Behind the Couch

2012 Dir. Jonathan Zarantonello Featuring a strong female cast comprised of renowned veterans of the genre, The Butterfly Room is headed by the fabulous and formidable Barbara Steele ( Black Sunday, Nightmare Castle, Pit and the Pendulum, Silent Scream , Shivers ), who delivers a mesmeric performance as maniacal matriarch Ann. Mentally unstable yet strangely vulnerable, her vanquished relationship with estranged daughter Dorothy (Heather Langenkamp) drives her to weave maternal bonds around a young girl called Alice (Julia Putnam). It turns out enigmatic Alice is not what she seems though, and has a few dark secrets of her own. Shocking revelations push an already unstable Ann over the edge as she seeks to preserve her relationship with Alice at any cost... With its mix of melodrama, Grand Guignol camp and tragic pathos, and its casting of a sensational older star in the role of a severely unhinged recluse, The Butterfly Room echoes 'hagsploitation' creepers such as C...

1961 Dir. Roger Corman Francis Barnard (John Kerr) makes his way to the home of his late sister Elizabeth (Barabara Steele) to meet her husband Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) and learn more of her death. Whilst there, he witnesses Medina slowly sink into mourning and insanity as his sister Catherine (Luana Anders) helplessly looks on. Francis soon begins to realise Elizabeth’s death occurred under mysterious circumstances and all is not as it seems…  The Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories were perhaps some of the first horror films I ever watched as a youngster. Staying up late and secretly watching the little portable TV in my room, with the light on of course, I often peered at these lurid gems of the genre from between my fingers. None had more of an impact than Pit and the Pendulum . It still retains the ability to chill and unsettle in its own unique way. Watching it is pure nostalgic bliss. Adding to the nostalgia and the bliss is the fact that the film stars...

1960 Dir. Mario Bava Aka The Mask of Satan With Black Sunday , Mario Bava not only directed his first film (if you don’t count Riccardo Freda’s The Vampires , which Bava photographed and finished directing when Freda left the production), he also made what many consider to be the definitive Euro-Gothic horror film. Adapted from a short story by Nicolaj Gogal, Black Sunday was banned in Britain for eight years, due in large to the brutal opening sequence where Barbara Steele has a mask with spikes inside it forcably fixed to her face. The diabolical Princess Asa (Steele) and her fiendish servant, are put to death as punishment for witchcraft and vampirism, and interned in the crypt of her ancestors; but not before she vows to inflict vengeance on the future generations of her family. Two centuries later, the wheel of the coach carrying the doctors Andre Gorobec and Thomas Kruvajan to a convention buckles, and they are temporarily stranded outside an ancient crypt. Which of c...

1962 Dir. Riccardo Freda This slice of quintessential Italian Gothic horror is a darkly beautiful and disturbing rumination on the most forbidden of desires… the love for the dead… Robert Flemyng stars as the tormented titular doctor, a respected surgeon with a morbid secret. Dr Hichcock has a pathological fascination with dead bodies, and harbours a deep desire to engage with them in sexual activities. He and his wife Margaretha (Maria Teresa Vianello), indulge in dark and sordid sexual encounters together: he sedates her with an anaesthetic he created, and as she slips into unconsciousness, he copulates with her deathly-still body. Margaretha eventually slips into unconsciousness, seemingly for the last time, when her husband administers too much anaesthetic during one of their macabre liaisons. Inconsolable, the doctor is unable to continue living in the house with ‘too many memories’ of his beloved wife, so he moves away. Cut to twelve years later and Hichcock returns wit...