Films
In the dark, a waking dream
Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)
An abusive husband has writer’s block. When a killer murders a woman he has agreed to meet, and then others are found dead, he forces his wife to help him.
Censor (2021)
Enid Baines is a censor at the British Board of Film Classification. Her parents decide it is time to have her long-missing sister declared dead. Enid’s daily life, the films she has to watch, and memories of her sister, begin to bleed together.
La Llorona (2019)
A former general found guilty of genocide is trapped in his house by protesters, and strange things begin to happen to the family as the ghosts of the past insist on being heard.
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Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Ana, a nurse, wakes up to the start of a zombie apocalypse, and manages to hook up with a police officer, Rhodes, and three other survivors and hide in a nearby shopping mall.
Night of the Demons (1988)
A disparate group of misfits are tormented by a demon after a seance-like party game on Halloween night. The second half of this film rips.
Saw (2004)
Two men wake up chained by the ankles to radiators on opposite sides of a locked room. There is a dead man between them with his brains blown out, clutching a tape recorder.
Triangle (2009)
Triangle is this year’s first such nugget of gold. It’s about the patterns of thought, feeling and action we find ourselves in, the bad habits we can’t break, especially with the people we love.
The Crazies (1973)
A military developed virus is accidentally released into the water supply of Evans City, Pennsylvania, and the military attempts to impose martial law to contain its spread.
My Bloody Valentine (1981)
A unique film set in a small mining town, with the young male characters mostly miners. It was exciting to see working class characters and locations in a film like this.
The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)
I though The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail would be a giallo, or at least a proto-slasher, but it is far more a crime-thriller. A wife inherits a million dollars and becomes the focus of a killer.
Nosferatu (1922)
The oldest unseen film in my collection. I appreciated the original Dracula and Frankenstein, but they were pretty dry in places. Nosferatu is ten years older again. This did feel like homework.
Salem’s Lot (1979)
Salem’s Lot has a special place in my heart. It was the first scary book I ever read. The film is the two part miniseries I remember from the eighties stitched together.
Nightmare Beach (1989)
The late eighties, Spring break in Florida, and thousands of young people are in bars and cars along the seafront, drinking, sunbathing and having sex. But this is Nightmare Beach.
A Quiet Place (2018)
Krasinski displays a touch of Spielberg in the way he shows the children’s lives, as well as in the adrenaline-inducing set pieces.
The War of the Worlds (1953)
I recently watched the cleak Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds, so I thought I’d go back to the original 1953 adaptation, whose bleakness is softened by the folksy charm of small town America.
The Thing (1982)
A perfect film. A shape-shifting alien picks off the crew of an Antartic research station. Suspicion turns to paranoia, and the remaining humans have stop the alien from taking over the world.
The Thing From Another World (1951)
A report of a crashed aircraft, a remote scientific outpost, a prickly doctor — and an alien whose unique biology threatens humanity.
Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
Horror stretches across many genres, and you can’t always know in advance how horror-y a film is, so with Shadow in the Cloud we are in war-action-horror territory, in that order.
Lisa and the Devil (1973)
One of the lesser-known corners of the Mario Bava-verse. Telly Savalas as the possible devil Leandro is an amusing presence, and if he is not particularly devilish, the dream-like plot definitely is.
The Addiction (1995)
This is a film thick with social commentary, philosophy texts and existential ideas. The first images we see are piles of dead bodies from the Holocaust and Vietnam.