dagon (2001) along with the Masters of Horror episode "Dreams in the Witch-House" (2005). The success of Re-Animator would be followed by Bride of Re-Animator (1990) and over a decade later Beyond Re-Animator (2003).

AFAMILY DRIVING ACROSS an isolated region of America become immersed in a toxic gas, and its vapours mutilate their dog. When the father goes out to investigate, he returns with half of his face torn away. In a gory sequence, which creates an element of intrigue and would hopefully set the tone for the remainder of the film, something foul then rips into them, leaving them all for dead.

The scene shifts to five students making their way to a festival, driving across a similar desert expanse, with an offended drugs dealer supposedly somewhere on their tail. True to form, their car breaks down, this time in what appears to be a mysteriously deserted diner; I say mysteriously because an hour ago this place was positively thriving. With the highway closed, they have no choice but to stay in the limbo of the aptly named "Halfway Motel". Shortly afterwards the mother from the film's prologue is seen, her mouth now severely disfigured, carving "Tell my son I love him". This is no ordinary motel and there is the distinct impression that they are not alone. Their suspicions are alerted when they run into an awkward individual by the name of Henry (Michael Ironside), who is searching for his wife. For the moment, he is not the one they need to fear, as he is very quickly suffocated by a shrouded figure. It's not long before the kids are afflicted by images of