Behind the Couch

1971 Dir. Robert Fuest The renowned surgeon, concert organist and holder of doctorates in Music and Theology, Dr Phibes (Vincent Price), was supposedly killed in a horrific car crash as he rushed to be by the side of his dying wife, Victoria. He did in fact not perish in the accident, but was monstrously disfigured and fiendishly angry with the surgeons who failed to save his wife’s life. Utilising highly imaginative and convoluted methods, Phibes has sworn to avenge his wife’s untimely death, and taking the Ten Biblical Plagues of Egypt as his inspiration, sets out to murder the surgeons he deems responsible for letting his wife die. The Abominable Dr Phibes is justly renowned for its opulent art-deco sets, lavish dialogue, knowingly camp performances and fiendishly dark sense of humour. Presiding over all this is the inimitable Vincent Price, a devilish delight to watch, who darkly relishes every moment. Almost every shot is drenched in artistic mise-en-scene, particularly ...

1943 Dir. Jacques Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie was the second collaboration between director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton and it followed on from the irresistible moodiness of Cat People (1942). Essentially taking the film’s rather lurid title from a newspaper article, and transporting elements of the plot of ‘Jane Eyre’ to a tropical setting, the filmmakers have created one of the most subtle, chilling and downright poetic horror films ever produced. The plot follows Betty (Frances Dee), a nurse, as she journeys to the West Indies to care for Jessica (Christine Gordon), the catatonic wife of plantation owner Paul Holland (Tom Conway). Betty soon begins to fall in love with Paul, and begins to suspect that the Holland family have a few dark secrets that are about to surface. Paul’s younger brother Wesley (James Ellison) and their mother Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett) are also caught up in whatever it is that Paul seems so keen to keep Betty from discovering. Betty b...

1974 Dir. Bob Clark Black Christmas is one of the earliest slasher films and strongly contributed to the blueprint, visual grammer and codification of the sub-genre. It tells of the residents of a sorority house who begin receiving unsettling and obscene phone calls during the run up to the Christmas holidays. Someone then breaks into the house, hides in the attic, and begins killing the young women one by one. The tale unfolds at a stalking-through-the-snow pace, ensuring the tension builds steadily to a genuinely shocking and chillingly bleak climax. The characters of Black Christmas are certainly more fleshed out than many other slasher film characters, and several are even quite complex, with rich inner lives. While the film is lauded for establishing various slasher movie conventions, it also addresses social issues such as women’s safety on campus, abortion, alcohol abuse, parental neglect, and domestic violence. With the characters already living with all these perso...

1963 Dir. Roger Corman After his exquisite, highly literate Poe adaptations ( House of Usher, Premature Burial and The Pit and The Pendulum ) Corman returned to directing with this cautionary tale of dangerous curiosity and existential crisis. Dr Xavier (Ray Milland) is a scientist who has concocted a serum that allows the human eye to see through anything! Against the advice of his colleagues Dr Brant (Harold Stone) and Dr Diane Fairfax (Diana van der Vlis), he experiments with the serum on himself. Sure enough, he is able to see through things! Walls! Paper documents! Clothes! However, this being a cautionary tale about the dangers of venturing into scientific realms we probably have no business venturing into, things inevitably turn bad for our intrepid doc. After accidentally pushing Dr Brant to his death from a window, Xavier goes on the run and winds up as a fairground sideshow act, looking into people’s minds and reading their thoughts and social security numbers and bein...

1962 Dir. Herk Harvey This obscure and oddly affecting horror film from the Sixties was directed by Herk Harvey and shot on a ridiculously low budget in Lawrence, Kansas. It showcases Harvey’s vivid imagination and ambitious aspirations, despite the shoestring budget. After a tragic drag racing accident, resulting in a car being forced off a bridge into the murky depths of the river below, church organist Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) seemingly emerges as the sole survivor. She appears dazed and soaked on the river bank before wandering off to begin a new life for herself in Utah. However, she soon finds her daily chores increasingly interrupted by the spectre of a cadaverous man (portrayed by Herk Harvey) who stalks her every move. Eventually she is mysteriously drawn to an eerie amusement park on an abandoned pavilion outside town, where she realises the full horror of her fate. The film successfully creates a veneer of normality which the otherworldly intrudes upon unass...

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...

2007 Dir. Dario Argento After 27 years Argento finally returned to the sinister figures of the Three Mothers to complete his trilogy that began with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). While wildly different in tone and style from the previous two instalments, Mother of Tears contains some of Argento’s cruellest, most sadistic imagery yet. And that’s saying something. The film follows the outrageous journey of art restoration student Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) who, after witnessing the brutal murder of her colleague by three mysterious figures, soon realises that a powerful witch known as the Mother of Tears has returned to Rome and intends to unleash evil and untold heartache throughout the world. Argento teamed up with writers Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch to pen the shocking and psychedelic Mother of Tears . Anderson and Gierasch also wrote Crocodile , The Toolbox Murders and Mortuary for Tobe Hooper . Argento insisted that Mother of Tears be as different from Susp...

2008 Dir. Steve Barker In a nameless, war-torn eastern European town, mysterious businessman Hunt (Julian Wadham) hires ex-marine DC (Ray Stevenson) to recruit a team of ex-soldiers to protect him on a somewhat risky journey into deepest, darkest, undisclosed ‘eastern Europe.’ His dubious plans are to scope out an old military bunker. The hard-as-nails gang of cynical, battle-worn veterans and mercenaries (including Richard Brake and Michael Smiley) are rather unsavoury to say the least, and assume that their shifty employer is in search of buried Nazi gold. Once at the outpost however, the men make a horrific discovery that turns their entire mission on its head and pits them against a force of unimaginable, and apparently supernatural, evil. Outpost is the latest military themed horror film in a sub-genre that includes The Keep (1983), Deathwatch (2002), The Bunker (2001), Shock Waves (1977) and R-Point (2004). It is a concept that appears to be infinitely more interes...

2000 Dir. Tobe Hooper A group of teenaged friends having a party on a boat are menaced by a giant crocodile. Written by Adam Gierasch and Jace Anderson (who also wrote Toolbox Murders and co-wrote Dario Argento's Mother of Tears ), Crocodile is a low budget, by the numbers creature feature. While it certainly has the potential to be a grimy, taut throwback to exploitation flicks of the 80s, particularly with Tobe Hooper directing, it sadly emerges as more of a ripple, rather than the tide of terror it could have been. Featuring a buffed and polished cast of thirty-somethings playing teens, and some very tedious dialogue and partying scenes, the screenplay paints the characters with the broadest of strokes. Sure, they’re having fun, but we just aren’t invited to care, even remotely, about them. When they steal crocodile eggs, we know their fates are sealed, so it doesn’t seem to matter if we still can’t tell them apart. Brief sojourns to other parts of the bayou where we see th...

2004 Dir. Paul Etheredge-Ouzts A group of friends are stalked and murdered by a masked killer as they party at West Hollywood's Halloween carnival.  Slasher movies can nearly always be relied upon to stick closely to a familiar structure and a set of conventions established by the likes of Halloween  (1978) and Friday the 13th  (1980) - oblivious characters are picked off one by one by a masked killer in an isolated location (summer camp, quiet suburban neighbourhood, sorority house, college campus etc) as they separate and wander off from the group. Eventually only one (usually a young woman - the 'final girl') is left to defeat the killer alone. Scream (1996) shook things up and breathed new life into the slasher film, with its fresh humour, irony and cine-literate characters and dialogue. In a post- Scream landscape however, is there anywhere left for the slasher to go that's new and interesting?  Enter HellBent . Written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts,...

2007 Dir. Kit Ryan Le pantomime du grand guignol… Botched is a rather fitting title for a film that seemingly revels in its own brand of absolute anarchy. Largely shot in Ireland and Eastern Europe, it boasts an eclectic cast who lick up their absurd characters with perverse relish.  Beginning as something of a slick heist-caper complete with Ocean’s Eleven style car chases, jewellery-thieving, a groovy David Holmes-like soundtrack and talk of ‘one last job.’ However, in a film called Botched , as its name may just suggest, you know that all will not go as planned. Sure enough, Richie (Stephen Dorff) is shipped off to Russia by his sadistic boss (Sean Pertwee) to retrieve a jewel-encrusted cross from a swish Moscow penthouse and compensate for messing up the last heist. However, events soon bleed into something else entirely ala From Dusk til Dawn . That ‘something else entirely’ is an incredibly gory slapstick film. Splat-stick, if you will. While the ‘one last job...