Exploitation films of the 1960s

She-Devils on Wheels

H.G. Lewis hands the gore to a real biker gang. The acting is a crime; the piano wire is the point.

Bad Girls Go to Hell

The definitive Doris Wishman roughie: grimy, deranged, and edited by someone allergic to faces.

Kilink Istanbul'da

The homegrown Yeşilçam pulp: a skeleton-suited supervillain lifted wholesale from Italian comics.

Satan's Sadists

Al Adamson's grimiest, shot partly where the Manson family was living.

Horrors of Malformed Men

Suppressed by Toei for decades. Butoh dancing, an island, and total delirium.

Scum of the Earth

Herschell Gordon Lewis invents the roughie the same year he invents gore. Busy man.

Blind Beast

Masumura, one set, three actors, and an ending that goes much further than expected.

Santo vs. the Martian Invasion

Martians in togas demand Earth's surrender. Santo declines.

The Brainiac

Not a Santo film. A forked-tongue demon eating brains with a spoon.

The Curious Dr. Humpp

Argentine, insane, and re-cut by its US distributor into something stranger.

The Curse of the Crying Woman

The Mexican gothic at its cobwebbed peak, Universal horror with the fog cranked up.

Violated Angels

The Richard Speck murders restaged as avant-garde pink film. Wakamatsu's coldest hour.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

Bleeding skies, a forehead-splitting alien, and an ending with no comfort in it whatsoever.

Love Camp 7

The film that invented nazisploitation six years before Ilsa made it a genre.

Santo vs. the Vampire Women

The best-shot Santo film. He wrestles twice for no reason at all.

Spider Baby

Jack Hill's first, Lon Chaney Jr's last good role. Very odd and very fond.

The Black Abbot

The standard-issue Wallace krimi. Hood, abbey, inheritance, fog.

The Blood Beast Terror

Cushing called it the worst film he ever made. He was being generous.

The Sinister Monk

A whip-wielding monk killing heiresses. Closest the krimi got to giallo.

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

The first Brazilian horror film, and the birth of Coffin Joe, a national icon with terrible fingernails.

Night of the Bloody Apes

Mexican horror at the gore end: a gorilla-heart transplant, real surgery footage, and a masked lady wrestler.

The Born Losers

The first Billy Jack film, and much nastier than the sequels.

The Dead Eyes of London

Blind killers, insurance fraud, and the best fog in the series.

The Inn on the River

The Rialto Wallace machine at full tilt: fog, a harpoon and Klaus Kinski looking guilty.

The Long Hair of Death

Margheriti and Barbara Steele do the burned-witch gothic, and the fog does half the acting.

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse

Coffin Joe returns, still hunting the perfect woman, and the film turns Technicolor to show you Hell.

Zinda Laash

Pakistan's first horror film: Hammer's Dracula, plus musical numbers, minus permission.

Camille 2000

Dumas restaged in a mod furniture showroom. The best-looking softcore of its year by a mile.

Color Me Blood Red

Lewis finishing his gore trilogy. A painter, and his pigment source.

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

The gadget-gunslinger spaghetti west arrives fully dressed in black.

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die

Mid-tier Eurospy with an unusually good title and Mike Connors.

Nightmare Castle

Barbara Steele twice over, one of them back from the grave, scored by a young Morricone.

The Creature with the Blue Hand

Kinski playing both twins and a killer's claw that snaps shut like a bear trap. The krimi going out swinging.

Cemetery Without Crosses

The French corner of the spaghetti cycle: gaunt, ritualistic, and dedicated to Leone.

Goyokin

A samurai returns to stop the massacre he could not prevent the first time. Shot in real snow.

Maciste in Hell

A muscleman drops into a full gothic hell. Peplum crossbred with a haunted-castle picture, and it looks it.

Succubus

Franco's arthouse credentials, such as they are. Fritz Lang liked it.

The Indian Scarf

Ten heirs in a Scottish castle, strangled one at a time. Kinski included.

99 Women

Franco doing the formula early, with Mercedes McCambridge as the warden.

Goliath and the Vampires

Maciste renamed again, fighting a shapeshifter. Cheerfully incoherent.

Kill, Baby... Kill!

A ghost child with a white ball. Fellini and Scorsese both stole from it.

The College Girl Murders

The point where the black-and-white krimi tips over into full-colour giallo delirium.

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock

Barbara Steele married to a necrophile surgeon, and Freda smuggling it past the 1962 censors on innuendo alone.

Castle of Blood

Barbara Steele in a haunted house on a bet. Better than it sounds.

Matango

Honda's mushroom-people film. Far bleaker than anything else Toho made.

Operation Kid Brother

They cast Sean Connery's actual brother. That is the entire idea.

Vixen!

The one that made the money and triggered the obscenity fight.

Zatoichi: The Tale of Zatoichi

The blind masseur who is also the deadliest swordsman alive. The first of twenty-five-plus.

Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!

Nothing to do with Django, and one of the strangest and cruelest westerns Italy ever shot.

OSS 117: Mission for a Killer

The eurospy archetype, from a French agent who beat James Bond into print by four years.

Sword of Doom

A swordsman with no morals and no motive cuts his way through the film. It stops rather than ends.

The One-Armed Swordsman

The film that made Shaw Brothers switch to male leads and stay there.

Blood Feast

The first gore film. Barely competent, historically unavoidable.

Branded to Kill

Got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu for making films nobody understood. Correct.

Planet of the Vampires

Bava builds an alien planet out of fog and two rocks, and Alien quietly borrowed the skeleton.

The Awful Dr. Orlof

Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.

The Big Gundown

Sollima's best. A manhunt that keeps turning into a political argument.

Tokyo Drifter

Suzuki given a budget cut and responding with pop-art abstraction.

Wild in the Streets

A rock star is elected president and puts everyone over 35 in LSD re-education camps.

Danger: Diabolik

Bava doing pop art on pocket change. Genuinely one of the best-designed films ever.

Gamera, the Giant Monster

Daiei's cut-price answer to Godzilla. A flying turtle. Children loved it.

Hells Angels on Wheels

The biker cycle's Jack Nicholson entry, shot by Laszlo Kovacs and a cut above the AIP norm.

Samurai Rebellion

Kobayashi and Mifune against feudal authority again. It builds slowly and then it does not stop.

The Whip and the Body

Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.

Day of Anger

A gunfighter mentors a despised young man, then has to face what he created. Van Cleef at his best.

Face to Face

Sollima's smartest western: watch a decent man discover he likes it.

Psych-Out

A deaf runaway searches for her brother in Haight-Ashbury. Nicholson with a ponytail and a band.

The Devil Rides Out

Hammer's best occult film. Lee as the hero for once, and enjoying it.

The Mercenary

Corbucci's Zapata western. A Polish gun-for-hire, a peasant revolutionary, and Jack Palance in a frock.

Two Thousand Maniacs!

H.G. Lewis, a Southern town, and gore effects that predate everyone.

War of the Gargantuas

Two giant humanoid brothers, one good, one savage, tear up Japan. Weirdly beloved, and Brad Pitt's favourite.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

The film that invented the Amicus anthology, dealt out as tarot on a train.

Lorna

Meyer stops joking. The one where the sun goes behind a cloud.

Witchfinder General

Vincent Price with the camp removed. Reeves died at 25, a year later.

Hercules in the Haunted World

Bava shoots Hades in gel colours. Looks like nothing else in the cycle.

Mothra

The most charming of Toho's roster, and openly anti-colonial about it.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much

The one usually called the first giallo. Still half a krimi.

The Wild Angels

Corman starts the cycle. Peter Fonda, real Hells Angels, and a funeral.

The Great Silence

Corbucci in the snow. The ending would never have cleared an American studio.

A Bullet for the General

The most openly political of the Zapata cycle, and the sharpest.

Black Sabbath

Three stories, one Karloff. The Wurdulak segment is the best thing Bava shot.

Destroy All Monsters

Eleven monsters, no restraint. Honda cashing every chip at once.

The Trip

Corman stages an LSD experience with every optical trick he had. Written by Jack Nicholson.

Africa Addio

Not staged, which makes it far worse. A repellent document.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

The film where Godzilla becomes a hero. Three of Toho's monsters team up against a golden space dragon.

Mondo Cane

The original. Oscar-nominated song, colonial gaze, half of it staged.

Carnival of Souls

Made by an industrial-film director for $33,000. Genuinely haunted.

Blood and Black Lace

The template, and still the best-looking film on this list.

Come Drink with Me

King Hu, Cheng Pei-pei, and the template for every wuxia since.

Black Sunday

Bava's debut as director. Barbara Steele and a mask full of spikes.

Death Rides a Horse

Revenge, Van Cleef, and a score Tarantino lifted wholesale.

The Colossus of Rhodes

Leone's actual debut, three years before the westerns.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Meyer's best. Tura Satana is a genuine screen presence and the dialogue snaps.

Sabata

A gadget-toting gunfighter blackmails a whole town. Lee Van Cleef, having an obvious blast.

King Kong vs. Godzilla

The most-watched Godzilla film in Japan, and essentially an ad-industry farce with two giant monsters.

Harakiri

A ronin asks to commit suicide in a lord's courtyard. What follows dismantles the whole code.