The House That Dripped Blood

Amicus built its name on the horror anthology, and this is one of the tidiest: four Robert Bloch stories wrapped in a Scotland Yard investigation into a missing actor, running through a country house that keeps outliving its tenants. You get Denholm Elliott menaced by his own fictional creation, Peter Cushing at a waxworks, Christopher Lee raising a very strange little girl, and Jon Pertwee sending up the whole business as a horror star who buys a properly cursed vampire cloak, with Ingrid Pitt along for it. The tone stays clipped and civilised, more twist-ending magazine than gore reel, and the title is a flat lie: there is barely a drop in it. Bloch complained about that himself. As a sampler of early-70s British horror doing its most comfortable thing, it is hard to beat.