Exploitation films

Horrors of Malformed Men

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

The Brainiac

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

The Curse of the Crying Woman

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

Ganja & Hess

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

Requiem for a Vampire

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

Spider Baby

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

The Blood Beast Terror

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

El Vampiro

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

Fascination

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

Lips of Blood

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

The Iron Rose

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

The Living Dead Girl

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

The Long Hair of Death

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

The Nude Vampire

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

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.

Nightmare Castle

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

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.

Vampyres

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

A Virgin Among the Living Dead

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

Baron Blood

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

Lisa and the Devil

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

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 Shiver of the Vampires

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

99 Women

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

Alucarda

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

Kill, Baby... Kill!

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

The Blood Spattered Bride

Spanish Carmilla adaptation with an unusually pointed anger about marriage.

The Grapes of Death

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

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.

Daughters of Darkness

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

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.

I Vampiri

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