The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies Part 5

TO THE LYRICS "everybody wants to be a winner", the Midvale High School athletes go through the motions as the camera juxtaposes between their various excursions before finally coming to rest on Laura Ramstead, whose incredible acceleration pushes her on to victory in the 100-metre dash. Her moment of glory, however, is short lived; she collapses and dies on the spot; Ash her coach (Christopher George) and boyfriend (E. Danny Murphy) race towards the scene but are unable to save her.

Laura's older sister Anne (Patch Mackenzie) arrives home from her Naval detachment, having been invited to collect her sister's award at the school's graduation ceremony. Soon after her appearance, a jogger is murdered by an unidentified figure carrying a switchblade and stopwatch. The slasher convention was now a few years old, and Herb Freed's story adhered to its principles dispatching the remaining members of the track team, one by one, this time at the hands of an a.s.sa.s.sin garbed in a tracksuit and fencing mask. The image may not have evoked the same level of dread as that of Michael Myers, but this style of mask made a return in John Ottman's Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000). The slaughter went on to include the obligatory decapitation, which was not the most convincing episode but was later followed by an inventive slaying using an American football, armed with a protruding sword. The killer was seen to launch the ball from afar and as it descended it ripped into the victim's stomach. In the aftermath of these murders, scarlet lipstick has been left on the face of the victims gathered on a once-proud team photograph. This inference throws suspicion on Anne, who could be using her military training to avenge her sister's unfortunate death.

Former rabbi, Herb Freed had been involved with making adverts for much of the earlier part of his career, but between 1977 and 1981 he turned to making horror movies, princ.i.p.ally Beyond Evil (1980) and Haunts (1977). When he conceived the idea for Graduation Day with writer Anne Marisse, he made use of every element of the slasher trope that was now in vogue. His film is now very much of its time and has become a nostalgic journey for those who were lucky enough to have been there. There was no escape from the roller-disco and the heavy metal sound that excited the youth of these years, and the delightful heroine as ever managed to keep her clothes on, unlike several members of the cast; in addition she also gave the audience some seasoned martial arts moves just for good measure. It worked; Freed's movie captured the imagination of cinema-goers across the whole of the US and it went on to be a huge commercial success. The presence of Christopher George no doubt gave his film a boost and a young Linnea Quigley was also to be found among the cast in what were very early days in a long and successful B-movie career. An ear piercing performance from Vanna White didn't do her career any harm; two years later she went on to host the US version of Wheel of Fortune.

AFORMER GALLERY CURATOR named Akiko (Makiko Kuno) has secured a position with the prestigious Akebono Corporation. Her new role is to a.s.sist and provide advice on its acquisitions of highly valuable artwork, with a view to selling them on at an astronomical profit. When she arrives on her first day, the security guard has no knowledge of the department for which she will be working. To add to her sense of unease, radio broadcasts tell of the escape of the deranged "Sumo Killer", who is standing trial for murder. He had apparently beaten his girlfriend and a fellow wrestler to death. That same day a towering security guard (Yutaka Matsus.h.i.+ge) also a.s.sumes his new duties with the company; he very quickly reveals his penchant for violence. When she finally does get to her office, Akiko's boss reveals himself as an ill-tempered tyrant, while her immediate colleagues are an awkward set who appear intent upon making her life unnecessarily difficult. Within days, they become the security guard's new targets as he begins to stalk the stairways and corridors of this corporate edifice. With Akiko locked in a doc.u.ment room and the building's lighting no longer working, the stage is set for a murderous finale.

The Guard from the Underground, which was also ent.i.tled Jigoku No Keibiin on its release and later went by the name Security Guard from h.e.l.l, has been described as a fast and cheap homage to the slashers of a decade past. For director Kiyos.h.i.+ Kurosawa it marked his return to j.a.panese cinema following four years in the wilderness. Having agreed to create a piece of soft-core p.o.r.nography, he presented his backers with a philosophical treatise portraying very little in the way of s.e.x. The financiers were far from impressed. This direct-to-video film was his chance to restore the industry's faith in his ability before going on to direct more significant works, which would include Cure (1997), Charisma (1999), Pulse (2001), Bright Future (2003) and his internationally acclaimed Tokyo Sonata (2008). Here, with very limited funding, he proved himself unusually inventive, creating a series of set pieces amidst these dimly lit corridors and annexes as the killer's indeterminable actions spiralled into abject mindlessness. This isn't a film in any way concerned with the subtleties of character development; rather, its design is to slaughter as many of these corporate types as possible. Strangely, for a movie of its kind the violence is not especially explicit, albeit with one notable exception involving a locker.

THE CARNAGE ON display in the Guinea Pig or Za Ginipiggu series of short films had regularly been threatened during the grindhouse years of exploitation, but no one ever dared take it quite so far. Over twenty years after they first appeared, these six films are still considered the most excessive movies to see production in j.a.pan. Their relish for agonizing pain and gore recorded between 1985 and 1989 would be instrumental in the rise of the torture p.o.r.n that has tormented western cinema for the last decade. Their notoriety stemmed from the furore that arose in the wake of the first two features, which forced producer and acclaimed horror manga creator Hides.h.i.+ Hino and fellow creator Satoru Ogura to prove that no one had been harmed during their making. So shocked was actor Charlie Sheen in 1991, he panicked after watching Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), believing he had been given a genuine snuff movie. He reported the film to the FBI and then informed the MPAA in the hope of preventing the global export of this sickening series. In the UK, a horror fan who had arranged for a copy of the film to be posted to him from abroad faced jail when he was accused of being in possession of a snuff movie. Only when the true nature of the film was established in a courtroom was his sentence reduced to a 600 fine. The Hino-directed Mermaid in a Manhole (1988) was also found in the huge anime and horror video collection of j.a.panese child serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, when he was arrested in July 1989. The series was once again the focus of much unwanted attention, which would inevitably heighten its infamy, although confusion remained as to whether Miyazaki had been acting out the gratuitous scenes from Flower of Flesh and Blood. Such was the mounting controversy surrounding the series, which had already been considerably toned down, it was forced out of production in its native j.a.pan, although it has now been reissued in the United States to an ever-growing fan base. Miyazaki was eventually executed for his crimes in June 2008 and while the j.a.panese film industry has produced its fair share of blood and guts in the years following the Guinea Pig series, rarely has it gone to such extremes. This, however, changed with Koji s.h.i.+rais.h.i.+'s Grotesque (2009), which in its unsavoury depiction of the acute s.e.xual torment, humiliation and torture of its male and female victims, stooped to far greater depths than the indulgence so far observed in the recent craze for torture p.o.r.n. s.h.i.+rais.h.i.+'s film offered absolutely nothing by way of narrative or development in character and as such found itself subsequently banned by the BBFC.

The reviled initiation to the Guinea Pig series, Devil's Experiment (1985), which has also been packaged as Ak.u.mano Jikken and the excruciatingly appropriate Unabridged Agony, along with the second feature Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), or Chiniku No Hana, work in a similar way to s.h.i.+rais.h.i.+'s Grotesque. Each of these cheap-looking productions was devoid of storyline and offered nothing by way of characterization; their creators' sole intent was to shock the viewer into believing they had in their possession a snuff movie, and as we now know they certainly succeeded. There were claims that Hides.h.i.+ Hino had received a similar video through the post, which acted as the catalyst for the series, but the outcry in j.a.pan was such the films that followed, while extreme, returned to conventional use of plot and introduced fully fleshed characters. The j.a.panese fascination for the snuff video refused to go away; it surfaced a few years later in The Evil Dead Trap (1988), a film that at first glance appeared to jump on Sam Raimi's lucrative bandwagon, and whose depiction of the barbaric practice of eye popping gave Lucio Fulci a run for his money.

Satoru Ogura had become disillusioned with what he saw as being the ba.n.a.l horror of the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s. Guinea Pig: The Devil's Experiment (1985) allowed him to create his kind of terror and marked the first of the series to see public release. A gang of three men have kidnapped a young woman and then embark on a torturous experiment to see how much pain her body can endure. For the duration of these unbearable forty-three minutes this hapless soul was verbally abused, punched and kicked, clawed, then had one of her fingernails removed before boiling water was poured over her arm. As it began to blister, maggots were forced into the wound and then scattered across her battered body, one of which crawled under her eyelid. The so-called experiment then demanded this unholy trio insert a needle into the poor girl's eye. As the violence and beatings became more protracted, the inevitability of the young girl's fate was all too obvious.

Flower of Flesh and Blood or Chiniku no Hana (1985) was inspired by an unmarked parcel that had been sent to Hides.h.i.+ Hino in the post. It was alleged to have contained an 8-mm film along with fifty-four photographs and a nineteen-page letter explaining the atrocious scenes in the contents of the package. After watching the film, which apparently doc.u.mented the appalling torture of a woman, he handed this vile subject matter to the police. For less than 20,000, he went on to make this forty-two-minute doc.u.mentary-styled re-enactment of what he could remember from the tape, which bears a close resemblance to a tale from his own manga series. A man dressed as a samurai (Hiros.h.i.+ Tamura) uses chloroform on an unsuspecting woman (Kirara Yugao) in the less populated suburbs of Tokyo and then takes her against her will to his home. She awakens to find herself tied to a bed in a darkened room that, as her eyes begin to focus, reveals the splattered stains of dried blood strewn across its walls. Before he begins to dissect his victim, the s.a.d.i.s.t stands before the camera and details that which will follow. He then proceeds to butcher her body and adds her body parts to his gruesome collection. Hino's film has been described as horror in its purest form; the youth of j.a.pan certainly loved it, giving it a top ten position among the country's video releases. This video also made it into the hands of American horror journalist Chas Balun, who copied it and introduced it to the underground horror cinema that was already discreetly operating in the United States. These bootlegs soon became treasured collector's items and the Guinea Pig series acquired a hush-hush popularity. Hino's ideas have continued to influence other modern creators, surfacing in Argentine Mariano Peralta's controversial Snuff 102 (2007), which resulted in the director being attacked following a screening at the Mar Der Plata Festival.

Flower of Flesh and Blood was an extreme piece of filmmaking and its success allowed Hino to continue his Guinea Pig movies. The series, however, was taken over by JHV, who refused to tolerate a repet.i.tion of the public outcry that had followed in the wake of the release of the first two films. Directed by Masayuki Kusumi, He Never Dies or Senritsu! s.h.i.+nanai Otoko (1986) ran to forty minutes and with an increased budget finally introduced the vaguest element of plot and rudimentary characterization. The series, which had established its unrelenting reputation on an almost incomprehensible nihilism, now turned to comedic gore. A heartbroken young man, whose girlfriend has ditched him for one of their smarmy colleagues, is then sacked by his boss. Having also fallen foul of his family, this despairing chap turns to suicide. However, when he slits his wrist he is shocked to see the blood stop flowing and the gash heal. Feeling no pain, he then cuts deeper and soon realizes he is "the man who cannot die". In contrast to the first two entries in the series, this man inflicts pain on his own body and then plans an amusingly elaborate revenge on his former girlfriend and her new lover.

Hides.h.i.+ Hino returned to direct the fourth short feature in the series, Mermaid in a Manhole or Manhoru no naka no Ningyo (1988), which had an extended running time of fifty-seven minutes. His tale of a grief-stricken painter (s.h.i.+geru Saiki) was based on one of his own manga. Having recently lost his wife, the painter returns to the river he played in as a child only to find it has been turned into a foul-smelling sewer. There he meets the mermaid (Mari Somei) who inspired him all those years ago. She has been stuck in the sewer for so long she has become infected, so he takes her back to his home in the hope of reviving her in the clean water of his bath. As she writhes seductively in the water, her illness soon takes a turn for the worse and the boils on her skin become pus-ridden b.l.o.o.d.y ruptures. Taking body art to the extreme, the artist uses the discharge from these lacerations to commit her portrait to a peculiar canvas, but her health declines and she eventually dies.

That same year Guinea Pig ventured into splatter-drenched science fiction in the Kazuhito Kuramoto directed Android of Notre Dame or Notoru Damu no andoroido (1988), which ran to fifty-one minutes. Kuramoto had already carved a reputation in the j.a.panese p.o.r.n industry and on this outing told the disappointing story of a diminutive scientist by the name of Karawaza (Tos.h.i.+hiko Hino) who had struggled to discover the cure for his sister's (Mio Takaki) failing heart. Up until this point, his research had been limited to experimenting with animals, but his endeavours now required a human guinea pig. A phone call from a man named Kato (Tomorowo Taguchi) provides the offer of the body of a recently deceased young girl in return for a substantial sum of money. The body soon turns up in a cardboard box! The experiment is again unsuccessful, despair turns to rage and then he hacks the broken body to pieces; Karawaza knows he needs a fresh corpse. When Kato reveals his true colours, the scientist is forced to escort him to his laboratory and he finally gets his live specimen.

The final tale in the series, Devil Woman Doctor or Pita no ak.u.ma no joi-san (1990), from director Hajime Tabe, whose background was in computer games, amounted to little more than fifty-two minutes of comedic gore sketches. In tone it had more in common with the third Guinea Pig, He Never Dies (1986), including in its cast one of j.a.pan's leading transvest.i.tes Pita, also known as s.h.i.+nnosuke Ikehata in the part of the female doctor of the feature's t.i.tle. She has been a.s.signed to a bizarre surgical enterprise that has been designed to treat only the most extreme cases, which necessitates a regular dosage of mutilation, blood, guts and, true to Guinea Pig's original premise, death. If the first of her patients becomes anxious, his head explodes; her next victim, I mean patient, is plagued by an exploding heart. And so the slapstick would continue in a tale that was as far removed from the series' graphic origins as could be imagined, but it still attracted a huge following. A seventh video Guinea Pig 7: Slaughter Special was released in 1991, collecting some of the most gruesome moments from the previous films, but the end alas was nigh.

ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT 1963, police were called to a Victorian-styled house in the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois. There they found the body of seventeen-year-old Judith Myers, stabbed to death by her six-year-old brother, who, having returned from trick-or-treating, found her in bed with her boyfriend. The eerily silent child was incarcerated in the Smith's Grove Sanatorium under the care of psychiatrist Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), the one person who recognized the evil locked in his soul. After being inst.i.tutionalized for fifteen years and knowing he faced a life of imprisonment, Michael Myers (Nick Castle) escapes just days before Halloween. Only Loomis knows his patient is heading home to Haddonfield. Soon after his arrival, Michael slips off with a white mask. These impa.s.sive features proved an unwitting stroke of genius and bore an uncanny resemblance to the mask that haunted George Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960). This would in due course make Michael's deadpan presence all the more ominous.

As bookish Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Michael's younger sister, discusses plans for Halloween with her world-wise friends Lynda (P. J. Soles) and Annie (Nancy Kyes-Loomis), she is certain that someone just out of eyeshot is watching her. Unbeknown to her dismissive friends they are also being observed. Later that evening while Laurie babysits across the street, Annie is confronted by Michael, who, without a word of warning, strangles her and then slits her throat. When Lynda appears at the seemingly empty house accompanied by her boyfriend, they seize the opportunity to slip upstairs to the bedroom. This would be their last, for shortly afterwards both are killed by the masked Michael, Lynda as she tries in desperation to call Laurie. Perturbed by Lynda's incoherent telephone call, Laurie crosses the street to the now darkened house. There she discovers the three dead bodies and Judith Myers' tombstone. What follows is a game of life and death as the amoral s.a.d.i.s.t stalks the innocent heroine of the piece, while Loomis and the Sheriff frantically try to bring him down. The film bows out with a shot of the Myers' house and Michael's heavy breathing, his face still concealed behind his mask. The image carries a warning; Michael Myers is still out there, alive and intent on the kill.

Filmed in only twenty-one days in the spring of 1978, John Carpenter's Halloween is a masterpiece of cinematic horror. Carpenter had already directed two acknowledged cult cla.s.sics with Dark Star (1974) and a.s.sault on Precinct 13 (1976); this time with co-writer Debra Hill he created a film that would a.s.sume the mantle as the first in a long line of slasher films, which drew its inspiration from Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's time-honoured Psycho. Executive Producer Irwin Yablans had aims to make a horror movie to rival The Exorcist, and with his business partner, Moustapha Akkad, toyed with the idea of a psychotic killer that stalked babysitters. Based on this, Carpenter and Debra Hill prepared a script they called "The Babysitter Murders". Yablans then suggested using a Halloween backdrop; thereafter the film became Halloween.

Carpenter's film both instigated and cleverly re-worked the principles that would become the blueprint for the slasher movies of the next decade. The first-person camera perspective was one of the many hallmarks of this feature and was used to disquieting effect as the silent a.s.sa.s.sin came to the fore, as he had four years before in Black Christmas. These houses weren't the Gothic manses of horrors past; everyday settings were now the norm, and the audience were introduced to the chaste female heroine, who proved invariably more resourceful than her male counterparts. Unlike many of his successors, Carpenter chose restraint in his portrayal of graphic violence, thus embracing Yablans' request "that the audience shouldn't see anything. It should be what they thought they saw that frightens them". To this effect, Carpenter conjured with the light and shadow, deceiving his audience as Michael prowled in the shadows akin to a childhood's monster under the bed.

The film succeeded in garnering a positive response from the audience for which it was intended, with comparatively very little advertising. The impression made by Carpenter's moody, yet unsophisticated score was similar in effect to that of Mike Oldfield's prelude to The Exorcist (1973) and Bernard Hermann's strings for the Psycho (1960) shower scene and became synonymous with the movie's unsettling premise. The columnists, however, proved more reticent. The movie's detractors regarded Carpenter's ideas as derivative, sourcing too much from Hitchc.o.c.k, De Palma and Lewton; further there were those who felt it lacked the erudition observed only a few years before in Carrie (1976) and The Exorcist. Later a.n.a.lysis questioned the extensive use of the peeping tom-styled roving camera, which aroused fears of the audience identifying with the villain, as it had done before in Jose Mojica Marins' Coffin Joe series and would do again in the Friday the 13th franchise as well as A Nightmare on Elm Street. There were those commentators who felt the film mirrored the declining moral values of America's youth, inferring an allegorical connotation between s.e.xual awakening and, at the hands of Michael Myers, the death of innocence. Carpenter has always been quick to dismiss such scrutiny.

Halloween was the surrogate to seven sequels, along with a remake in 2007 followed by a 2009 sequel to the remake ent.i.tled Halloween II, which has no bearing on the original released in 1981, which was the highest grossing horror movie of that particular year. The sequels, with the exception of Halloween III, were to continue the legend of Michael Myers but were continually censured owing to their explicit display of violence and gore. A ma.s.s-market paperback by Curtis Richards, ent.i.tled Halloween, was published by Bantam Books in 1979, followed by a video game for the Atari 2600 in 1983, and later a series of comics were published by Chaos Comics in 2000 and, more recently, Devil's Due in 2008.

VIRGINIA WAINWRIGHT HAS everything going for her; she is young and beautiful, and her fellow cla.s.smates would have you believe she is one of Crawford Academy's most popular seniors. She has also earned a place in a rather elite crowd, which includes among its members.h.i.+p some of the most affluent seniors at the school. The self-styled Top Ten gather each evening at the Silent Woman Tavern located somewhere near the Academy. While making her way to the tavern one of the clique, Bernadette O'Hara, is beset by an unknown figure. She manages to repel his attack and while making her escape, seeks help from a student with whom she seems acquainted. Her appeals fall on deaf ears as the unseen student takes a blade to her throat.

The Top Ten spend too much time playing elaborate shenanigans and this night is no different. After dunking a pet mouse in an offended drinker's beer, the group dare one another to hit the accelerator and take their cars over a rising drawbridge. Although the car in which Ginny is forced to travel makes it over the bridge, she vents her anger at being coerced into such a precarious jaunt. She continues on her way home, but unknown to her is followed by someone who enters her bedroom and makes off with her panties. We now learn that Ginny is trying to pick up the pieces of her shattered life after narrowly escaping death as she traversed a similar drawbridge some years before. Ever since the accident, she has had to attend regular therapy sessions, but her memories of the incident remain somewhat vague.

In the days that follow the angry scene at the drawbridge, her over-privileged friends are murdered in a variety of grisly and imaginative ways; two of them seemingly at the hands of the disoriented Ginny. Her confusion is heightened when in a series of flashbacks she recalls the death of her mother and the betrayal by her friends. With only days to go to her eighteenth birthday, Ginny contacts her psychiatrist (Glenn Ford) in the hope of uncovering more of her past. When he insists he can no longer help her, she responds by taking a poker to the back of his head. Several days later her father returns home for her birthday celebrations to find his wife's desecrated grave and the corpses of the butchered Top Ten seated at the family dining table, which looks just as it did four years before on the night of Ginny's betrayal. His daughter then enters, carrying a large cake, quietly murmuring "Happy Birthday". This, however, isn't the finale, far from it, for there will be a series of further twists before J. Lee Thompson brings his film to its shocking climax.

Having already made a whole string of highly successful movies, including The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Cape Fear (1962), Bristol-born J. Lee Thompson put together this cult slasher, which carefully adhered to the precepts of this lucrative cinematic trend before culminating in one of the most unexpected twists so far ventured by the genre. Thompson was a well-respected director, whose finest work was arguably during the 1950s and early 1960s, with a reputation for working very closely with his cast. In so doing, he got the very best out of his team, placing Happy Birthday to Me leagues ahead of so many of its contemporaries. A high level of competence was observed in both the direction and cinematography, with a skilled manipulation of the set's lighting to ensure this feature did more than just chill the spines of its a.s.sembled audience. Although his film can boast six rather bizarre killings, including the infamous skirmish with the s.h.i.+sh kebab skewer, Ginny's graphic brain surgery rates as one of the most stomach turning episodes of the entire period.

In the United States, the MPAA called for the editing of certain scenes, but surprisingly the print issued for cinematic release in the UK, along with the 1986 RCA/Columbia video, opted for the gorier footage, which included the weight-lift and s.h.i.+sh kebab death scenes. This release also contained a haunting music score, which, for contractual reasons, was replaced with a disco soundtrack for the DVD of 2004. The DVD annoyed fans still further in returning to the edited print first released in the United States in 1981. Happy Birthday to Me may not have been very popular with many of the critics, but among horror film regulars this film is one of the essential entries of the period.

HATCHET WAS ANOTHER attempt to build on the success of Scream (1996) and emulate the golden years of the eighties slasher. As they fish in a backwater swamp, two hunters, Sampson (Robert Englund) and his son Ainsley (Joshua Leonard) are slaughtered by a hideous ent.i.ty. Some miles away in the Mardi Gras celebration of New Orleans, a group of friends set out with an inexperienced guide, Shawn (Parry Shen), on a haunted swamp tour. On the same tour are a couple of topless girls, Misty (Mercedes McNab) and Jenna (Joleigh Fioreavanti) along with their seedy director, Shapiro (Joel Murray).

Soon after entering the swamp, a hobo warns them to stay away from the area, but Shawn continues to take them further into this swampland where they come upon several derelict houses, one of which was home to the deformed Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). Many years ago young Victor was hidden away by his protective father until, one Halloween, a group of teenagers threw fireworks into their house, which resulted in a huge fire. As his father took a hatchet to the door to save his son, he accidentally killed him as the blade hit him full in the face. Victor's father never recovered and died of a broken heart. Local legend tells of a vengeful spirit that murders all those who enter the swamp. One of the girls sees someone in the trees, and then Shawn crashes the boat leaving the party in this alligator-infested terrain standing before the house of Victor Crowley. Very soon, Victor will continue his vengeful wrath.

After making commercials for cable television and fronting the heavy metal band Haddonfield, Adam Green returned to the slasher formula of the 1980s in what was an amusing homage, which saw guest appearances from horror legends Robert Englund and Tony Todd. While there was nothing new in his film, his script threw in the one-liners, contained enough topless shots to delight the male element of his teenage audience and ran at a fast pace as the kills came in ever so typically graphic fas.h.i.+on. Hatchet 2 appeared in 2010 and followed on from the unsatisfactory finale, which, true to the slasher trope, had left this original outing open for a lucrative sequel.

FROM THE OUTSET, Alexandre Aja's film had but one desire and that was to shock, initially allowing the camera's lens to dwell upon a girl wearing only a hospital patient's gown whose back has been severely lacerated. We are then thrown into a change of scene, as a fearful young woman chases through a forest to meet with a road where a car's headlights reveal a nasty gash to her stomach. In a matter of minutes the audience have been sufficiently warned. What will happen in the next hour and twenty minutes will take them a lot further than the average horror movie; Aja will go out of his way to sicken using every means at his disposal.

Marie (Cecile de France) and Alex (Maiwenn Le Besco) take their time as they enjoy a leisurely drive to Alex's family home in the country in the hope of getting on with some exam revision. As they continue on their journey, a seedy fellow (Philippe Nahon) is observed reclining in the seat of his truck. His expression is one of perverse delight as he wallows in the heightened ecstasy of f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o, then soon after discards a severed head from the window of his vehicle before promptly driving away. It is not until much later that the girls arrive home and after the long drive yearn for nothing more than a solid night's sleep. There is already a suggestion Marie has a hankering for Alex, but such thoughts are swept aside when a loud banging comes to the front door. Alex's father hurries downstairs to be confronted by the intimidating figure from the truck and the incisive slash of his razor. He isn't finished yet; once inside the house the killer forces his quarry's head through the slats of the stairway then decapitates him with a bookcase. The girl's mother is then exposed to his murderous rage; her throat is cruelly sliced open to be followed by an effusive splatter of blood. In desperation, Marie tries to find somewhere to hide as the killer's blade is heard carving into his victim; her hands are later revealed to have been severed.

Coc.o.o.ned by her earplugs, Alex has remained completely oblivious to the furore that has besieged her home. That is until she awakens and finds the killer's knife poised at her throat. While this is going on Marie attempts to phone for help as Alex's little brother escapes into the fields. The killer, now brandis.h.i.+ng a shotgun, follows the child from the house. Marie seizes the opportunity to come to the aid of her friend, but fails as she bids to free her from her chains. Refusing to be deterred she lays hands on her weapon of choice which takes the shape of a razor sharp kitchen knife. The killer continues to work at an alarmingly quick pace and by now has already removed Alex to the rear of his truck. Discreetly, Marie secretes herself at the back of the vehicle and then they set off, eventually stopping at a petrol station, where the silent a.s.sa.s.sin's b.l.o.o.d.y spree summarily continues. The petrol a.s.sistant takes the full force of an axe, then the forecourt's cameras reveal a strange sight: all is not quite as it at first seemed.

Haute Tension was released as High Tension in North America, and when it entered the UK it was given an appropriate release as Switchblade Romance. The original American theatrical version was instantly cut by several minutes owing to the film's graphic content. An element of this can be attributed to the welcome return of one of horror's former masters, makeup artist Giannetto De Rossi. Many years before De Rossi had worked under Lucio Fulci, with his last entry in the macabre coming at the height of Italian horror boom on Fulci's own House by the Cemetery (1981). While De Rossi once again excelled in his b.l.o.o.d.y craft, he couldn't take all of the blame for the censor's wrath. From its opening scenes, Aja's film was just too violent for mainstream audiences, exultant in its ferocious intensity, which would continue without relent for the entirety of the excessive proceedings.

As with many of its explicit predecessors, the plot was sacrificed for the purpose of s.a.d.i.s.tic carnage, but the tension in its claustrophobic embrace held the audience firmly in its grasp. The camera work combined with the fast-paced direction to overwhelm the limitations in narrative and then ten minutes before his tale came to its d.a.m.ning finale Aja revealed he had been hiding something, throwing in an inexplicable twist that tossed the whole film on its head. The denouement observed a commonality with so many facets of modern French cinema and among fans of this specific genre was lauded for the effect in its final delivery. The reviews were understandably mixed, with many critics being appalled by the prolonged brutality; many raised questions about that which transpired at the denouement, while others drew unhealthy comparisons with Dean Koontz's novel Intensity, first published in 1995. Alexandre Aja, however, had shown that a small French production company could shock even the most bloodthirsty hack and slash enthusiast and produce horror at its most visceral.

TWO YOUNG WOMEN are so engrossed by the tension of a slasher movie they fail to take notice of a man who slinks into the seat behind them. The onscreen slaughter is of little interest to him; he seeks his own thrills and, just to prove the point, lurches forward to stab one of them through the back of her seat. The killer (Tom Rolfing) has a homicidal appet.i.te for blus.h.i.+ng brides, having murdered his intended some years before when she stood him up at the altar. Ever since he has been trailed by the man she had hoped to marry, policeman Len Gamble (Lewis Arlt).

The stalker turns his attention to young Amy Jensen (Caitlin O'Heaney), whose future husband Phil is away on his stag weekend. Amy and her likeable friends, Joyce and Nancy, are getting together with friends for the excitement of the hen party. The girls may not be about to walk the aisle themselves, but all too soon they become the killer's prey. As she tries to save herself, Amy has to turn to her former boyfriend Marvin (Don Scardino), who now works in the morgue, a locale which provides for a thrilling climax.

Armand Mastroianni's entry to the slasher years rehashed themes already observed in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), but his creepy direction and clever pacing ensured his audience never became bored. The execution of the point-of-view camera shots heightened the menace as Mastroianni worked to disguise the killer's face and, as in Halloween, the splatter factor was kept to an absolute minimum, no doubt at the request of MGM. There was thankfully one particular gruesome moment which has lived on with the movie's fans: the chilling sight of a severed head immersed in the depths of a fish tank. The creativity shown in his opening scenes wasn't to go unnoticed; Wes Craven later used it in the introductory sequence to Scream 2 (1997). The main score, however, was just a little too reminiscent of Carpenter's synthesized theme, but worked to similar effect in evoking the requisite air of suspense. He Knows You're Alone also marked the debut for a young Tom Hanks, who gained his very first couple of scenes before marching on to one of cinema's most successful careers.

AMIDST A COLLEGE'S partying, the president of the Alpha Sigma Rho fraternity commands that four pledges, each attired in fancy dress, stay at Garth Manor until dawn on h.e.l.l Night to ensure they fulfil their initiation rites. As the four students are escorted to the abandoned manse, a story is told of how twelve years before, Raymond Garth murdered his wife and three of their deformed children; legend would have you believe one son managed to survive. In despair, the father later hung himself in the confines of the family home. With this chilling account still fresh in their minds, the pledges begin to settle for the night waiting for dawn in a house that, although deserted for more than a decade, appears remarkably well furnished. They are completely unaware that the other members of the fraternity will attempt to frighten them using some of their own special effects. However, the lofty pranksters are set upon by an unseen figure; one of them is hauled screaming into a trench and then decapitated, another has his neck broken and the president is eventually impaled on a scythe. There is more to the legend than the pledges have been told and very soon they learn there are two killers in their midst. The pace accelerates as the imaginative slaughter continues in the tunnels situated beneath this ageing hall, and true to the slasher trope only the final girl will survive.

h.e.l.l Night took the popular slasher theme of the day and swathed it in the mystery of an ageing haunted house. Tom DeSimone had learned his trade in adult films and in what was only a forty-day shoot he, along with his crew, produced a very creepy episode. His film was immersed in the atmospherics of the autumnal clime and the enormity of the imposing Gothic locale. Such was the allure of this house he didn't need the pools of blood that were already congealing in so many cinemas of the day. The murders for this movie were frequently carried out off screen and were cleverly worked to fuel the audience's antic.i.p.ation rather than cause frustration. The script then deliberately played down the conventional juvenile s.e.x and nudity of these films, choosing instead to flesh out the characters of the four pledges. Among the novices was Linda Blair, who had been the centre of so much attention following her role in The Exorcist (1973). Strangely the two actors who played the killers were never listed in the film's credits; their real names have, for over thirty years, become something of a mystery.

FRANK COTTON HAS an insatiable l.u.s.t for life's pleasures, the more bizarre the greater his sense of personal gratification. When he is offered a small puzzle box in an exotic foreign market place, with the promise of pleasure beyond the ken of mortal man, he eagerly accepts. He has no conception of the demonic Cen.o.bites, a sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic breed that dwell beyond the gates of the box and take a perverse delight in entrapping their victims to render them to an eternity of exquisite pain and torture. Frank disappears without trace and months later leaves his suburban home to his brother Larry and sister-in-law Julia. While Frank was a thrill seeker, his brother lives a quite pedestrian life and his wife is an uncaring woman with little comprehension of life's little pleasures. Her only sense of arousal comes from the memory of her sordid affair with Frank.

Somehow, Frank managed to escape the Cen.o.bites' agonizing clutches, but his body has been ripped and torn beyond recognition. When Larry injures himself and his blood spills onto the attic's wooden floor, Frank is returned to life, but he needs more if he is ever to be completely regenerated. Once she has overcome her disgust, Frank finds a willing ally in the heartless Julia. She uses her guile to attract the men she meets in the pubs and bars of the area and brings them home to the attic s.p.a.ce to allow her former lover to feed on their life force. With each new victim, he comes closer to returning to the world of living flesh. However, Julia's erratic behaviour has aroused the suspicion of Larry's daughter, Kirsty. When she ventures into the attic room, she discovers her stepmother's dark secret and only just escapes with her life. As she breaks away from her treacherous uncle, she triggers the puzzle box and sets in motion the elaborate process that opens the gates to the domain of eternal torment and brings her face to face with Pinhead and his debauched cohorts. They see only the smooth flesh of a new victim and prepare to drag her into their darkened world of pain and suffering, but true to the heroines of slasher lore she remains strong in their presence and enters into a bargain to lead them to her uncle in exchange for her life. She now has to use her cunning to avoid her duplicitous stepmother and return Frank to the torment of the puzzle box.

In this, his stunning debut as a director, Clive Barker brought to the silver screen one of his darkest creations, mischievously toying with the more dubious delights of s.e.x and death. In the UK, his film attracted an "X" certificate; the BBFC were appreciably perturbed by this cruel flirtation with sadomasochism. The black leather and fetish wear of the Cen.o.bites was certainly not the customary fare of the average British cinema, even though the more astute would have discerned Barker was narrating a very subtle tale of romance, albeit diabolically macabre. The script was based on his short story The h.e.l.lbound Heart, an account inspired by a meeting with the English industrial band Coil, who he later hoped would write the score for his film. Among band member Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's collection of p.o.r.nography were a number of m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic gay magazines; the images provided the glimmer of an idea for the torturous dominion of the Cen.o.bites. Their vicious display was balanced by a warped surrealism that seeped through the atmosphere of this tale set in an English suburbia inhabited by so many Americans, each of whom, true to Barker's original, revealed themselves as well-rounded characters able to hold the viewer's attention. While nowhere near as gory as so many of its contemporaries, the scenes of Frank's torment were excruciating and served as a reminder of the hedonist's descent into a h.e.l.l of his own making.

The leather-clad Pinhead would continue to emerge from the sickening horror of the puzzle box, to become a lucrative horror icon and sp.a.w.n seven sequels h.e.l.lbound: h.e.l.lraiser II (1988), h.e.l.lraiser III: h.e.l.l on Earth (1992), h.e.l.lraiser: Bloodline (1996), h.e.l.lraiser: Inferno (2000), h.e.l.lraiser: h.e.l.lseeker (2002), h.e.l.lraiser: Deader (2005) and h.e.l.lraiser: h.e.l.lwood (2005) along with a series of comics published by Marvel's Epic imprint and later Boom! Studios.

ANAKED WOMAN LIES dead in a field. The camera follows the path of the impa.s.sive Henry (Michael Rooker), juxtaposed with images of other murder victims, their terrified screams reverberating to disturb the viewer and prepare them for the unhinged madness that is about to follow. Henry has trailed an unsuspecting woman, watching in the distance as she enters her home.

By day, Henry works as a pest exterminator, sharing an apartment with Otis (Tom Towles) and his sister Becky (Tracy Arnold). Garbed in his work clothes he has little difficultly in entering the homes of his victims and is seen returning to the home of the woman he followed shortly before. Soon after, her dead body is revealed with an electric cable choking her throat; cigarette burns can be seen running down from her neck to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Otis reveals he met Henry while serving time in prison; although Henry never talks about it, he killed his mother. However, he eventually does open up to Becky about his mother and her cruelty, although his story is strangely confused. He recalls how she made him dress as a girl, and was then forced to watch her engage in s.e.x with her seedy clientele. Unable to endure further humiliation he claims to have stabbed her and then insists he shot her. Henry's grasp on reality is obviously not all that it should be.

When the two men travel to a seamy part of town and pick up a couple of prost.i.tutes, Henry turns on the women and strangles them before breaking their necks. Initially Otis appears shocked, but he too has killed in the past and the following night they murder a shady trader who deals in stolen electrical goods. Henry stabs him with a soldering iron and then smashes a television set over his head. Otis then takes great pleasure in plugging in the set and electrocuting him. They then help themselves to a video camera, which they use to record the rape and slaughter of an entire family. Later they are seen savouring their grisly activities in their apartment, just as the voyeuristic Mark Lewis had previously done in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), with the sickening Otis taking considerably greater delight in their escapades than his brooding partner.

As the body count continues to rise, the police appear alarmingly ineffectual. Henry believes himself to be clever enough to evade capture as he continually alters his modus operandi and keeps on the move. The film takes a turn when Otis becomes his next victim. Henry walks in on him to find him attempting to strangle Becky, having already raped her. Otis's death is typically brutal and soon after Henry is observed calmly dismembering his former accomplice in the bath, before disposing of his remains in a river. As the psychopath leaves town with Becky, she confesses her love. Henry dispa.s.sionately admits to feeling the same way, not that he has any understanding of human emotion his mother saw to that many years ago. In the harrowing finale, he dumps a suitcase by the side of the road. The camera homes in towards the abandoned case, which is revealed stained in blood. The film ends as it began with the sounds of a desperate struggle and screaming as Henry now drives away to continue in his life of murderous crime.

The inspiration for Henry came from the confessions of the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who admitted to more than 600 murders between 1975 and his arrest in 1983. An investigation undertaken by the Texas Attorney General's office invalidated the vast majority of his claims, leading to Lucas being convicted of eleven murders. John McNaughton's film based its premise on Lucas's violent fantasies rather than the crimes for which he was actually found guilty. Lucas's appalling childhood never gave him a chance. He murdered his abusive mother in 1960, a violent prost.i.tute who frequently made him watch her while she had s.e.x with clients, and for his matricide he served ten years in prison before eventually being paroled. Following his conviction, he was sentenced to death for the murder of an unidentified female victim known only as "Orange Socks". In 1998 the Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, commuted the sentence to life in prison, three years prior to Lucas dying of heart failure.

McNaughton's disturbing film was shot on 16-mm film in less than a month with a budget that amounted to a meagre $111,000. He kept his costs to a minimum by employing family and friends, with Mary Demas excelling as she played three different murder victims. The diminutive budget afforded the film a bleakness that befitted its sordid nature, with the city of Chicago a.s.suming a depressingly downtrodden guise. Only Gerald Kargl's unrelenting portrayal of the Salzburg serial killer Werner Kniesek, in his controversial debut Angst (1983), has ever exceeded McNaughton's psychotic depiction.

The movie's violent content coupled with the producers' concerns over the quality of the final cut meant it would be another four years before McNaughton would see his film released devoid of a rating. Before the film was submitted for cla.s.sification in the UK, thirty-eight seconds were removed, without his approval. The scene had depicted a half-naked woman sitting on the toilet with a broken bottle lodged in her mouth. The BBFC then insisted a further twenty-four seconds had to be cut from the family ma.s.sacre, making specific reference to Otis groping the mother's b.r.e.a.s.t.s before and after killing her. Only then was this film considered suitable for a cinematic release. Further cuts were ordered when it was later submitted during the 1990s, this time moderating the impact of the murder of the shady salesman and once again the distressing butchery of the family. It wasn't until 2003 that an uncut version of the film was cla.s.sified for British DVD release. Chuck Parrello was offered the chance to direct a sequel; Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2 was to continue the slaughter in 1996.

AN OLD MAN (John Steadman) is observed readying himself to leave his home in the desert. As he loads his truck, he gazes out across the arid wasteland as if trying to trace an unseen presence. There is not a soul to be seen, so he continues in his preparations, only to be confronted by a ragged young girl (Ja.n.u.s Blythe). Unable to restrain his annoyance, he chastises her owing to the activities of her kinsfolk. The girl protests, claiming their ambush of a nearby airfield was simply to a.s.suage their hunger. When she pleads with him to take her away, he refuses, knowing she would never survive in the world beyond the desert. A sound in the background interrupts their discourse, prompting the girl to take cover.

Retired detective Big Bob Carter (Russ Grieve) and his family are holidaying in a trailer in the arid vastness of the same desert. When they the stop at an isolated gas station they are advised to keep to the highway. Bob, however, knows best and takes a short cut through a former nuclear test site. There is an air of inevitability leading to the seemingly accidental crash. The damage to the vehicle's axle leaves the family stranded in this unforgiving wilderness. Bob and his son-in-law, Doug (Martin Speer), set out to find help completely unaware that they have been lured into a trap by an inbred cannibalistic family eager for human flesh. Wes Craven carefully builds the tension to fever pitch in the hours before nightfall; then the psychotic family begin to close in on their city-dwelling prey. The ensuing slaughter is brutal. If they are to survive, the remaining members of this family will have to match the depravity of their persecutors. As the closing frames fade to red, Doug is seen in close up, still stabbing and kicking the dead body of one of his cannibal a.s.sailants, a scene that was cut for its initial release in the UK.

In 1977, Wes Craven revisited the theme of family vengeance, a premise he had used to deliver such a shocking impact five years before in Last House on the Left. Although he had resisted several offers to return to such a degree of violence, personal finances left him with no other option. The Hills Have Eyes is a gruesome exploitation film so typical of the period, yet Craven's craft went that one step further in creating a cult cla.s.sic unhinged by a rawness to its intensity and resultant harrowing brutality. His simple narrative drew upon the dubious tale from the sixteenth century of the incestuous Sawney Bean clan, who are alleged to have committed similar atrocities along the coastal pathways of Ballantrae, Ayrs.h.i.+re. He went on to evoke his interest in Greek mythology, attaching such names to the clan as Juno, Pluto, Mercury and Mars, and in a similar way to these epic tales revealed how good and evil could become obscured, with the good having to fall to the ways of evil if only to protect themselves from the encroaching malevolence. The grainy edit and claustrophobia that was evident, even in such an immense landscape, combined to augment the sense of dread, ensuring that this was a film which would live on with those exposed to its savagery.

Before it could be seen in the cinemas, several of the more graphic takes had to be removed with the footage left on the cutting room floor, now believed to have been lost. In the weeks after its release, this low-budget terror proved to be a surprising success, and in the years that followed went on to acquire cult status. After working on A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven was given the chance to direct a sequel in 1985, The Hills Have Eyes Part II, although he later disowned it. In 2006, Alexandre Aja directed the remake, with a new telling of The Hills Have Eyes II following in 2007 scripted by Craven and his son Jonathon.

YOUNG HAROLD HAS an innocent crush on Susan, one of the girls in his cla.s.s, but takes things just a little too far. He just won't stop hara.s.sing her, and when she laughs at his Valentine card he completely loses control. Breaking into Susan's house, he takes his rage out on her brother, killing him by breaking his neck with a coat hanger. The last we see of the lovelorn murderer is the image of him running away from the scene in fits of hysterical laughter.

Nineteen years later Susan (Barbi Benton) has married and been divorced. She leaves the new man in her life in the car as she goes into a Los Angeles county hospital for a routine check up. However, events in the hospital take a strange turn. Unbeknown to her a mysterious figure disguised in a surgical mask has placed a set of false test results in her medical file. From that moment on, the staff in the hospital begin to treat her as if she is very seriously ill. They detain her by forcibly restraining her in straps and keep her locked away in private wards while the medics subject her to a series of humiliating examinations. Some of these a.s.sessments can only be described as sleazy and are obviously played for effect, as Barbi Benton had been a Playboy cover girl some years before. As she endures these often shameful procedures, she is pursued by the maniac in the mask as he stalks the hospital wards, slaughtering anyone who crosses his path with a variety of surgical tools that would inspire Dr Giggles when he embarked on his rampage in 1992. Hours later, her boyfriend finally gets out of the car and starts to search the near deserted hospital, only to be decapitated and have his head presented to Susan encased in a box of Valentine's Day pastry. Shock followed upon shock as Hospital Ma.s.sacre coursed to its climactic finale with the screaming Susan having to come face to face with the man in the surgical mask.

The original working t.i.tle for Boaz Davison's obscure terror was Be My Valentine, or Else . . . which might just have given too much of the game away. Davison returned to the surgical world of Halloween II to create another low-budget shocker, in the hope of rehas.h.i.+ng its predecessor's premise to produce something the audience would never forget. While college fraternities and sororities had been played to death, the hospital setting had yet to be fully explored. This typically illogical film made a few hours of medical carnage resemble the St Valentine's Day Ma.s.sacre, using a seasonal day of celebration as the backdrop for yet another slasher's modus operandi. There were countless holes in the script in addition to so many obvious red herrings, but Davison laid on the suspense and kept his viewers chewing away on their fingernails. This wasn't a film that relied upon reels of gore, although there was a worthy axe to the head and an over-sized hypodermic syringe that did its fair share of damage. Much, however, was left to the audience's imagination to guess just what the crazy guy in the mask was really up to. All these years later few enthusiasts remember this film; it's still to see release to DVD, but it certainly did Davison very little harm as he furthered his career and went on to far greater things.

A COUPLE OF AMERICAN tourists, Paxton (Jay Hernandez), a law graduate, and Josh (Derek Richardson), an aspiring writer, and their Icelandic companion (Eythor Gudjonsson), enjoy the highs and erotic pleasures of Amsterdam. For a man of the law, Paxton displays little in the way of morality; ruled by his desire for hedonistic pursuit he experiences everything the city has to offer. They eventually meet up with Alex, who recommends a hostel in Bratislava, a city almost bereft of young men following the ravages of war. If these three men had taken the time to read up on the history of the region they would have known the war had ended some sixty years before and the last invasion of Czechoslovakia had been in August 1968, when the Warsaw Pact had laid siege to the country. Such trivialities are not their concern and they make the journey to Slovakia and quickly find the hostel, where a dubbed version of producer Tarantino's Pulp Fiction plays on a portable television in the reception. Alex's story appears to be true, for not long after their arrival a host of young lovelies make themselves readily available. Then the film takes a rather dark turn and the amorous tourists become the exploited. The hostel is a cover for a bizarre organization, where the wealthy exchange huge sums of money to indulge their darkest fantasies. This affluent gathering has moved on to the extremes of sadism and murder, to satiate their burned-out s.e.xual craving. Chainsaws, knives and drills complemented by an acetylene torch are the order of the day as this claustrophobic nightmare begins to engulf the hapless tourists. The finale that takes place in this dungeon-like world becomes one of revenge as Paxton bids to escape from one of the most black-hearted films of its generation.

With the release of Hostel, torture p.o.r.n had come of age. Eli Roth had promised much, and his movie turned out to be a resounding box office success, but in its wake caused utter dismay among his audience. There was a dark sense of inevitability hanging over the last hour of this film, which traumatized its audience, using an effective sequence of agonizing torture scenes in sets that left no doubt as to the cruel fate awaiting those who had been hurled into this remorseless domain. However, he fell into the trap of the slasher movies of twenty years past with the focus of his film resting too heavily on the s.a.d.i.s.t's torturous l.u.s.t, forfeiting any conceivable indication of character development. As a satire of a world obsessed by the excesses of consumerism, it was reminiscent of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978); but in its grisly exposition, it was infinitely more brutal. Koldo Serra's acclaimed short El Tren de la Bruja (2003), in which a man agrees to be tormented while strapped to a chair in a darkened room, is thought to have inspired Roth's script for his film. Having been inspired by the gore of Lucio Fulci and especially Alien (1979), he would in turn go on to influence a succession of films that revelled in the pain and suffering of their victims, but as with Hostel they were found equally wanting in their failure to elicit a due sense of empathy. In the months after its release, many people in both Slovakia and the Czech Republic were openly angered by his depiction of the region, but in truth it had never been Roth's intention to cause such offence. His was a film that explored the depths of human depravity and exposed just how little his fellow countrymen knew of the world beyond their borders, hence the trip to war-torn Slovakia. Two years later Roth pandered to a new set of s.a.d.i.s.ts, producing a sequel Hostel: Part 2, this time throwing a group of delectable young ladies into this unrelenting world of torment.

RELEASED IN ITALY as Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero, Lucio Fulci's atmospheric tale, partially inspired by the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, begins with the camera's gaze falling on the softness of a naked young woman (Daniela Doria). This doesn't last; soon there will be the customary bucket load of bloodthirsty carnage, as Fulci was enrolled alongside Hersch.e.l.l G. Lewis to become "the G.o.dfather of Gore", in this the final part of the "h.e.l.l's gate" trilogy. Secreted in a deserted old house the girl dresses after s.e.x and calls out for her lover. She receives no response. She learns why when she stumbles upon his mutilated corpse. The shocks continue when a sharp knife is forcibly thrust through the back of her head. We are never privy to the killer's ident.i.ty; all we see is her body being dragged through a doorway leading down to the cellar.

Several months later, Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) with their son Bob (Giovanni Frezzi) prepare for their move to New England. Young Bob cannot take his eyes away from the photograph of a creepy old house, in which he can clearly see a young girl warning him not to go there. When they enter their new, but dilapidated, home the cellar door, observed in the film's opening sequence, has been locked and nailed shut. The following day, flashlight in hand, Norman descends the cellar stairs only to be attacked by a huge bat, which tears into his hand. In an effort to defend himself, he brandishes a knife and vigorously lunges at it. Blood oozes from its body as it dies on the kitchen floor. The gore continues to spill when the property agent, Mrs Gittelson, arrives at the house. The viewer only ever gets to see an emaciated arm that attacks the poor woman with a poker and then into her b.r.e.a.s.t.s before frenziedly ripping her neck open.

While trying to find Bob, Anne, the babysitter, ventures into the cellar; but is set upon and graphically decapitated by the still-obscured murderer. The child now appears, only to see Anne's severed head rolling down the metal stairs. That night the boy returns to the cellar. The door slams shut and in the shadows, a glowing pair of eyes can be seen, their gaze refusing to leave the terrified child. Petrified he begins to scream, awakening his mother, and then Norman returns and takes an axe to the cellar door, while Dr Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava) holds Bob's head against its wooden panels, inviting yet another decapitation. Instead, we are treated to a vivid hacking of Freudstein's left hand.

How no one ever discovered the cellar's grisly secret remains one of the films many mysteries. A charnel house containing the mutilated cadavers of his abducted victims is thrown open to the light, littered with surgical apparatus and a blood-stained pathologist's slab. While there are so many memorable moments in this film, the appearance of Dr Freudstein surely must be its crowning moment, now turned into a putrescent corpse. Using the dismembered body parts of his victims, the deranged surgeon has succeeded in keeping himself alive. His body, however, is disgustingly maggot-ridden; they erupt when Norman drives a surgical knife deep into his stomach. The blow fails to stop him. Enraged he tears out Norman's throat and then turns to the escaping Lucy. He unceremoniously drags her down a metal ladder, battering her head against each of the rungs. Finally, as he splatters her skull into the concrete floor, there is a violent discharge of blood and brains. Only Bob survives. He is saved by Mae, the girl from the picture, who now stands at her mother's side, Mary Freudstein (Teresa Rossi Pa.s.sante). She leads both Mae and Bob from the house and through the wintry grove on into the netherworld.

An abundance of motifs inspired by many previously successful horror films are in evidence in Fulci's movie, notably The s.h.i.+ning (1980), The Amityville Horror (1979), The Haunting (1963), The Omen (1976), The Exorcist (1973) and of course the many incarnations of Frankenstein. His craft allowed him to instil a creepiness to the house and its grounds, providing enough scares to keep his audience on the very edge of their seats. While the acting may have appeared occasionally wooden, it wasn't to distract from Fulci's vision as he showed himself to be a veritable maestro of splatter, devising a succession of imaginative death scenes in one of his most unsettling features.

House by the Cemetery has endured many difficulties with the BBFC; the cinema version was edited to remove the poker murder and the slas.h.i.+ng of Ann's throat. Its release prior to the Video Recordings Act saw the film banned amidst the hysteria of the campaign against video nasties. Although it was to gain official approval in 1988, it was again edited to remove the cinema cuts and had the first stabbing removed, then saw cuts to the bat attack, Norman's throat being torn o