Vintage Nightmares from British Cinema

Don’t look now. Actually do look. You can’t help it. It’s the warning that cinema audiences always disobey. And the compulsion comes naturally to British filmgoers, whose dreams have been haunted by Frankenstein’s monster, Martian war machines, and the horrors lurking on quiet country lanes or on the lonelier stretches of the London Underground.

Some of the most memorable British movies seem to have come straight from the subconscious. Quatermass and the Pit brings ancestral monsters shrieking from the London clay. The holiday cyclists of And Soon the Darkness are followed by a pursuer who hunts them from the horizon, but keeps his distance. The policeman hero of The Wicker Man is alarmed by horribly legible Pagan imagery – maypoles, confectionary hares, teenage girls with flowers in their hair – before being consigned to the flames.

Ealing’s Dead of Night is the horror portmanteau from which nobody can escape: once it has told its most blood-curdling story – the one about a sentient ventriloquist’s doll called Hugo – it simply loops back to the beginning. (It was influential, too: the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle saw it and proposed a new model of the universe.)

Nicolas Roeg, though, might be the director who best understood the fractured logic of nightmares. The Man Who Fell to Earth traps David Bowie’s lost alien on an Earth that seems as overpoweringly strange and hostile to us as it does to him. (No wonder he takes to drink.) Don’t Look Now is even more disorienting, cutting between images of dark water, spilt ink, surging rain. Nothing but the colour red links the accidental death of a little girl with a murderous being in Venice. But this is all that’s needed.

When we’re asleep, we don’t question the logic of our terrors. Sometimes, in the cinema, we are also too scared to ask.

Below are our pick of the best horror movies in the Studiocanal Vintage Classics range.

The Wicker Man
The Wicker Man, frequently voted the Best Horror Film of all time was brilliantly scripted by Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth, Frenzy) and features a career-best performance by the legendary Christopher Lee. Director Robin Hardy’s atmospheric use of location, unsettling imagery and haunting soundtrack gradually builds to one of the most terrifying and iconic climaxes in modern cinema.
What Love Horror says:
“The Wicker Man has proven extremely influential over the past four decades. Many British horror films have tried to ape its unique atmosphere, pitched somewhere between camp, pastoralism and disquiet; but none have succeeded in replicating it.”
Buy it from Amazon or Planet of Entertainment by clicking the links.
Read our full review right HERE

Circus of Horrors
Starring Anton Diffring (Beast Must Die, The Man Who Could Cheat Death), Erika Remberg (Mord in Rio), Yvonne Monlaur (The Brides of Dracula), Donald Pleasence (Halloween) and directed by Sidney Hayers (Night of the Eagle) from a screenplay by George Baxt, Circus of Horrors, with its depiction of voluptuous scantily-clad women meeting violent and sadistic ends amidst the lurid backdrop of the circus, is considered to be the third film in original distributor Anglo-Amalgamated’s so-called “Sadian trilogy” following the 1959 releases of Horrors of the Black Museum and Peeping Tom.
What Love Horror says:
“Circus of Horrors provides a gripping and interesting story using the circus as both backdrop and means for murder and manipulation, entertaining the audience as much with the spectacle and skills on show as the gruesome deaths that occur.”
Buy it from Amazon or Planet of Entertainment by clicking the links.
Read our full review right HERE

The Masque of the Red Death
A first ever extended cut of Roger Corman’s iconic horror film The Masque of the Red Death, stunningly restored in 4K by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and The Academy with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Starring horror stalwart Vincent Price (House on Haunted Hill, House of Wax, Edward Scissorhands) in one of the finest performances of his career, alongside a knock-out supporting cast including Jane Asher (Alfie, Death at A Funeral), Hazel Court (The Premature Burial, The Raven), David Weston (Becket, The Red Baron) and Nigel Green (Jason and The Argonauts, Zulu) and based on the classic gothic fiction tale The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy by Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death is considered one of Roger Corman’s (The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven) most distinctive works and an all-time horror classic.
What Love Horror says:
“Featuring a stunning and chilling central performance from Vincent Price The Masque of the Red Death is most definitely the best of Roger Corman’s Poe cycle succeeding as it does in being both a wonderful and respectful adaptation while also creating something spectacularly cinematic.”
Buy it from Amazon or Planet of Entertainment by clicking the links.
Read our full review right HERE

Quatermass And The Pit
The third in the trilogy of films based on Nigel Kneale’s seminal Quatermass series, Quatermass & the Pit was made by Hammer Studios in 1967, directed by stalwart Roy Ward Baker and starring Andrew Keir as the titular scientist, battling evil alien forces that threaten to take over the world, and also stars James Donald, Barbara Shelley and Julian Glover. Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass series has been said to have influenced everyone from John Carpenter to Dr Who.
What Love Horror says:
“Building brilliantly and moving from a simplistic science fiction adventure through a supernatural horror film concluding with an apocalyptic disaster movie ending which is still powerfully disturbing and unsettling Quatermass And The Pit is a classic British movie which deserves recognition and praise as a film ahead of its time that is still as powerful and thought provoking as it was when it was made.”
Buy it from Amazon or Planet of Entertainment by clicking the links.
Read our full review right HERE

Peeping Tom
Peeping Tom was originally released in 1960, shortly before Hitchcock’s equally shocking Psycho, and provoked British critics to a fury of disgust at its sympathetic portrayal of a serial killer and Powell’s revolutionary use of filmmaking to explore the voyeuristic nature of cinema. Powell’s career never recovered from the scandal. But twenty years later, Peeping Tom was hailed as a misunderstood masterpiece – thanks to the efforts of filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, who submitted the film to the New York Film Festival in 1979 and helped finance a US re-release, allowing it to be rediscovered by a new audience. Today its wit, beauty and power see it rightly celebrated as a classic.
What Love Horror says:
“Peeping Tom is not only a great piece of cinema but a highly original and influential piece of horror whose exploration into the psychology of a killer and our obsession with watching other peoples fear are as relevant today as they ever where.”
Buy it from Amazon or Planet of Entertainment by clicking the links.
Read our full review right HERE

Fright
The original British slasher film from 1971, Fright was directed by Peter Collinson (The Italian Job, Straight on Till Morning), and stars Honor Blackman (Goldfinger), Susan George (Straw Dogs), Ian Bannen (The Flight of the Phoenix), George Cole and Dennis Waterman (Minder).
What Love Horror says:
“Fright doesn’t necessarily hold up because it’s incredibly dated. It may also not be quite as suspenseful as “Stranger” or “Halloween” but don’t count it out. It has all the elements of a great thriller, so if you can get past the wardrobe and the set design, you’re in for quite a ride.”
Buy it from Amazon or Planet of Entertainment by clicking the links.
Read our full review right HERE

Don’t Look Now
Praise for Don’t Look Now has continued over the years, and the film has topped Time Out’s Best British Film Of All Time poll twice in a row. The film is also regularly ranked as one of the top horror films of the century, and cited as an influence on many leading directors for their films, including Ben Wheatley, Danny Boyle, Lynne Ramsay, Ryan Murphy and Martin McDonagh. In their tributes to Roeg in 2018, Edgar Wright referred to him as “A master of the art”, Asif Kapadia dubbed him a “Legendary inspirational director”, the BFI called him “A true great if ever there was one” and David Jenkins of Little White Lies stated he was a “British titan of cinema.” In recognition of his unique, uncompromising vision, Roeg was also awarded the BFI Fellowship and won the BAFTA Special Award for Outstanding Creative Contribution to Cinema in 2009.
What Love Horror says:
“Illuminating, frightening and full of imagery that will stay in your mind long after its done, Don’t Look Now needs to be watched now by everyone as an essay in filmmaking and fear.”
Buy it from Amazon or Planet of Entertainment by clicking the links.
Read our full review right HERE

Dead Of Night
This classic portmanteau from Britain’s legendary Ealing Studios is justifiably one of the most revered and successful horror anthologies ever made. Composed around a group of strangers, mysteriously gathered at a country estate where each reveals their chilling tale of the supernatural, it features appearances by many of the best British actors of its day, including Mervyn Johns, Ralph Michael, Basil Radford and Michael Redgrave. Featuring four directors and four writers, each responsible for one of the individual flashbacks that are loosely worked together with immense psychological sophistication, Dead of Night is one of just a handful of ‘true’ British horror films of British cinema’s first half-century, paving the way for the AMICUS and HAMMER horror cycles a decade later.
What Love Horror says:
“Wonderfully atmospheric, every frame of Dead of Night seems infused with dread creating an extremely haunting experience both due to the films themes and its imagery which will stay with you long after the cleaver credits roll.”
Buy it from Amazon or Planet of Entertainment by clicking the links.
Read our full review right HERE

The Vintage Classics range is a premium film brand from STUDIOCANAL celebrating iconic British films, each one lovingly restored and available with brand new interviews on Blu-Ray, DVD, UHD and Digital.

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