1960s
Plot: mysterious femme fatale plots to take over the world. Debonair playboy intervenes. Leave it to the Italians to produce a spoof of a spoof. Argoman, the Fantastic Superman spoofs the Superargo movies with Giovanni Cianfriglia, themselves sendups of the more popular Eurospy exercises of the day. In Italy it
1960s
Plot: aristocratic vampire and his aides terrorize sleepy Filipino village. Kulay dugo ang gabi (The Night Is the Color of Blood or Blood Is the Color of Night, Google Translate insists on the former, the cult blogosphere at large on the latter. Regardless, it was released internationally as The Blood
1970s
Plot: Eva, a snake dancer, is hired to perform at a gentlemen’s club in Hong Kong. There always has been a thin line and a degree of overlap between horror and erotica. Nowhere was that line more blurred and the distinction more nebulous than in continental Europe in the
1960s
Plot: who or what is causing the dead to rise in a sleepy Cornish hamlet? The house of Hammer could never be accused of not pouring their everything into whatever they were producing. If it has attained any kind of longevity these days it’s because The Plague Of the
1970s
Plot: forty-something and two feisty twenty-year-olds roadtrip around rural France. The first few directorial features from Joël Séria have an autobiographical slant. His debut Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (1971) was an irreverent coming of age tale loosely based on the 1954 Parker–Hulme murder case in Christchurch, New
1960s
Plot: the night Muriel (and her lover) came out of the grave. The crown jewel in Barbara Steele’s conquest of Mediterranean horror cinema is in all likelihood this, Nightmare Castle, Mario Caiano’s epitome of gothic horror perfection. In Nightmare Castle (released back at home as Amanti d'
1950s
Plot: colonists discover a white girl living in the jungles of Kenya. The noble savage is a literary convention as old as time. After the Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller in the thirties and forties had made Edgar Rice Burroughs’ most enduring creation one of the heroes of the big
1980s
Plot: Waldemar Daninsky faces Countess Elisabeth Báthory… again! El Retorno del Hombre Lobo (or The Return Of the Wolfman, released in North America as The Craving in 1985 and, at a later stage, internationally as Night of the Werewolf) was the first of two El Hombre Lobo episodes produced during
1970s
Plot: two sisters inherit a mansion and convert it into a pension. Hilarity ensues! In the post-La Liceale (1975) years things weren’t always easy for Gloria Guida. No doubt la Guida had the luxury of picking the roles she was interested in but the general quality of the sex
1980s
Plot: the Shelleys visit Byron and compete to write the scariest story they can. Even the most talented and serious of directors like to unwind from time to time and indulge themselves in what by all accounts should be considered pulp. For British filmmaker Ken Russell that was Gothic. To
2010s
Plot: who or what lurks within the darker bowels of the English countryside? The 1970s were a decade of constant and grand innovation in horror and exploitation. No other subgenre went through greater evolution than the vampire movie. Hammer, the British film studio that once led the charge in revitalizing
1990s
Plot: abused woman is impregnated by alien and becomes its murderous host. France was absolutely the last place you’d expect to find a genuine horror gem at the dawn of the decade that all but killed the genre. A simple concept can go a very long way when executed