The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
Black, villainous comedy reigns supreme when Vincent Price plays the ultra-fiendish Doctor Phibes, who finds his murderous inspiration in the nine biblical plagues of Egypt. One of the best samples of Grand Guignol comedy, this film was Price's 100th.

Aftermath (1994)
Nacho Cerda's 30-minute short dares to look at what happens in a mortuary in the worst possible circumstances and earns its place as one of a handful of short films on this list. Not for the faint of heart.

Alien 3: Director's Cut (1992)
The Alien 3 you know is not the Alien 3 you were meant to see. Studio marketing left David Fincher's dystopic, pseudo-religious Alien entry cut to ribbons and stripped of all its narrative and emotional power. Excised were poetic dialogue scenes and a gorgeous outdoor shot of Fury 101's barren, windy landscape - a metaphor for the bleak, futureless existence of its all-male settlement of self-ordained monks. The oxen that are seen towing the remains of the Sulaco's escape pod were also removed and replaced by a meaningless dog in a studio reshoot. In Fincher's original vision, the alien is birthed by one of the prison planet's life-sustaining oxen, mirrored by a moving eulogy by Charles S. Dutton (Dillon) as they cast their already fallen into oblivion. The differences are too many to list here, but trust us when we say that the 145-minute Director's Cut is an entirely different movie and an overlooked, underrated gem.

Alucarda (1978)
This erotic, hypnotic slice of Satanic cinema hails from Mexico and tells the tale of a strange girl who infiltrates a nunnery with devil worship and wanton lesbianism.

Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
Sorely overlooked upon release as yet another case of sequelitis, The Possession actually ages a lot better than the original Amityville Horror with its story of domestic tragedy and ghostly first-person camera work.

Angel Heart (1987)
Alan (The Wall) Parker's polished and mood-soaked Satanic horror film starring Micky Rourke and Robert de Niro is riveting from the opening frame right through to its supernatural, downbeat ending.

Angst (1983)
A raw and extremely well-lensed psycho killer film that follows the few bleak hours after a killer's release from prison, Angst reaches levels of intensity seldom seen in cinema and for that reason is nearly impossible to find.

Anguish (1987)
Spanish director Bigas Luna anticipated the post-modern horrors of the Scream trilogy with a movie that takes the film within a film concept and exhausts it in a very clever, entertaining way.

Aswang (1994)
Graphic, grainy and reminiscent of the low-budget body horror of early Cronenberg, this American-made movie takes a Filipino vampire legend about foetus suckers who use long, phallic tongues to feed on unborn children, and adds a dash of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Bad Seed (1956)
A stagey and dated thriller that nevertheless packs in a whole lot of ill will with its engrossing central character, a feisty pigtailed little girl who murders indiscriminately when she doesn't get her way.

Battle Royale (2000)
Kinji Fukasaku's Japanese smash hit sent shock waves across the globe and yet it remains without a proper North American release. The film stitches together Lord of the Flies and a particularly nasty episode of Survivor in which contestants must kill or be killed.

The Beast Within (1982)
A graphic Southern gothic horror film that begins with the rape of a woman by a mysterious beast. After eighteen years and a town cover-up, the bastard son begins to change and hunts for a woman of his own to impregnate in what's possibly the most grisly phase of puberty ever conceived.

Black Sabbath (1963)
Italian horror maestro Mario Bava's first anthology scores huge on The Drop Of Water, the last of three short episodes and one of the most chilling ghost stories never committed to celluloid. Watch it only at night.

Black Sunday (1960)
Mario Bava's best film was also his first, a dreamy fog-shrouded take on Nikolai Gogol's The Vij, immaculately invoked as a mood-soaked, witchy nightmare.

Blood of the Beasts (1949)
Eyes Without a Face director George Franju turned a 20-minute documentary on a Parisian abattoir into an unexpectedly shocking and graphic, but ultimately poignant and intellectual meditation on violence. A tough watch but worth every bloodsoaked second.

The Butcher Boy (1997)
Neil Jordan's morally complex fable of an Irish boy whose intense hatred for his next door neighbour results in grisly murder, walks the fine line of the genre before exploding in a shower of blood and bizarre hallucinations.

Calvaire (2004)
A French riff on Deliverance, Calvaire is infinitely more sadistic and psychologically warped than its American point of reference.

The Changeling (1980)
George C. Scott's perfectly dead serious demeanor only makes this under-appreciated Canadian haunted mansion movie that much more chilling. An offspring of the great black and white ghost films of the '50s, it's elegant, detailed and scary as hell - particularly the unforgettable shot of a child-sized, cobweb-covered wheelchair.

Charlie's Family a.k.a The Manson Family (2003)
Fifteen years in the making, Charlie's Family is underground cult filmmaker Jim VanBebber's kaleidoscopic, postmodern mocku-horror on the events leading up to the infamous "Helter Skelter" murders that ended the hippy era in a shower of blood. Gritty, dirty and unsettling, the film chronicles the evolution of Manson from hippie guru to murderous paranoiac and dares to include a shocking and virtually unwatchable recreation of the killings - every stab wound intact. Equal parts Maniac and Natural Born Killers, Charlie's Family is, as the BBC called it, "exploitation filmmaking at its most insane, deranged and unforgiving."

Communion (1989)
This is Philippe (The Beast Within) Mora's take on Whitley Strieber's supposedly true account of his abduction by spindly, big-eyed aliens from a remote cabin in the woods. Rather than trying to make an argument for or against, Communion soaks up the mood of pervasive dread as Chris Walken is taken on the ride of his life.

Curdled (1996)
When Quentin Tarantino made Pulp Fiction, he took the character of Esmeralda Villalobos - the taxi driver obsessed with knowing what it's like to kill a man - from this movie. Best described as a darkly elegant romantic comedy... between a blue-collar Mexican girl and a white-collar American serial killer.

Curse of the Demon (1957)
A suspenseful offering courtesy of director Jacques Tourneur (I Walked With a Zombie) based on M.R. James' Casting the Runes. Despite arguments for and against unveiling a demonic face in the last frame, Curse stands as one of the most carefully laced psychological horror films of the period.

Cutthroats Nine (1972)
Pushing the boundaries of graphic and bloody spaghetti western violence well into horror territory, this obscure guns 'n' gore extravaganza about desperate (and chained together) prisoners being marched through the mountains is as gritty as it gets. A nasty nihilistic gem, waiting to be rediscovered.

Cutting Moments (1997)
Douglas Buck's searing portrait of domestic meltdown does in 25 minutes what most horror films can't do in 90, by unflinchingly focusing on a rarely explored form of violence: self-mutilation.

Dead & Buried (1981)
Alien scribes Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett weave a horrific Lovecraftian tale about a creepy town called Potter's Bluff. Its townspeople are collectively murdering Rhode Island tourists, who reappear the next day not quite themselves. A zombie film unlike any other.

Deathdream (1974)
Andy goes to Vietnam and mysteriously returns home - as a vampiric zombie. One of Black Christmas director Bob Clark's first films, Deathdream (a.k.a. Dead of Night) is an effectively chilling, surreal commentary about the effects of the war on the American family. Its original perspective may be the result of it being a Canadian indie production.

Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)
Michele Soavi's zombie romance vehicle also known as Cemetery Man takes the Italian undead movie and plants it firmly in cheek. Based on a novel by Tiziano Sclavi, the cemetery man (Rupert Everett) literally wrestles with love and death as he retires the reanimating corpses (one of whom he falls in love with) that mysteriously revive in the graveyard he keeps.

Deranged (1974)
Released the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this grimy, bizarre little Canuck film is the must-see forgotten Ed Gein film, with scenes of cruelty and corpse manipulation every bit as shocking as those in Hooper's opus. Plus, it's Tom Savini's first makeup credit!

The Devil's Backbone (2001)
Guillermo del Toro's ghostly moving picture poem is a sample of the best the genre has to offer and yet it continues to be ignored by North American audiences.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
The very first cinematic Hyde was played by John Barrymore in John S. Robertson's eerie silent classic. Barrymore's unforgettable alter ego is often overlooked in favour of the more well-known Frederic March, but this ballsy, murderous tale is by far the best adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel to date.

Duel (1971)
Steven Spielberg's feature film debut shows the young director fleshing out Richard Matheson's ultimate road rage story with aggressive camera work that puts a lot of mileage on a threadbare plot.

The Entity (1981)
Carla's beaten and brutally raped nightly by an unseen force and no one believes her. Supposedly based on a true story, The Entity's terrifying premise is cranked up by Barbara Hershey's harrowing performance and a commanding soundtrack.

The Eye (2002)
The Pang Brothers hit an international nerve with this spooky horror flick about a girl who inherits the eyes of a dead psychic woman and begins to see creepy, dead people. Scariest movie of the year, hands down.

The Exorcist III (1990)
When William Peter Blatty adapted Legion - his other novel about demon possession - he didn't think the producers would ask him to tack an exorcism onto the final frames. Their thinking: how could it be called Exorcist III if it didn't have at least one exorcism? The subsequent editorial fuckery also resulted in two different actors (Jason Miller and Brad Dourif) inexplicably playing the same role of incarcerated Scorpio killer. Not surprisingly, the movie barely uttered a boo during its theatrical run, but is best revisited on home video where the meticulous choreography of its horrors can be fully appreciated. Despite its editing room flaws, Exorcist III is actually a grieviously underrated picture; its weird ensemble of characters and inescapable foreboding sets the stage for some of the most finely-crafted scare flicks in horror cinema.

Eyes Without A Face (1960)
Off-kilter angles and sinister shadows permeate this French masterpiece of quiet horror in which a doctor attempts to restore his daughter's hideously scarred face. Unceremoniously dubbed and dumped on the US market as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, Eyes was only recently rescued from obscurity by Criterion.

Frailty (2001)
Bill Paxton's understated creepshow thriller scored big on atmosphere, originality and three twist endings but, for whatever reason, audiences didn't flinch. Maybe it went over their heads.

Gates of Hell (1980)
Of all the horror movies that have ever been made, only one can boast a literally gut-wrenching scene in which a woman pukes up her own intestines while weeping tears of crimson glory. Add a cranial lathe penetration, a priest who hangs himself, wind packed with maggots, oatmeal-faced undead and you've got yourself Fulci's most overlooked film.

Genesis (1998)
Nacho Cerda's haunting and poetic follow-up to the grisly Aftermath is an unusual silent horror short that speaks volumes - recommended for its nightmarish cinematography alone.

The Haunting (1963)
Pointlessly remade in 1999, Robert Wise's The Haunting is one of the genre's best unknown haunted house movies - psychologically layered and genuinely frightening.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
John McNaughton's unsettling pseudo-biopic on Henry Lee Lucas remains a shocking portrayal of a look into a week in the life of a serial killer. The film anticipated a grim new turn for the genre, but it is far from an exercise in obscenity; twenty years later it remains a mute and all-too-sobering look into the mind of an urban prowler.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943)
Jacques Tourneur's atmospheric Haitian zombie film is often dismissed as cheesy B-movie fare no thanks to its title, but is actually a masterwork of soft shadows against an eerie summer night.

Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (1964)
Possibly the most tasteless film ever made, Ilsa mixes Nazis, prison torture and gore with titillation and sex in one of the genre's most notorious sleaze fests, courtesy of old-school exploiteers Don Edmonds and David Friedman. Guaranteed to offend.

In My Skin (2002)
Marina de Van's tale of a woman obsessed with picking at a cut in her leg is an unsettling exploration of one individual testing the boundaries of her body.

Incubus (1965)
What do you get when you put William Shatner in a black and white Satanic horror movie shot in the artificial language of Esperanto? Surprisingly, a gorgeous, surreal should-be classic that walks the line between exploitation shock and Bergman's Seventh Seal.

The Innocents (1961)
Chilling and beautifully shot, this black and white adaptation of Henry James' Turn of the Screw about a governess trying to save two possessed children ranks with the original Haunting for tension and atmosphere. Why it took so long to reach DVD is a mystery.

Irreversible (2002)
Eleven minutes from this film will decimate you, but you have to sit through the entire thing to appreciate its technical beauty and sink into the cold, existential dread that resides within these frames.

Ichi The Killer - Uncut (2001)
The movie that made Japanese director Takashi Miike one of the most interesting people working at the fringes of extreme cinema, Ichi The Killer is a bloody opera of extreme sadism - a masterpiece of genre-busting, gut-wrenching brutality, and a truly unique film that manages to balance unbridled violence with depth of character and psychological insight. Ichi The Killer embodies the spirit of cult cinema, punishing the eye with arterial sprays, hot grease, involuntary piercing, severed nipples, complete vivisection and rooms so filled with blood that it literally rains from the ceiling. Miike would forever be known as the man who revolutionized splatter filmmaking and has since become synonymous for a renegade style soon to be very mimicked.

Kairo (2001)
Although it didn't receive the same attention given to Ringu or Ju-On, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's masterfully-directed tale of Internet apparitions, teen suicide and the end of the world is so choked with sickly dread it'll leave you breathless. Intensely horrifying and unforgettably brilliant.

Lady In a Cage (1964)
This fright flick stars aging Hollywood actress Olivia de Havilland as the victim of a home invasion in an early precursor to Last House on the Left. A young James Caan makes the movie, playing a maniacal thug with evil in his heart and torture on the brain.

The Last Horror Movie (2003)
Rivals Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as a movie of urban atrocity while taking the psycho killer film to its limits and emerging as one of the most incisive externalizations of a murderer's thought processes ever to be depicted in British film.

The Laughing Dead (1998)
It's far from perfect, but Patrick Gleason's Laughing Dead represents low-budget indie horror filmmaking at its most inventive with an atmospheric post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller that injects fresh blood into the tired vampire mythos. Proves admirably you don't need deep pockets to think outside the coffin.

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973)
Loosely based on J. Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, Lemora is a crude but ambitious film that mixes Little Red Riding Hood with George Romero, along with nods to Lovecraft, Dreyer's Vampyr, Night of the Hunter, and werewolf and gangster films - all shot in a richly toned atmosphere prefiguring Argento's Suspiria.

Les Diaboliques (1955)
A man is murdered by his wife and mistress, his body dumped into a school's muddy, unused pool. When the pool is drained, there's no trace of the corpse, and yet the kids - unaware of the murder - claim to still see him. Chilling suspense that belies a sixty-year time tag.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)
The uncut version of Jorge Grau's Italian-Spanish co-production (shot mainly in the English countryside) is a well-made, original movie about a couple of hippies caught up in a zombie apocalypse caused by pesticides. It's got scares, gore, and cockney accents.

Let's Scare Jessica To Death (1971)
Most readers would probably recall this film from the dusty and dated box cover art dying on typical video store shelves, but a second look reveals a quietly terrifying ghost story and a little known classic.

Love for Mother Only (2003)
Dennison Romalho's Amor so da Mae was the Rue Morgue favourite at FanTasia 2003, a colour-drenched, Satanic short with the sound and feel of a demonic incantation.

Lighthouse a.k.a. Dead of Night (2000)
While the homicidal-maniac-on-the-loose plot was tired twenty years ago, this British import (known as Dead of Night on these shores - not to be confused with the 1945 film of the same name), stands head and shoulders above most films of its kind, so much so that the standard stalk-and-slash antics found here are never what they've become in so many other similar attempts. Taking it's cues from classic horror films like Old Dark House and The Black Cat, and displaying strong influences from Italian giallo (particularly Tenebre), Lighthouse is a taut, innovative film with a mixture of astounding effects, strong atmosphere and impressive set pieces ultimately deserving of a wider audience than it ever got.

Lumière (1996)
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the film camera, 40 international directors were given a Lumière camera, black and white film stock, and under 50 seconds to make a movie. David Lynch's "mini-epic" destroyed the competition with an arcane dungeon laboratory where armed aliens torture a woman floating in a giant vat. Stark, horrifying and unforgettable.

Man Bites Dog (1992)
It preceded every independent murder mockumentary as a reality TV interview with a fast-talking, lonely serial killer. Man Bites Dog was censored for scenes in which a child is suffocated to death and later when the camera crew is coaxed into participating in an extended rape scene.

Maniac (1980)
Bill Lustig's splatter classic still plays like the sleaziest thing to come out of the New York underground in the '70s, and Frank Zito remains one of the genre's most understated villains.

Martin (1977)
George Romero's modern vampire movie exists in the shadow of his Dead films but still stands as an utterly original genre piece, despite its budgetary constraints.

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
The inimitable Charles (Twilight Zone) Beaumont penned this Poe adaptation, gorgeously shot by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price as the Satan-worshipping Prince Prospero. Debauchery, depravity and the red death reign supreme.

May (2002)
Lucky McKee's feature film debut is a curious mix of Carrie and Frankenstein with a performance by Angela Bettis that will make your broken heart bleed.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)
Richard Gere's name on the marquee pretty much ruined this film for genre philes who dismissed it as a glorified episode of the X-Files, but The Mothman Prophecies stands as a mature horror movie - frightening, unsettling, and displaying a remarkable insight into the psychology of grief.

Nattevagten (1994)
Remade virtually shot for shot by Hollywood (as Nightwatch), this Danish original is still the better of the two - a creepy whodunit with a lot of suspense and an inventive twist.

Nekromantik 2 (1991)
More grisly and unusual than Jörg Buttgereit's original 1987 corpse fetishization flick, Nekromantik 2 is worth watching for its outrageous finale alone. If you thought seeing a man ejaculate while stabbing himself in the gut was insane, Monika M has the ultimate climax in store for you.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Robert Mitchum gives one of the most starkly evil performances in cinema as a preacher/child killer stalking his ex-prison bunkmate's offspring. The elegantly shot black and white film is the only one ever directed by actor Charles Laughton (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939).

Onibaba (1964)
In the mid-'60s, Kaneto Shindo took a film crew into the marshes of Japan, where they lived in seclusion, pouring themselves into what became one of the genre's most hauntingly sublime and savage works. Set during the most desperate hours of the country's Feudal period, the lyrical nightmare has a mother and daughter-in-law murdering lost soldiers, throwing their bodies into a deep hole, and selling their possessions for food. When a lecherous neighbour returns from battle, erotic desire and jealous rage wreak further havoc before a lost samurai appears in a hideous demon mask (that inspired the look of Pazuzu in The Exorcist) and twists the story into even darker territory. From its surreal soundtrack to sumptuous visuals, Onibaba is nothing less than a masterpiece.

Opera (1987)
Living in the shadow of Deep Red and Suspiria, Argento's Opera rises above his body of work with its memorable image of a woman forced to watch her friends get filleted lest the needles taped to her eyelids blind her if she closes them. A creative Italian take on The Phantom of the Opera that blows Argento's own Phantom adapt out of the water.

Paperhouse (1988)
If a kid's storybook was ever turned into a horror movie, this is it. This little-known UK offering opens the doors into a child's psyche as she faces paternal fear, abandonment issues and anxieties about growing up. Eerie and memorable.

Peeping Tom (1960)
Psycho may have vaulted Alfred Hitchcock to new heights, but Peeping Tom - Michael Powell's edgy, expertly crafted, and brutal film about a shy killer crippled by Freudian parental issues - effectively ended the director's career, despite the fact that it was released only a few months earlier in Britain. Powell's vilified masterpiece was savaged by the press and yanked from theatres for daring to cross the line between sex and violence. Indeed, his self-reflexive statement on cinema was way ahead of its time in questioning the pleasures of sex, death, and voyeurism in the movies, implicating the viewer and filmmaker as active participants.

Perdita Durango (1997)
Also released as Dance With the Devil, Perdita Durango brought together voodoo, kidnapping, gunplay and good old-fashioned sex appeal - like the horror action flick that Quentin Tarantino never made. Despite being a crowd-pleaser on the festival circuit, it was dumped direct-to-video before inexplicably vanishing.

Pin: A Plastic Nightmare (1988)
A psychologically original Canadian movie in which a boy projects a made-up personality onto a medical dummy, Pin is a surprisingly effective and original creepfest that still gooses the flesh.

Psycho II (1983)
A sequel to the Hitchcockian classic was moribund from the start, but Psycho II is surprisingly faithful to the original and has shocks all its own. A worthy update.

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
Based on a British television series by writer Nigel (The Abominable Snowman) Kneale, this sci-fi horror hybrid is a throwback to an earlier age of cautionary science and moody soft-focus monsters - it's also Hammer's first official foray into horror. With a feel like a classic Doctor Who episode mixed with a healthy dose of The Thing, Quatermass stands out as an effective and atmospheric film; essential and influential despite the limitations of its time and budget.

Ravenous (1999)
Antonia Bird's wild, bloody and darkly humorous tale of a cannibalistic killer infiltrating a military outpost in the 1800s suffered from bad timing when released in the middle of the ironic, Scream period of the late '90s. Or was it just too gory for the mainstream? You decide.

Raw Meat (1972)
Unusually gory and nasty for an early '70s Brit film, perhaps due in part to it being directed by American Gary Sherman, Raw Meat (a.k.a. Deathline) features the last of an inbred cannibal race descended from workers abandoned in a turn of the century tunnel cave-in preying on subway commuters. Illogical yes, but a must-see if only for Donald Pleasance's killer performance as a snarky detective.

Razor Blade Smile (1998)
Get past the first fifteen minutes of this Brit gothic flick and you'll find yourself in the middle of a small-budget vampire action movie - sexy, clever, and boasting one very cool twist-turn ending. Guaranteed to change your perception of what a vampire film is capable of.

The Reflecting Skin (1990)
Rare, cult item that winked into theatres before fading into obscurity. The film is a look at prairie life weirdness shot from the point of view of its eight-year-old protagonist, who watches his father commit suicide, his mother go mad, and adopts an aborted foetus whom he mistakes for a fallen angel.

Repulsion (1965)
Painstakingly blurring the lines of genre, Roman Polanski's Repulsion is a study in repression, loneliness and collapse as a sexually repressed and isolated woman slowly succumbs to the demons in her mind. Painful to watch but beautifully executed.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991)
The essence of splatter-fu, Riki Oh is a bloodbathed beacon of ridiculousness. Gore paints the screen, tendons are severed and limbs hacked off as two-bit actors attack their two-dimensional roles like starving dogs in a butcher's shop. Indispensible.

Rituals (1976)
This overlooked Canadian classic pays debt to Deliverance in a gruelling tale of four men on a camping trip who are tormented by an unseen assailant. Only survives on grainy VHS, but entirely worth it.

Santa Sangre (1989)
Alejandro Jodorowsky's only horror film is a singular vision, a film that manages to out-Argento Argento and is still capable of revolutionizing the genre in a way that it inexplicably never did. Santa Sangre was inspired by the life of a Mexican serial killer who murdered countless women, was incarcerated, and eventually released only to marry and settle into a life of domestic bliss(!). In Jodorowsky's hands, the film incorporates a travelling circus, a heretical church of blood worship and a boy who literally becomes the arms of his armless mother and seeks revenge on those who would threaten their uncanny relationship. Bizarre, poetic and engulfed in Jodorowsky's signature mysticism, the film is the essence of cult; see it to love it, to hate it or to simply know that it exists.

The Separation (2003)
Working in the tradition of stop-motion artists like Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay, Robert Morgan's disturbing, unforgettable ten-minute follow-up to his creepy Cat With Hands tells the story of separated Siamese-twin dollmakers who get reacquainted in a most gross and engrossing way.

Session 9 (2001)
Brad Anderson's creepy shot-on-video feature brought together elements from The Blair Witch Project and The Shining in one of the year's most genuinely unsettling films.

The Seventh Seal (1957)
Ingmar Bergman's stagey and endlessly imitated morality play is little known by genre enthusiasts and yet it remains one of cinema's most powerful and revered meditations on death.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Charming but deadly Uncle Charlie - played with a cold smile by Joseph Cotton - is on the run and cozying up to his oblivious small-town relatives. With unnerving shades of incest and a vampirish subtext, this is Hitchcock's subversive, blackly comical pre-Psycho commentary on Middle America.

Spider Baby (1964)
A sad, mean-spirited version of the Addams Family with a twisted sense of humour and shades of Lolita, Jack Hill's cult gem stars Lon Chaney Jr. as the aging caretaker of an inbred but lovably murderous mutant family facing eviction from a greedy lawyer.

Street Trash (1987)
Jim Muro's gory cult favourite boasts melting vagrants, a game of catch with a severed penis, Toxic Avenger-style acting and lots and lots of vomit courtesy of a strange brew called Viper. Need we say more?

Targets (1968)
In 1968, Roger Corman let then-rookie director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) helm a low-budget horror film with two restrictions: a) he had to make the most of two contractually-owed days of work from Boris Karloff, and b) he had to pad it out with stock footage from earlier Corman-Karloff collaboration, The Terror. Bogdanovich delivered a self-reflexive meditation on the genre that contrasted the old Victorian terrors of Karloff's era with a generation rocked by the real-life horrors of killers like Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald. In it, Karloff plays an ailing horror star in the twilight of his career, whose final public appearance intertwines with an unexplained killing spree by an all-American suburbanite. Provocative, chilling and way ahead of its time, Targets was unfortunately shunned after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Jack Kennedy - just after the film's release - made it hit too close to home.

Tetsuo: Iron Man (1989)
Body horror got hardwired with an explosive current of Japanese surrealism in Shinya Tsukamoto's low-budget manic debut feature about a businessman morphing into a sexualized metallic monster. Insanely stylish and outrageously original, it went on to influence directors like David Fincher and Takashi Miike.

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967)
Gory, surreal, chilling and bizarre, Brazilian genre god Jose Mojica Marins' second outing is a delirious feast on religious and social themes. Think of it as the defining Brazilian horror film, and enter with caution.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)
With Tombs of the Blind Dead, Spanish director Amando de Ossorio not only created some of the most starkly imaginative movie monsters ever to creep across a silver screen, but also an airtight mythology, a potent nihilism and a haunting poetry seldom seen in films of the era. Consider it a stylish, bone-chilling psychosexual nightmare classic.

Two-Thousand Maniacs! (1964)
It's not gore pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis' bloodiest, but Maniacs! mixes an almost Disney-like down-home hillbilly atmosphere with unflinching nastiness for an unwholesomely original tale of hicks torturing and slaughtering city folks under the guise of a civil war celebration. Yee-haw!

Uzumaki (2000)
Director Akihira Higuchi adapts Junji Ito's brilliant, nihilistic comic book of the same name into a bizarre, surrealist tale about a small Japanese town that falls under the spell of a mysterious curse - the curse of the spiral - that literally begins to distort and disfigure the real world.

Vampyres (1974)
José Ramón Larraz took the familiar gothic English setting and soft-focus theatrical titillation of the lesbo-vamp flick, built it into a hallucinogenic plot about predatory bloodsucking swingers preying on motorists, and amped up the gore. Savage, sensuous and surreal - Vampyres is a sumptuous standout in an often sleazy sub-genre.

The Vanishing (1988)
A man's wife goes missing and the abductor offers to disclose her fate, but at a horrible cost. Director George Sluzier remade this for Hollywood in 1993, but the best version is his original 1988 Dutch one, which keeps the ultra-bleak ending of Tim Krabb's novel.

Wait Until Dark (1967)
A recently blinded woman (Audrey Hepburn) is terrorized by a trio of thugs while they search for a heroin-stuffed doll that they believe is in her apartment. This inventive scenario survives as superior '60s suspense.

Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)
The film that may have traumatized your parents' parents, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is a subtle yet disturbing gaze into the mind of a troubled woman and her wheelchair-ridden sister whom she incessantly torments.

The Witchfinder General (1968)
Vincent Price is Matthew Hopkins, leading a bloody witch hunt across civil war-torn England in the seventeenth century. Alternately titled The Conqueror Worm to cash in on an association with Poe, the film owes a debt to Hammer both in style and the brutality of its violence, but it's Price's portrayal of pathological cruelty veiled in religious mania that gives the film its power.