Last Halloween I wrote a column about horror movies and the dilemma all fans of the genre eventually face: that they’ll run out of good ones. After years of gorging on them myself, I’m getting dangerously close to that point, but I haven’t arrived there quite yet. The following are a few obscure gems I’ve recently discovered, any one of which would make an excellent Halloween alternative to watching Halloween for the zillionth time.

A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS: Throughout the 1970s, the BBC had an annual tradition known as “A Ghost Story for Christmas” — hour-long tales of terror meant to raise goosebumps during the otherwise jolly yuletide season. Though generations of Brits love and cherish these films — most of which were shot in 16mm and made by journeyman television director Lawrence Gordon Clark — they’re almost completely unknown in North America and very difficult to see. This one, adapted by Clark from an M.R. James short story, is the only one I’ve been able to get my hands on, and it’s shockingly good. Set on the windswept coast of Norfolk during the 1930s, Peter Vaughan plays an amateur archeologist searching for one of the three “lost crowns of Anglia.” Unfortunately for him, the crown is protected by a rather deathly-looking fellow with a habit of bludgeoning treasure-seekers. From its first scene on, A Warning to the Curious establishes a peerlessly lonely, foreboding atmosphere — it does for Norfolk what Don’t Look Now did for Venice — and it gradually makes you feel as uneasy and vulnerable as the protagonist. There are shots here — one in a hotel room, and one in the woods at night — that creeped me out like nothing has in years.

(Available for purchase from Sinister Cinema.)

THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED: This 1969 Spanish film by director Narciso Ibáñéz Serrador, who later directed the cult fave Who Can Kill a Child? (which I wrote about last year), is set in an all-girls boarding school in turn-of-the-century France, and if you ask me it’s vastly superior to Dario Argento’s similar but needlessly nonsensical Suspiria (which arrived almost a decade later). The plot is fairly simple — a stern headmistress tries to keep her wayward charges in line as girl after girl goes missing — but Serrador works the psychosexual tension to a fever pitch, and he brings out every shred of menace in the isolated, gothic setting. A slow-motion attack in a greenhouse is a memorable showstopper, as is a later scene when one of the young ladies investigates a darkened living room armed only with a candle. It isn’t hard to guess who the killer is, but the unmasking is done with such creepy finesse you’ll be shocked anyway. 

(Available at Eyesore Cinema.)

INTRUDER: This inventive late-’80s slasher has an impeccable pedigree. Director Scott Spiegel co-wrote the film with friend Lawrence Bender (who went on to produce most of Quentin Tarantino’s films), and the cast includes director Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, both fresh off of Evil Dead II. So why the dickens is it still so unknown? Intruder is set in a grocery store slated for closure, and it follows the young staff as they work long into the night marking down inventory. For reasons I can’t recall, everybody starts getting offed. The plot is nonsense, but the movie is so energetic and stylish that good plotting would be overkill. Spiegel brings off a bunch of applause-worthy camera tricks — at one point, he adopts the perspective of a hole in a rotary phone — and man oh man does he do good gore. (Ever wondered what one of those whirring meat slicers could do to a human head? Wonder no more!) Plus, Spiegel shows real affection for his oddball cast — a rare virtue in slasher films — and he eliminates the usual moral justifications for their deaths. In fact, the killings here are so fun and gruesome they’re more like rewards for good behaviour.

(Widely available.)

AND SOON THE DARKNESS: I’ve always been fond of horror films that flout the rules a little bit, and this 1970 British chiller does so by taking place entirely during the daytime. On a bike trip through the French countryside, two pretty English girls find themselves tailed by a handsome yet vaguely sinister motorcyclist. One of them — the blonde, of course — wants to say hello, while the uptight brunette wants to keep her distance, which leads to a fight and a parting of ways. After riding ahead, the brunette relents and waits for her friend at a lonely roadside café. The friend never shows. Director Robert Fuest makes the sun-baked backroads and farmers’ fields weirdly threatening, and he compounds the unease by making his heroine a non-French speaker barely able to communicate with the locals. The movie relies entirely on mood, not gore or T&A sleaze, which is a nice change and calls to mind future genre classic The Vanishing. NOTE: Do not accidentally rent the worthless straight-to-video remake from 2010.

(Available at Suspect Video.)

NO TELLING: American indie director Larry Fessenden has developed a cult following for his unique, socially conscious horror films: Habit, Wendigo, The Last Winter. This film, his super-low-budget 1991 debut, has been all but impossible to see over the years, so imagine my surprise when it showed up for free streaming on Netflix a few weeks ago. It’s about a young geneticist and his artist wife who move to a farm so he can work on his experiments in relative privacy. For awhile, it’s simply a tale of marital discord — the husband, consumed with work, barely leaves his lab, so the wife seeks solace in another man. The horror element comes from the husband’s secret experiments: increasingly gruesome tests on increasingly inappropriate animals. Essentially, the movie is Bluebeard’s Wife as retold by PETA, and while it almost completely eschews scares, it has a memorably morbid trajectory. But be advised that it’s not for everyone — while no animals were harmed in its making, there’s necessarily a lot of simulated animal abuse.

(Available on Netflix Canada.)

CURTAINS: This early-’80s Canadian effort — about six actresses stuck in the snowbound country home of a pretentious theatre producer — is pretty much a mess. Halfway through filming, producer Peter Simpson took over from a director who was making a boring Agatha Christie-style murder mystery rather than the agreed-upon slasher. Simpson wasn’t really able to fix the film, but he did graft on some dandy set-pieces, including one so good it singlehandedly redeems the entire misbegotten project. On a blindingly sunny morning, one of the ladies heads to a nearby pond to practice her figure skating. (Awesomely, she brings a ghetto blaster blaring Burton Cummings’s “You Saved My Soul.”) As she twirls and twirls, a figure wearing a terrifying hag mask appears and sets out across the ice after her. I can’t even articulate why this scene works so well — it just does, and every dedicated horror fan and every patriotic Canadian should see it at least once.

(Available at my house on VHS.)

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