“You can’t cheat death twice.” The tagline for The Jester 2 knowingly toys with the very predicament its creators find themselves in: how do you resurrect a concept that, while promising, never quite mastered the trick the first time around? Colin Krawchuk’s sequel attempts to double down on the carnival of cruelty he began in 2023’s The Jester, expanding the mythology of its demonic mime while testing the limits of how much showmanship can mask repetition. The result is a film that juggles energy and invention in fleeting bursts, but too often trips on its own elaborate setup.
Picking up the pieces from the first outing’s father–daughter tragedy, The Jester 2 shifts focus to teen magician Max, whose sleight-of-hand becomes both metaphor and mechanism for survival. Her encounter with the titular killer—a supernatural trickster whose violence borders on ritual—sets in motion a classic Halloween-night pursuit that pits illusion against illusion. On paper, it’s a clever conceit: the hunted becomes the performer, blurring lines between spectacle and sacrifice. Yet for all its smoke and mirrors, the film struggles to find genuine suspense amid its flourishes.
What Krawchuk continues to capture well is the tactile texture of fear. His world feels grimy, tactile, and grounded in a kind of dark vaudeville sensibility that distinguishes The Jester from its obvious cousins—Terrifier and The Bye Bye Man among them. The set pieces have an almost mechanical rhythm to them: gears grind, lights flicker, and the inevitable payoff arrives with splattering precision. There are, admittedly, some inspired kills—moments that flirt with invention without surrendering to pure sadism—and they serve as small mercies in a film otherwise content to revisit its predecessor’s beats.
Performance-wise, newcomer Max (played with gritty conviction and just enough pathos from Trentham) gives the film its pulse. She lends emotional dimension to what might otherwise have been a mere exercise in Halloween carnage. The character’s duality as performer and prey allows for some intriguing thematic play—magic as self-delusion, survival as artifice—but these moments are fleeting, buried beneath narrative repetition and pacing issues that dull the edge.
If The Jester was about potential unrealised, The Jester 2 is about potential overplayed. It suffers the fate of many horror sequels: the impulse to explain what should remain mysterious. The mask, the mythos, the magic—all begin to fray under the weight of unnecessary exposition. What’s lost is the eerie enigma that made the character work best in the shorts—a phantom that needed no backstory to haunt us.
The Prognosis:
There’s a decent film hiding beneath the face paint—a story about performance, grief, and female agency wrapped in blood-streaked pageantry—but The Jester 2 can’t quite pull the rabbit from the hat. For every clever twist or gruesome flourish, there’s a scene that drags, a trick that lands flat. It’s an average follow-up that entertains enough to justify the ticket, but not enough to warrant an encore.
In the end, this jest feels familiar, its laughter hollow. The mask remains unsettling, the kills inventive—but the magic? It’s starting to vanish.
As Halloween draws near, horror once again becomes a shared ritual — a season of remembrance for stories that refuse to stay dead. Surgeons of Horror continues its Halloweekend celebration by exploring two of the year’s biggest horror sequels — The Conjuring: Last Rites and I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) — both of which resurrect familiar spirits for a new generation. Each film proves that in horror, the past is never truly buried. It lingers, waiting to be summoned.
In horror, nothing stays buried for long. The genre thrives on return — the killer who rises again, the curse that refuses to fade, the franchise that won’t go quietly into the night. As Halloween approaches, two recent releases — The Conjuring: Last Rites and I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) — embody that familiar resurrection instinct. Both reach back into the collective unconscious of horror fandom, summoning their mythologies for one more invocation. The result? A cinematic séance with two very different spirits.
Where The Conjuring franchise has become synonymous with ecclesiastical dread and the poetics of possession, Last Rites marks its most reflective chapter yet. It is less about the shrieks in the dark than the quiet toll of faith under siege. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return with a weary grace, embodying spiritual endurance as Ed and Lorraine Warren face a final reckoning. The film’s success — the highest-grossing in the series to date — suggests that audiences still crave the sacred amid the spectral. Horror, after all, has always been the Church of the uncertain.
Director Michael Chaves, whose previous entries divided fans, appears here at his most composed. The film leans on ritual and rhythm, crafting its horror from slow encroachment rather than surprise. Where early Conjuring installments sought to make the invisible visible — the demonic literalised through spectacle — Last Rites internalises the terror. It becomes about spiritual corrosion and the limits of belief. The scares are fewer, but the unease lingers longer, like a stain that refuses absolution.
THE CONJURING: LAST RITES: BUY OR RENT NOW
If The Conjuring franchise operates as a gothic cathedral — all solemnity, candlelight, and conviction — then I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is its neon-lit funhouse mirror. Twenty-eight years on from the original, the slasher that once defined late-’90s cool has been reborn for a postmodern audience weaned on legacy sequels and self-awareness. The returning players — older, guiltier, carrying the weight of past sins — are now haunted less by the killer with a hook than by the cultural echo of their own youth.
The new Summer trades the slick polish of the original for something darker and more psychologically knotted. Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson injects a contemporary anxiety into the glossy nostalgia — an unease about memory, mythmaking, and the impossibility of escape in a world where the past is always trending. It’s a film about being haunted by an earlier version of yourself, both on-screen and off. If The Conjuring: Last Rites examines faith as a haunted institution, I Know What You Did Last Summer dissects nostalgia as a haunted emotion.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER: BUY OR RENT NOW
Taken together, the two films form an accidental dialogue about horror’s relationship with repetition. The genre has always been cyclical — the curse that returns, the scream that echoes — but in 2025, the loop feels newly self-conscious. We no longer revisit the past merely to reanimate it; we revisit to interrogate it. What does it mean that we find comfort in repetition? That audiences continue to gather for another exorcism, another confession, another reckoning with sins once buried? Perhaps the modern horror franchise is the truest ghost story of all: one where the spectre is the story itself, forever refusing release.
It’s telling that both films found such success not by reinventing their formulas but by leaning into legacy. The Conjuring: Last Rites positions itself as a summation — the solemn benediction of a franchise that once defined a new wave of studio horror. I Know What You Did Last Summer, meanwhile, taps into the ironic nostalgia economy, where a wink to the camera can coexist with genuine bloodletting. Between them lies the spectrum of modern horror’s obsessions: belief, guilt, and the inability to let go.
As studios mine familiar IPs for one more scare, it’s easy to be cynical. Yet these films remind us that the franchise model, at its best, functions like folklore — stories retold, reshaped, and reinterpreted for each generation. Every return is an exorcism, every revival a confession. And as long as we keep watching, the ghosts — cinematic or otherwise — will keep coming back.
In this year’s crowded Halloween line-up, Last Rites and I Know What You Did Last Summer stand not as nostalgic curios, but as mirrors reflecting horror’s restless soul. The genre’s truest power has never been novelty, but endurance. Horror doesn’t die — it reincarnates, forever compelled to haunt itself.
Saul Muerte
This article is part of Surgeons of Horror’s 2025 Halloweekend coverage — a series of features and retrospectives exploring horror’s many faces, from sacred hauntings to nostalgic revivals. Stay tuned for upcoming deep dives into Weapons, The Toxic Avenger, Freakier Friday, The Evil Dead, and HIM — because Halloween isn’t just a night. It’s a ritual.
Halloween rarely stays confined to a single night. The ritual of the Halloweekend—a three-day communion of darkness, nostalgia, and popcorn—has become an annual rite for horror fans. It’s a time when the barriers between the cinema and the living room dissolve, and the flicker of the television once again becomes our campfire glow. This year, as October 31st falls on a Friday, it’s the perfect excuse to transform your home into a theatre of the uncanny.
From franchise resurrections and genre experiments to reanimated cult icons and family-friendly frights, this year’s home entertainment line-up offers a spectrum of screams for every taste. Whether you crave dread-laden mythology, subversive satire, or a gentle chill that still lets the kids sleep at night, here’s your guide to building a Halloweekend Movie Marathon worthy of the season.
The Franchises Return: Evil Never Dies, It Just Streams Differently
Sequels are the lifeblood of the horror ecosystem, and 2024–2025 has delivered them with unholy enthusiasm. The Conjuring: Last Rites has become the highest-grossing entry in the franchise—proof that James Wan’s universe of haunted faith still has audiences under its spell. The film closes the Ed and Lorraine Warren saga with ritualistic grandeur, blending theological terror with operatic spectacle. It’s horror as folklore, deeply Catholic yet oddly romantic, and best watched with the lights off and the volume indecently high.
Hot on its spectral heels comes I Know What You Did Last Summer, the long-awaited sequel that trades the 1990s teen slasher sheen for something darker and more mournful. Age has crept into its survivors, and the sins of the past feel heavier, more human. Together, these two films form the perfect one-two punch for a Friday night of ghosts and guilt—two hauntings from opposite ends of the horror spectrum.
If you still have stamina after that, revisit The Black Phone. Scott Derrickson’s original remains a masterclass in slow-burn suspense, and Ethan Hawke’s masked performance feels destined to be rediscovered each Halloween.
Weapons of Fear: The New Face of Prestige Horror
For those who prefer their terror thoughtful, Weaponsstands as this year’s dark horse—a meticulously constructed nightmare that unfolds with existential precision. Director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian dissects masculinity and violence through a lens of cosmic dread, proving once again that the most terrifying monsters are often human. It’s not just horror; it’s arthouse apocalypse.
And just beyond the horizon lurks HIM—available to pre-order now and set to release in early November. Word from festival circuits teases something Lovecraftian, something deeply unsettling. If Weapons is about human violence, HIM promises to explore the unfathomable violence of the universe itself. For the serious horror aesthete, these two titles belong at the heart of your Halloweekend viewing.
Horror Meets Humour: The Body Horrific
Sometimes the only way to survive the darkness is to laugh through the blood. Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, does exactly that—fusing body horror with relationship disintegration in a way that’s both hilarious and grotesque. It’s Cronenberg by way of couple’s therapy, proof that the boundaries between love and revulsion remain dangerously thin.
Then there’s The Toxic Avenger (2025), the riotous revival of Troma’s most beloved mutant. Director Macon Blair reimagines the cult classic for a new age of environmental anxiety and pop-cultural absurdity. With Peter Dinklage and Kevin Bacon leading the chaos, it’s a delirious love letter to 1980s splatter cinema—messy, magnificent, and defiantly unclean. Expect a full-length exploration of this one soon on Surgeons of Horror, because The Toxic Avenger deserves more than a mere mention; it’s a mutation worth celebrating.
Family Frights: When the Night Belongs to Everyone
For those who prefer their ghosts gentle and their monsters misunderstood, Halloween can still be a shared experience. Freakier Friday offers body-swap comedy with a spectral twist—perfect for a family-friendly movie night that nods toward the macabre without the nightmares. Meanwhile, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride remains a perennial classic, a gothic romance that continues to delight and haunt with its delicate stop-motion melancholy.
Pair these two for Sunday evening—an epilogue of warmth after the chaos, proof that the spirit of Halloween can be cosy, not just cold.
Classics Reawakened: Blood and Memory
No Halloween is complete without returning to the foundations. The Evil Dead (1981), Sam Raimi’s kinetic debut, remains one of the most visceral horror experiences ever committed to film. Its mixture of slapstick terror and relentless energy forged the DNA of modern horror filmmaking. Forty years later, its influence is still bleeding into the genre’s veins. Watching it today is like summoning the raw essence of what makes horror eternal: audacity, invention, and the thrill of transgression.
Curtain Call: The Comfort of Fear
Halloween on screen has evolved beyond simple scares—it’s a shared ritual, a space for collective catharsis. The modern horror fan might binge on supernatural sequels, dissect social allegories, or seek comfort in gothic animation. Yet the result is the same: we gather in the dark to feel alive.
This Halloweekend, the ghosts aren’t outside—they’re waiting in your queue. So dim the lights, queue up your terror of choice, and let the screen glow like a candle in the night.
The mid-1970s horror market was awash with low-budget genre experiments, and Kiss of the Tarantula, directed by Chris Munger, fits neatly into that mould: a small-town thriller with a pulpy premise and an uneven execution. It’s a film that teeters on mediocrity for most of its runtime, but one that manages, almost unexpectedly, to crawl toward something far more compelling in its closing act.
The story follows Susan Bradley (Suzanna Ling), a troubled teenager whose closest companions are her pet tarantulas. Bullied, misunderstood, and scarred by childhood trauma, Susan turns her eight-legged friends into weapons, unleashing them on those who cross her. It’s a deliciously pulpy set-up—revenge served on a platter of fangs and venom—but the execution is too often sluggish, bogged down by pedestrian pacing and flat staging that sap the film of its potential bite.
For much of its runtime, Kiss of the Tarantula plays like a TV movie stretched too thin: the dialogue feels stilted, the performances serviceable but uninspired, and the horror largely tame. The spiders themselves are often more a novelty than a source of genuine terror, filmed with a kind of clumsy reverence that undercuts their menace. The film seems unsure whether it wants to be a serious psychological character study or a campy exploitation piece, leaving it stranded in the middle ground.
And yet, in its final act, something shifts. The atmosphere thickens, the tension sharpens, and the climax pays off with a burst of lurid energy that the preceding hour sorely lacked. Susan’s descent reaches a grim inevitability, and the film finally embraces its morbid premise with conviction. It doesn’t completely redeem the shortcomings, but it does leave the viewer with a stronger final impression than the slow middle stretch would suggest.
The Prognosis:
As a whole, Kiss of the Tarantula is far from a lost classic. It’s a curiosity, an example of 1970s regional horror that never quite capitalises on its deliciously twisted concept. Still, thanks to its striking finale, it avoids being dismissed outright. Mediocre for most of its length, lifted only at the end.
There’s a point, somewhere around hour three of a sleepless binge on cigarettes and neon, when the city stops being a grid of steel and glass and becomes a writhing organism — teeth in the pavement, eyes in the gutters, a heartbeat under the asphalt. SUN lives in that fever-space, a feral descent through New York’s arteries, pumping black blood and paranoia, dragging a haunted dancer through a nightmare carnival of his own making.
Dominic Lahiff isn’t interested in narrative comfort or traditional story beats; he takes the audience by the throat and hurls them down a staircase of toxic masculinity, one cracked vertebra at a time. The dancer, played with apocalyptic intensity by Cordell “Storm” Purnell, becomes both predator and prey — a man poisoned by love, overprotection, and jealousy until it curdles into possession, body and soul. Watching him stumble through the city’s nocturnal labyrinth is like witnessing a man wrestle not just with ghosts but with the razor-bladed reflection in his own mirror.
And here’s where it goes nuclear: Lahiff choreographs this collapse not with words but with movement. Purnell’s physicality — twitching, spasming, exploding into motion like a man possessed by every violent urge his body has ever contained — becomes the language of descent. Dance as madness. Dance as confession. Dance as exorcism. It’s a performance that slips the leash of acting and lunges straight into the ritualistic.
The themes are sharp and cruel. SUN is a meditation on how men weaponize protection into control, how jealousy gnaws holes in the skull, how love can deform into something ravenous and diseased. Lahiff has no patience for redemption arcs — this is about confronting the rot, peeling back the skin, and finding not salvation but raw meat pulsing in the dark.
Visually, it’s a knockout. Every frame looks soaked in cigarette smoke and concrete sweat, the cinematography catching the city not as backdrop but as living antagonist. And the score — sweet hell, the score — it doesn’t just accompany, it punishes. A pounding, relentless soundtrack that syncs with Purnell’s movements until sound and body blur into one convulsive dirge. It’s like watching a man dance his way into the underworld with the subway screeching along as orchestra.
The Prognosis:
SUN is cinema as possession. A film that doesn’t want to be watched so much as endured, swallowed, vomited back up in chunks of neon and bile. It’s beautiful, it’s punishing, and it leaves you trembling in the realization that sometimes the monsters we fear aren’t lurking in the alleys of New York — they’re standing right behind our own eyes, grinning, waiting for the music to start.
By the flickering gaslight of memory, we descend into the catacombs…
In the vast mausoleum of cinema’s past, there lies a spectral figure whose face has haunted generations — not because it was seen, but because it was revealed. Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, was no mere actor; he was an alchemist of the grotesque, conjuring anguish and terror from wax and wire, shadow and silence. And in 1925, beneath the vaulted ceilings of the Paris Opera House — conjured on Universal’s backlot like a fever dream of Gothic excess — he achieved his magnum opus: The Phantom of the Opera.
Chaney’s transformation into Erik, the Opera Ghost, was no simple matter of greasepaint and prosthetics. Nay — this was a self-inflicted metamorphosis, a cruel devotional rite. He stretched his nostrils with fishhooks, pulled back his lips with piano wire, stuffed cotton into his cheeks and contorted his nose with collodion and spirit gum until he became the very spectre that Leroux’s fevered imagination had birthed. Witnesses on set reportedly recoiled in real terror. It was not performance — it was possession.
The result? A revelation. The reveal of Chaney’s ghastly visage in the catacombs remains one of the most seismic shocks in silent cinema — a jolt not merely of fright, but of empathy twisted by horror. His Phantom was not the debonair recluse we would come to see in later years, but a tragic wretch — equal parts Mephistopheles and martyr.
This duality, this tightrope walk between monstrous and misunderstood, laid the foundation upon which every subsequent Phantom would totter. Claude Rains, in the Technicolor sprawl of 1943, became the tragic artist disfigured by acid — his descent not from birth but from betrayal. Herbert Lom, in the blood-tinted grandeur of Hammer’s 1962 adaptation, leaned into melancholic villainy, a Phantom forged by society’s indifference. Robert Englund — ever the sadistic showman — sliced his way through the 1980s in a slasher-inflected fever dream. And of course, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical wraith — perhaps the most culturally ubiquitous — swapped horror for high romance, crooning beneath the chandelier with yearning rather than rage.
Yet all of them, every last Phantom, owed a debt to Chaney.
His influence was not confined to narrative or design — it permeated cinema’s very DNA. The idea that the monster is also the victim, that the face behind the mask might inspire pity rather than revulsion — this was Chaney’s gospel. His Phantom is cinema’s first antihero in full — a sympathetic spectre long before capes and cowls became a genre of their own.
And let us not forget his legacy behind the lens. Chaney’s refusal to allow studio make-up artists near his face gave birth to the actor-as-architect — the performer who carves the mask himself. In his wake came Karloff, Lugosi, even Brando in his monstrous mumble. Every character actor who lost themselves in latex and madness owes a nod to the man who first made the grotesque beautiful.
He died in 1930, silenced by throat cancer before the talkies could claim his growl. But he remains eternal — not just in celluloid, but in spirit. Every time a horror film dares to ask us to empathise with the beast, every time a mask slips to reveal a wound, it is Chaney we are glimpsing beneath the flesh.
So raise your glass, dear reader, to the man who made the shadows sing. For behind every mask, there is pain. And behind that — if we dare look closely enough — there is Lon Chaney.
It’s been 40 years since The Return of the Living Dead shuffled, sprinted, and shrieked its way onto cinema screens, unleashing a chaotic blend of punk rock anarchy, grotesque splatter, and dark comedy that set it apart from the more solemn zombie canon of the time. Written and directed by Alien co-creator Dan O’Bannon in his directorial debut, the film took a side door into George A. Romero’s undead universe and blew it wide open with a mohawked middle finger.
Rather than emulate Romero’s social commentary-laden horrors, O’Bannon opted for something rowdier, more rebellious. He injected his tale with a subversive punk ethos that thrived on nihilism, attitude, and aesthetic chaos — fitting perfectly with the Reagan-era disillusionment bubbling beneath the surface of 1980s youth culture. From the moment the Tarman lurches from his canister with a gooey “Braaaains,” you know you’re in for something altogether weirder, louder, and dirtier.
A Director of Dark Ideas
O’Bannon’s fingerprints are all over this madness. Having previously collaborated with John Carpenter on Dark Star (1974), a lo-fi sci-fi satire, O’Bannon showed early signs of his interest in bureaucratic ineptitude, flawed authority figures, and characters who crack under pressure. Those themes are alive and well in Return, as Frank and Freddy (James Karen and Thom Mathews) bungle their way into doomsday with pitch-black comic flair. O’Bannon’s ability to juggle absurdity and dread feels like a spiritual continuation of Dark Star’s cosmic incompetence — only now with punk rock zombies and rib cages flying across the screen.
Linnea Quigley: Scream Queen Icon
No retrospective is complete without acknowledging Return’s punk siren, Linnea Quigley. As Trash — the cemetery-dancing, death-fantasizing goth girl — Quigley became a bona fide B-movie legend. Her performance isn’t just a campy cult favourite; it’s emblematic of a genre era where sex, gore, and attitude collided. I had the pleasure of interviewing Quigley in the early days of the Surgeons of Horror podcast, and her passion for indie horror and her status as a scream queen remain as potent today as ever.
One of the film’s most enduring legacies is its soundtrack. It didn’t just accompany the movie — it was the movie’s beating heart. Featuring tracks from The Cramps, 45 Grave, T.S.O.L., The Damned, and Roky Erickson, the music seethes with defiance and doom. The soundtrack wasn’t an afterthought; it was a manifesto. It locked the film into the punk subculture and turned it into a midnight movie mainstay, the kind you quoted at parties and watched on scratched VHS at 2AM with your loudest friends.
A Cult That’s Still Kicking
The Return of the Living Dead didn’t just inspire sequels — it inspired a lifestyle. Its heady mix of gallows humour, splatterpunk visuals, and self-awareness gave rise to a devoted fanbase who still scream “Send more paramedics!” at screenings. Its zombies are fast, smart, and unrelenting, subverting Romero’s rules and adding fresh panic to the genre. And its influence bleeds through countless horror-comedies that followed, from Dead Alive to Shaun of the Dead.
Though not always polished — the film wears its rough edges like badges of honour — Return survives as a riotous time capsule of punk horror energy. Dan O’Bannon may have only directed a handful of films, but this one alone is enough to keep his name in the horror hall of fame.
The Prognosis:
Forty years on, The Return of the Living Dead still kicks, bites, and thrashes. Whether you’re here for the brains, the tunes, or the screaming, mohawked zombies, there’s no denying its impact on horror, punk culture, and midnight movie fandom.
Quarxx’s All the Gods in the Sky (Tous les dieux du ciel) is not easily categorised, and that’s entirely the point. Sitting somewhere between psychological horror, arthouse drama, and cosmic nightmare, this French genre-bender takes its time and isn’t afraid to make its audience uncomfortable—both emotionally and philosophically.
At the centre of this bruising tale is Simon, a deeply troubled factory worker played with quiet intensity by Jean-Luc Couchard. Isolated on a decaying farmhouse in the French countryside, Simon devotes his life to caring for his sister Estelle (Melanie Gaydos), who was left severely disabled due to a tragic accident during their childhood. The pair exist in a shared purgatory of guilt, silence, and unresolved trauma.
Quarxx delivers a slow punch of a film—one that creeps under your skin not with conventional jump scares, but with mood, decay, and despair. It builds its atmosphere with surgical precision, weaving in splinters of sci-fi, existential dread, and surrealism. Simon’s fixation with extraterrestrial salvation offers a disturbing mirror into his desperation—a hope that something beyond this earth might rescue them from their irreversible reality.
While not all of its experimental swings land perfectly, the film is bolstered by weighty performances and a haunting visual style. The bleak, moldy interiors and ghostly farm exterior evoke a tactile sense of rot, both physical and spiritual. Quarxx makes no effort to handhold the viewer, instead demanding that we wade through the same confusion and torment as Simon himself.
All the Gods in the Sky is certainly not a film for everyone. Its pacing is deliberate, its emotional resonance often brutal, and its genre elements veer from subtle to grotesque. But for those willing to embrace its unsettling tones, there’s something strangely transcendent at its core—a meditation on guilt, disability, and the yearning for escape, whether divine or alien.
The Prognosis:
Though it never fully ascends into the upper tier of arthouse horror, it remains a distinct and memorable piece—an otherworldly prayer whispered from the darkest corners of human suffering.
Saul Muerte
All The Gods in the Sky premieres on Shudder and AMC+ Monday 4 August
With Blood and Black Lace, Mario Bava didn’t just craft a stylish horror film—he laid the foundation for the giallo genre and, by extension, the slasher films that would dominate decades later. The plot revolves around a masked killer targeting models at a high-end fashion house, but the real star is Bava’s camera. He bathes every murder in lush colour, surreal lighting, and baroque composition.
Beyond the violence, the film is a commentary on beauty, vanity, and objectification. It’s cold, glamorous, and entirely modern in tone. Bava strips away gothic frills and dives into something sleeker, bloodier, and more psychologically perverse. Its influence echoes in Argento, De Palma, and even Carpenter. As a blueprint for modern horror aesthetics, it’s utterly essential.
Roman Polanski’s first Hollywood outing became a defining film of 1960s horror. Rosemary’s Baby is not just a satanic thriller—it’s a chilling portrayal of gaslighting, bodily autonomy, and the terror of maternity. Mia Farrow delivers a painfully vulnerable performance as Rosemary, who suspects her neighbours—and even her husband—of plotting to steal her unborn child.
The genius of Polanski’s direction lies in restraint. There are no jump scares, no overt monsters—just a creeping, invisible dread that builds as Rosemary’s reality collapses. Its depiction of conspiracy, control, and isolation remains just as terrifying in the modern age. Few horror films have captured such a profound sense of helplessness with such elegance.
While not a traditional horror film, Persona is one of the most disturbing explorations of identity, psychology, and emotional vampirism ever committed to screen. Bergman strips narrative to the bone, presenting a surreal, hypnotic story of a nurse and her mute patient whose identities begin to merge. Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson give performances of staggering depth and intensity.
The film bleeds horror through its stark visuals, experimental editing, and lingering dread. Persona is like a cinematic séance—haunting, elusive, and emotionally violent. It’s no surprise that directors like Lynch, Cronenberg, and Aronofsky count it as a key influence. It’s the horror of the self, the horror of losing who you are, and it still rattles cages today.
Adapted from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, this elegantly executed ghost story remains one of the finest supernatural horror films ever made. Deborah Kerr plays a governess convinced that two children are being haunted—or are possibly possessed. Clayton’s direction is measured, deliberate, and psychologically loaded, and Freddie Francis’s cinematography is nothing short of sublime.
What makes The Innocents so powerful is its ambiguity. Are the ghosts real, or is it all in her mind? Kerr’s unraveling sanity, paired with the children’s eerie innocence, casts a spell of psychological dread. Every frame is composed like a nightmare you’re not sure you’ve woken from. This is gothic horror at its most refined.
George A. Romero’s indie breakthrough redefined the horror landscape. Shot on a shoestring budget, Night of the Living Dead introduced the modern zombie and a new kind of horror—raw, political, and relentlessly bleak. A group of strangers barricade themselves in a farmhouse while the dead rise outside, but it’s the human conflict inside that proves even more devastating.
Beyond the gore and terror, Romero injected biting social commentary, particularly with the casting of Duane Jones as the pragmatic, heroic lead—a revolutionary choice in 1968. The ending remains one of the most shocking and cynical conclusions in film history. Romero didn’t just invent the zombie genre—he made horror dangerous again.
Made on a meager budget by industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey, Carnival of Souls is a haunting, otherworldly descent into liminality and isolation. Candace Hilligoss plays Mary, a church organist who survives a car crash but begins to experience eerie visions and finds herself drawn to a decaying carnival pavilion. There’s something deeply off about everything, and that’s precisely the point.
The film exudes a dreamlike dread, feeling closer to a waking nightmare than traditional narrative cinema. Its grainy aesthetic, ghostly figures, and quiet existential despair place it closer to Eraserhead than any of its contemporaries. Forgotten for years, it’s now recognised as a minimalist masterpiece—an early taste of psychological horror that resonates far beyond its time.
Roman Polanski’s first foray into English-language horror is a claustrophobic, harrowing portrait of mental breakdown. Catherine Deneuve plays Carol, a young woman whose aversion to men—and possibly her own sexuality—manifests in increasingly violent and surreal visions. Alone in her sister’s apartment, her mind begins to fracture, and the walls close in.
Polanski visualises psychosis with expressionistic flair: cracks in the wall pulse, hands emerge from shadows, and time slips into delirium. Repulsion is a deeply personal horror, terrifying because of how intimate it feels. It’s a study of trauma, repression, and psychological collapse, with Deneuve delivering a near-silent performance of devastating power.
“The house was born bad.” So begins The Haunting, Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. A masterclass in suggestive horror, the film avoids special effects in favour of sound design, lighting, and psychological pressure. Julie Harris is unforgettable as Eleanor, a woman unmoored by grief, fear, and the lure of something malevolent within Hill House.
Wise builds tension through whispers, groans, and creeping camera movements, allowing the audience’s imagination to conjure the worst. It’s one of the finest haunted house films ever made—graceful, terrifying, and laced with subtext about repression, desire, and madness. The Haunting proves you don’t need to show horror—you just need to suggest it perfectly.
What more can be said about Psycho? With one shower scene, Hitchcock changed the face of horror forever. But the true genius of the film lies in its structure: the heroine dies halfway through, the killer hides in plain sight, and nothing is what it seems. Bernard Herrmann’s score screeches like a knife through the psyche, and Anthony Perkins redefined the horror villain with his portrayal of Norman Bates.
Psycho wasn’t just shocking—it was taboo-breaking, opening the door for horror to become a place for psychological complexity and transgression. It turned horror inward, focusing not on monsters, but on the terrors of the human mind. Its cultural impact is immeasurable, and it remains as nerve-shredding today as it was in 1960.
Reviled upon release, Peeping Tom all but ended Michael Powell’s career—but time has revealed it as one of the boldest, most prescient horror films ever made. Carl Boehm plays Mark, a shy cinematographer who murders women with a camera rigged to capture their dying expressions. Powell confronts the audience with the guilt of voyeurism, turning the lens back on us.
Unlike Psycho, Peeping Tom makes us complicit. It asks uncomfortable questions about pleasure, violence, and cinema itself. Ahead of its time in style, theme, and psychology, the film paved the way for meta-horror and slasher films alike. Today, it stands tall not just as a horror classic—but as a cinematic reckoning. Disturbing, elegant, and unflinching, it is the defining scream of the 1960s.
Final Reflection: Shadows That Still Stretch
The 1960s were a decade of dualities. Horror clung to its gothic past while clawing toward a future of psychological disquiet and societal reflection. From the creaky castles of Hammer Horror to the nihilistic farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead, from Bava’s colour-saturated dreams to the stark terror of Repulsion, the genre evolved—sometimes subtly, sometimes violently—into a mirror for modern anxieties.
What’s most striking about revisiting these 60 films is how many of them still resonate. The fears they tap into—madness, loss, alienation, the monstrous unknown—remain timeless. In an era defined by political turbulence, social upheaval, and cultural rebellion, horror responded with a spectrum of expression: macabre wit, international surrealism, philosophical dread, and blood-soaked revolution.
These aren’t just entries on a list. They’re signposts of a genre learning to stretch its limbs, daring to question not just what frightens us, but why. The artistry of Persona, the invention of Carnival of Souls, the moral terror of Peeping Tom—they’ve all left fingerprints on the films that followed.
So whether you’re a long-time horror fan or a curious newcomer, the ’60s are well worth mining. They’re haunted by ghosts, yes—but also by bold ideas, aesthetic daring, and transgressive spirit. The shadows cast by these films still stretch long and deep.
Here’s to sixty screams—and many more still echoing.
A psychedelic descent into Buddhist hell, Jigoku is unlike anything else made during the early 1960s. Nakagawa’s daring vision of the afterlife—complete with lakes of blood, boiling pits, and nightmarish retribution—remains one of cinema’s most unsettling portrayals of spiritual torment. The first half plays like a tragic morality tale, but the second erupts into avant-garde terror, with tortured souls spinning in eternal damnation.
Though initially dismissed upon release, Jigoku has gained cult status over the years, its visceral visuals and theological weight inspiring later Japanese horror auteurs. It’s more than just a horror film—it’s a surreal morality play that punishes its characters with unapologetic cruelty. Brutally beautiful and philosophically rich, it continues to unsettle audiences with its stark warning: all sins are accounted for in the end.
Quiet, chilling, and methodical, Village of the Damned is a landmark in British sci-fi horror. When the entire population of a small village blacks out for several hours, the mystery deepens as all the women wake to find themselves pregnant. The resulting children—blonde-haired, glowing-eyed telepaths—exude menace even in silence. Based on John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, the film smartly balances science fiction with primal unease.
Wolf Rilla’s restraint in direction enhances the film’s creeping dread. The horror isn’t in violent spectacle, but in the cold detachment of the children and the quiet unraveling of societal norms. The concept of invasion from within—through the family unit, no less—remains a potent fear. It’s a landmark in “rational horror,” where the enemy is emotionless, inscrutable, and terrifyingly close to home.
Mario Bava’s directorial debut is a baroque masterwork that ushered in a new era of Italian horror. With gothic castles, cursed bloodlines, and eerie iconography, Black Sunday made a horror icon out of Barbara Steele, who plays both the vengeful witch Asa and her innocent descendant. The film’s opening—featuring a spiked iron mask being hammered onto a face—is still shocking in its brutality.
More than its gothic trappings, it’s Bava’s visual flair that defines Black Sunday. His use of light and shadow, inventive camera work, and atmosphere over gore would shape the Italian horror genre for decades. A beautiful, bleak fairytale with a vicious edge, it’s as elegant as it is gruesome. Steele’s haunting presence, paired with Bava’s artistry, makes this a cornerstone of European horror.
A haunting blend of poetic melancholy and surgical horror, Franju’s Eyes Without a Face tells the story of a brilliant but deranged doctor who attempts to restore his daughter’s disfigured face by abducting women and removing theirs. What could have been pure exploitation is elevated by Franju’s sensitivity and surrealism. Edith Scob’s porcelain mask remains one of cinema’s most tragic and iconic images.
The film balances horror and humanity with elegance, exploring themes of identity, obsession, and the destructive nature of love. Its infamous face-removal scene remains disturbing even today—not for gore, but for its clinical, almost reverent tone. Eyes Without a Face is a poetic nightmare, and one of the most emotionally resonant horror films of its time.
Bava returns to the countdown with this sadomasochistic gothic melodrama starring Christopher Lee as a cruel nobleman whose spirit returns to torment the castle after his death. Equal parts ghost story and psychological drama, the film plays with repression, eroticism, and punishment in ways that shocked 1960s audiences. Lee’s character is never fully seen as ghost or memory, adding to the film’s ambiguous spell.
What makes The Whip and the Body stand out is Bava’s use of colour and atmosphere—bold purples, greens, and reds dominate the shadowy castle corridors, creating an almost operatic visual language. The story may be thin, but the tone is thick with dread and desire. It’s a sensual, eerie experience where the line between love and torment becomes disturbingly blurred.
Hitchcock’s avian apocalypse might lack a musical score, but it more than makes up for it in primal tension and conceptual horror. When birds begin attacking people without warning or reason, a seaside town spirals into chaos. Tippi Hedren gives a strong performance in her debut, but it’s the escalating terror and eerie sound design that leave the deepest scars.
More ambiguous than Psycho, The Birds presents nature itself as an inexplicable force of retribution. Hitchcock carefully builds dread with long silences and sudden attacks, keeping audiences on edge. The lack of resolution or motive enhances the sense of unease. It’s one of the first eco-horrors and a masterclass in psychological tension—and remains as unpredictable as the creatures it features.
Grim, nihilistic, and shockingly violent for its time, Witchfinder General follows Vincent Price as the real-life Matthew Hopkins, a corrupt 17th-century witch hunter who exploits superstition for power. Price trades his usual theatricality for a chillingly restrained performance, and director Michael Reeves captures the cruelty of mob justice with unflinching realism.
This film marked a shift in horror toward historical savagery and moral ambiguity. There’s no supernatural force—just human evil, greed, and fear. The violence feels grounded and brutal, heightened by a sense of inevitability. Tragically, it was Reeves’ final film, but what a legacy to leave behind. Witchfinder General is a blistering indictment of hysteria, and one of Price’s most unsettling roles.
A gorgeous anthology of ghost stories drawn from Japanese folklore, Kwaidan is as much an art piece as a horror film. Each of the four tales is steeped in elegant visuals, elaborate sets, and stylised storytelling. The supernatural elements are restrained but emotionally potent—spectres that echo sorrow more than screams.
Kobayashi’s deliberate pacing and painterly composition make Kwaidan a hypnotic experience. From snow spirits to haunted manuscripts, the film meditates on death, longing, and betrayal with eerie calm. A visual triumph, it brought Japanese horror into international acclaim and remains a benchmark for atmospheric storytelling.
Ingmar Bergman’s only official horror film, Hour of the Wolf is a psychological descent into madness. Max von Sydow plays a troubled artist tormented by guilt, hallucinations, and the predatory elites who may or may not be figments of his crumbling mind. Shot in stark black and white, it’s a fever dream of paranoia, repression, and artistic anguish.
Bergman uses horror tropes—creeping shadows, grotesque partygoers, and violent visions—not for thrills, but as metaphors for spiritual crisis. Hour of the Wolf is suffocatingly introspective, peeling back layers of the human psyche with razor-sharp precision. It’s disturbing not because of what’s shown, but because of what lurks in the margins—an existential nightmare dressed as art cinema.
Ghostly and poetic, Kuroneko tells of two women killed by samurai, who return as cat spirits to seduce and destroy men. Set in a moonlit world of rice fields and ruined mansions, it’s an elegiac tale of vengeance and longing, steeped in noh theatre and Japanese mythology.
Shindō crafts a haunting atmosphere, where every whisper of wind or shadow on a screen feels deliberate. The film explores the cost of violence and the fragility of love in the face of betrayal. Both tender and terrifying, Kuroneko is a beautiful ghost story that transcends the genre—haunting in every sense.
Surgeons of Horror 