Staff pick
Nunsploitation ranked by blasphemy
7 films
Ranked from the merely sacrilegious up to Ken Russell torching a cathedral. The habit comes off in reel one either way.
Lists
The argument format. Make one, fork someone else's, or just take the recommendations and go.
From the staff
Staff pick
Poliziotteschi starter pack
8 films
Italian cops who close cases by ignoring the courts and the paperwork. Start at the top, before the moustaches blur together.
Staff pick
Nastiest of the nasties
10 films
The tapes the DPP put on its seize-on-sight list. Prosecuting them in a country with ferries to France was the best advertising any of them ever got.
Staff pick
The giallo starter pack
6 films
Six films, in this order. By the end you will know whether you can live without the plot making sense.
Staff pick
Essential Ozploitation
8 films
Australia spent fifteen years making films about the country trying to kill you. These are the ones that meant it.
Staff pick
Gateway drugs for horror normies
8 films
For the friend who liked Hereditary and thinks that is the deep end. Nothing here will make them leave the room.
Staff pick
Euro-gothic for the giallo graduate
8 films
The graduate course after the giallo: cobwebbed castles and a dead woman who will not stay buried, lit by Bava like nobody since.
Staff pick
Drive-in creature features
8 films
After Jaws, every drive-in needed its own hungry animal. Some got a shark, some had to make do with a very large pig.
Staff pick
Krimi: the German pulp thrillers
8 films
West Germany filmed most of Edgar Wallace in fog, with a hooded killer and a wildly overqualified cast. Comfort food with a body count.
Staff pick
Women in prison: the essentials
10 films
Roger Corman worked out you could film the whole genre in the Philippines for nothing, and everyone spent the next decade reshooting his shower scene.
Staff pick
The Spanish horror shelf
9 films
Shot twice, dressed for the Madrid censor and naked for the drive-in. The blind Templars on skeletal horses are still the best monster on the shelf.
Staff pick
Notorious by reputation
6 films
Films whose legend outran them: banned, prosecuted, or argued about for forty years by people who mostly have not seen them.
Staff pick
Better than their reputation
8 films
Prosecuted, banned, dismissed or filed on the wrong shelf. All of them are good.
From everyone else
Nobody has published one yet. Go first.