griggs's - Horror Films (Available on Cinema Paradiso) Everyone Should Watch Once List

Show moreShow less

After accidentally unleashing the demonic forces held within the Necronomicon (The Book Of The Dead) the now legendary Ash finds himself being transported back in time to the dark ages where he is forced to do battle with a relentless army of grotesque, flesh eating "deadites".

Armed with his ever reliable chainsaw, his big, smoking boom stick and a second hand car. Ash Williams — hero, man of action, prophesised saviour of ancient times and discount store employee — is about to show the medieval dead what it means to be truly groovy, because this time they're messing with the wrong chin. It's time for some sugar baby.

Show moreShow less

An artist's model, Aki (Mako Midori), is abducted, and awakens in a dark warehouse studio whose walls are decorated with outsized women's body parts - eyes, lips, legs, and breasts - and dominated by two recumbent giant statues of male and female nudes.

Her kidnapper introduces himself as Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), a blind sculptor whom she had witnessed intently caressing a statue of her naked torso previously at an exhibition in which she featured. Michio announces his intention of using her to sculpt the perfectfemale form. Atfirst defiant, she eventually succumbs to his intense fixation on her body and finds herself drawn into his sightless world, in which touch is everything.

Show moreShow less

Shamoto runs a small tropical fish shop. His second wife, Taeko, does not get along with his daughter, Mitsuko, and this worries him. One day Mitsuko is caught shoplifting at a grocery store.

There they meet a friendly man named Murata, who helps to settle things between Mitsuko and the store manager. Since Murata also runs a tropical fish shop, Shamoto establishes a bond with him and they become friends; Mitsuko even begins working for Murata and living at his house. What Shamoto doesn't know, however, is that Murata hides many dark secrets behind his friendly face. He sells cheap fish to his customers for high prices with his artful lies. If anyone detects his fraud or refuses to go along with his moneymaking schemes, they're murdered and their bodies disposed of by Murata and his wife in grisly ways. Shamoto is taken in by Murata's tactics, and by the time he realizes that Murata is insane, and a serial killer who has made over fifty people disappear, he is powerless to do anything about it. But now Mitsuko is a hostage at Murata's home and Shamoto himself has become the killer's unwilling accomplice. Cruel murders gradually cripple his mind and finally the ordinary man is driven to the edge of the abyss.

Show moreShow less

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American writer living in Rome, inadvertently witnesses a brutal attack on a woman (Eva Renzi) in a modern art gallery. Powerless to help, he grows increasingly obsessed with the incident.

Convinced that something he saw that night holds the key to identifying the maniac terrorising Rome, he launches his own investigation parallel to that of the police, heedless of the danger to both himself and his girlfriend Giulia (Suzy Kendall)...

Show moreShow less

Guess who's back. Back again. Back in green. He's tough. He's tall. And he's still a 200 ft. Flying turtle. From the same crew who brought us the effects-juiced Gamera: Guardian of the Universe now comes an even more CGI-enhanced adventure fop our tortugan hero.

A freak meteor shower near Sapporo, Japan brings with it more than just a killer light show. Electrical problems, over-grown plant life and a whole slew of rather irritable critters also drop in to threaten the human race. Local science instructor Midori Honami (Mild Mizuno) is called to assist the brave Colonel Watarase (Toshiy uki Nagashima) in the military's oft-confused attempts to save mankind. They must find a way to successfully combine efforts with their reptilian protector, or both will face ultimate destruction from the Earth's bugged-out invaders. Join the battle as Gamera and his bipedal pals work to repel the Attack of Legion!

Show moreShow less

Following the death of their mother, sisters Su-mi (Lim Soo-jung) and Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young) are sent to convalesce in a mental hospital. When they are released, they are greeted by their father and taken home.

Once there, it becomes obvious that this isn't the wholesome family unit that the girls' new step mother wishes it was. On their first night home disturbing and seemingly unexplainable events - footsteps on the stairs, doors opening of their own accord - begin to occur, and strange hallucinations plague the family. It soon becomes impossible to tell whether it is the sisters' unstable mental health, the cruel mind games played by the step mother, or the dark presence of a supernatural force which is at work within the house.

Show moreShow less

When a young actress (Kristy McNichol) adopts a stray white Alsatian she hit with her car, she soon discovers that the dog has been conditioned to attack any black person on sight.

Its only chance is Keys (Paul Winfield), an animal trainer focused on breaking the dog's behaviour and finding a way to eradicate its vicious instincts.

In modern-day London, a sex criminal known as 'The Necktie Murderer' has the police on alert, and in typical Hitchcok fashion, the trail is leading to an innocent man, who must know now elude the law and prove his innocence by finding the real murderer.

In this high-octane thriller, a tough-talking serial murderer transforms his Dodge Charger into an indestructible weapon and then climbs behind the wheel of his well-oiled killing machine to terrorise a group of women on the road.

Show moreShow less

Before 'The Grudge', before 'Dark Water', there was 'Pulse', one of the scariest films ever made from the master of Japanese horror, Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

At Sunny Planet Sales in Tokyo, a group of friends are concerned about Taguchi, a colleague who owes them a computer disc for a project and hasn't been returning phone calls. When co-worker Michi (Kumiko Aso) visits Taguchi's apartment to check on him, he seems fine. But within minutes, Taguchi has hanged himself. Michi flees the apartment, taking the disc, which may contain the most deadly computer virus ever created... When Taguchi subsequently reappears as a ghostly presence on their computer and video screens, is he trying to contact his friends from beyond the grave or is there something more sinister afoot? Soon, there are more sudden deaths and disappearances within the group, terrifying rooms sealed in red tape, and the appearance of more ghosts as the city of Tokyo - and the world - is slowly drained of life.

Show moreShow less

Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread.

As head of RKO's B-horror-movie unit during the 1940s, Lewton, working with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, brought a new sophistication to the genre by wringing chills not from conventional movie monsters but from brooding atmosphere, suggestion, and psychosexual unease. Suffused with ritual, mysticism, and the occult, the poetically hypnotic 'I Walked with a Zombie' and the shockingly subversive 'The Seventh Victim' are still-tantalizing dreams of death that dare to embrace the darkness.

Robert Egger's 'Nosferatu' is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake. Starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe.

Show moreShow less

Directed, produced and starring Paul Wegener 'The Golem' is a masterpiece of early cinema. The story centres on a Jewish community threatened with removal from the city under proclamation from the Emperor, which the head Rabbi, Rabbi Loew predicted in the stars.

Constructing a Clay Man to stop this oppression and calling upon ancient powers in a magical amulet the creature is brought to life to protect its people.

Show moreShow less

Samurai lemon (Kazuo Hasegawa) has grown distant from his wife Oiwa (Yasuko Nakada) since she miscarried. Oume (Yôko Uraji), the pretty young daughter of a wealthy family, falls madly in love with lemon after he saves her from a group of drunk swordsmen.

Oiwa learns about the blossoming affair and grows despondent. Without his knowledge, lemon's associates conspire to clear the way for him to marry Oume by poisoning his wife. But Oiwa returns from the grave as a horribly disfigured ghost to haunt lemon and her tormentors. Director Kenji Misumi (Lone Wolf and Cub) and writer Fuji Yahiro (Sansho the Bailiff, Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji) turn the quintessential Japanese ghost story into a profoundly resonant doomed romance, with chilling ghost scenes that would leave a deep mark on the creators of J-horror.

Show moreShow less

A team of local TV reporters are following a squad of firemen on night duty. The footage is completely live and their task is to make show about on the life of these professionals who work while we are sleeping.

The first job of the night is to rescue an old lady who is trapped inside her apartment but the routine rescue soon takes a sinister turn. Something evil is spreading throughout the building, out of control. Trapped inside, the firemen and the TV crew have to confront an unknown and lethal horror. Now, the only thing that matters is hiding, surviving and trying desperately to escape. They must keep on recording. No matter what happens. Until the very last moment.