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

Five friends travelling through rural Texas stumble across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover something sinister within. The group soon find themselves picked off, one by one, by a masked madman with a chain saw.

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Two woodcutters head into the mountains to fell an ancient tree. Caught in a snowstorm, they spend the night in a mountain lodge, where afemale spirit appears and takes the life of one of the men. She spares the other man's life on the condition that he never tell anyone what happened that night.

The woodcutter (Akira Ishihama) goes on to marry the mysterious beauty Yuki (Shiho Fujimura) and together they have a child. But Yuki catches the eye of a lecherous lord, whose advances force her to reveal a dark secret. Period film specialist Tokuzo Tanaka, a former assistant to both Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, creates a broodingly atmospheric tale in which the viewer fully empathises with the ghost. Featuring a score by original 'Godzilla' composer Akira Ifukube.

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Recent widower Shigeharu Aoyama is advised by his son to find a new wife, so he seeks the advice of a colleague having been out of the dating scene for many years. They take advantage of their position in a film company by staging an audition to find the perfect woman.

Interviewing a series of women, Shigeharu becomes enchanted by Asami, a quiet, 24-year-old woman, who is immediately responsive to his charms. But soon things take a very dark and twisted turn as we find that Asami isn't what she seems to be...

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It's 1987 and Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is living the American dream. He has a great job, he's handsome, he's athletic and has the attention of many beautiful women. However, Patrick has a dark secret that he keeps hidden from those around him; Patrick is a psychopath.

Dissatisfied with this charmed life, Patrick spends his evenings prowling the streets looking for victims; whether they are his business associates or strangers he meets in passing, he makes no distinction. Cultivating his serial killer persona as much as his yuppie lifestyle, the two sides of Patrick's life soon begin to merge and he begins to wonder where one side of his life ends and the other begins.

Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) dares to tamper with life and death by creating a human monster (Boris Karloff) out of lifeless body parts.

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Originally shown on BBC1 in 1974 and rarely seen since, "Penda's Fen" has become the stuff of legend, its name invoking the spirit of a time when television had the power to provoke and astound.

Exploring themes of personal and national identity, language, history and industrial progress, this unclassifiable drama boldly weaves its exquisite, fantastical imagery with the rousing music of Elgar to tell a tale of ancient legends and sexual awakening which stands as one of British television's greatest ever achievements.

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Wheelchair-bound heiress Penny Appleby (Susan Strasberg) arrives at the Cote d'Azur to live with her estranged father. Penny's stepmother Jane (Ann Todd) informs her that her father has left suddenly on business.

That night Penny visits the summer house, where she sees her father's corpse propped up in a chair. Further disturbing incidents are also witnessed solely by Penny. A local doctor, Pierre Gerrard (Christopher Lee), speculates that the girl might be going insane. Penny confides in the family's chauffeur Bob (Ronald Lewis), believing that Jane and Gerrard are attempting to have her certified and thus cheated out of her inheritance. Penny's trust is cruelly betrayed before the horrifying truth is revealed...

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Follow The Assassin through a forbidding world of tortured souls, decrepit bunkers, and wretched monstrosities forged from the most primordial horrors of the subconscious mind.

Every set, creature, and effigy in this macabre masterpiece is hand crafted and painstakingly animated using traditional stop-motion techniques. 'Mad God' is a labour of love, a testament to the power of creative grit, and an homage to the timeless art of stop-motion animation. Ready your eyes. Ready your spirit. Prepare to meet your maker.

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On a cold, bright autumn day in Suffolk, England, a little girl in a red mackintosh drowns in a pond-the daughter of John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie).

Trying to recover from the tragedy, the couple arrive in Venice, Italy, where John has been commissioned to restore a church. In the eerie atmosphere of the lagoon city in winter, they encounter two strange sisters. Laura is suddenly released from her grief when one of them, a blind psychic, tells her that she is in contact with her dead daughter. Angered and sceptical, John carries on with his work, but witnesses an unsettling vision of his own: a little girl in a red mackintosh disappearing into the Venetian alleys. As Venice and his fate close in on John, illusion, reality and sudden terror spiral the story to its grotesque climax.

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American psychologist John Holden (Dana Andrews) arrives in England to discover that his colleague, Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham), has suddenly died following his efforts to discredit notorious occultist Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnls).

The cynical Holden dismisses Karswell's warnings as supernatural nonsense, even when he and Harrington's niece, Joanna (Peggy Cummins), are confronted by a series of bizarre and inexplicable events. Holden discovers that Karswell has slipped him a parchment featuring ancient runic symbols - a sign that, like Harrington before him, he has been marked for imminent destruction by a fire-breathing demon.

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The first sound-film by one of the greatest of all filmmaker's, Vampyr offers a sensual immediacy that few, if any, works of cinema can claim to match.

Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer leads the viewer, as though guided in a trance, through a realm akin to a wakingdream, a zone positioned somewhere between reality and the supernatural.

A priest becomes a vampire… another man's wife is coveted… a deadly seduction triggers murder

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Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps and other sordid souls, is a place that reeks of death and hopelessness, where a lonely vampire is stalking the towns most unsavory inhabitants.

But when boy meets girl, an unusual love story begins to blossom... blood red.

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"It was an evil house from the beginning, a house that was born bad". The place is the 90-year-old mansion called Hill House. No one lives there. Or so it seems. But please do come in. Because even if you don't believe in ghosts, there's no denying the terror of 'The Haunting'.

Robert Wise returned to psychological horror for this much admired, first screen adaptation of Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting of Hill House'. Four people come to the house to study its supernatural phenomena. Or has the house drawn at least one of them to it?

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On a black and unholy Halloween night years ago, little Michael Myers (Will Sandin) brutally slaughtered his sister in cold blood. But for the last fifteen years, town residents have rested easy, knowing he was safely locked away in a mental hospital - until tonight.

Tonight, Michael (Tony Moran) returns to the same quiet neighbourhood to relive his grisly murder again...and again...and again. For this is a night of evil. Tonight is Halloween!