The films

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Horrors of Malformed Men

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

▶ watchcult

The Brainiac

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

▶ watchcult

The Curse of the Crying Woman

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

▶ watchcult

Ganja & Hess

An art film that was sold as a vampire picture. Recut and buried for decades.

▶ watchcult

Requiem for a Vampire

Rollin at his purest. Two women in clown costume, a castle, almost no dialogue.

▶ watchcult

Spider Baby

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

▶ watchcult

The Blood Beast Terror

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

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This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse

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

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El Vampiro

Mexico's caped vampire, fanged on screen a year before Hammer got there.

▶ watchcult

Fascination

Rollin's best, and the one where the pretty dream logic finally grows teeth.

▶ watchcult

Lips of Blood

Rollin's most coherent, which is not saying a great deal. Gorgeous.

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The Iron Rose

Rollin with the vampires stripped out, and his best film for it.

▶ watchcult

The Living Dead Girl

Rollin's best late film. Melancholy where the Italians were loud.

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The Long Hair of Death

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

▶ watchcult

The Nude Vampire

A secret society, a Paris chateau, and dream logic all the way down.

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Zinda Laash

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

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Nightmare Castle

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

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The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

A widower lures redheads to his castle to get over his dead wife. Nonsense plot, glorious mood.

▶ watchcult

Vampyres

Two women lure travellers to a country house and drain them. British, bloody, erotic.

▶ watchcult

A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Franco at his dreamiest. Distributors added zombies later without telling him.

▶ watchcult

Baron Blood

A resurrected torturer stalks his own castle. Bava on more commercial autopilot, still gorgeous.

▶ watchcult

Lisa and the Devil

Bava's most personal film, and his strangest. Telly Savalas as the devil, holding a lollipop.

▶ watchcult

Maciste in Hell

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

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Succubus

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

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The Blood Spattered Bride

Spanish Carmilla adaptation with an unusually pointed anger about marriage.

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The Shiver of the Vampires

Rollin with a fuzz-guitar band and a vampire who lives in the clock. His most fun.

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99 Women

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

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Alucarda

The most hysterical nunsploitation film ever made. A convent, two possessed girls, and constant screaming.

▶ watchcult

Kill, Baby... Kill!

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

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The Grapes of Death

Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.

▶ watchcult

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock

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

▶ watchcult

Castle of Blood

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

▶ watchcult

Daughters of Darkness

Delphine Seyrig as Bathory in an empty Ostend hotel. Genuinely elegant.

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Planet of the Vampires

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

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The Awful Dr. Orlof

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

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I Vampiri

Freda walked off Italy's first sound horror; Bava finished it. The whole euro-gothic shelf starts here.