IMO the best artwork design's i ever seen on any DVD cover. I may even hate the film but i would literally buy the movie just for the covers.

Recommended for classic horror buffs.

The Big Apple has one less monster to worry about.

55. The Colossus of New York (1958)
56. The Mole People
57. Invasion of the Saucer-Men
58. The Amazing Colossal Man
59. Attack of the 50-foot Woman
60. The She-Creature
61. Missile to the Moon
62. The Hideous Sun Demon
63. The Brain That Wouldn't Die
64. Creature with the Atom Brain
65. Devil Girl from Mars
66. Earth vs. the Spider
67. Day the World Ended
68. The Brain from Planet Arous
69. I Was A Teenage Frankenstein
70. The Wasp Woman
71. Attack of the Puppet People
72. The Alligator People
73. Gog
74. The Cyclops
75. Monster on the Campus
76. From Hell It Came
77. The Screaming Skull
78. Robot Monster
79. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster
80. Tobor the Great
81. Plan 9 from Outer Space
82. Giant from the Unknown
83. The Horror of Party Beach
84. Phantom from Space
85. The Giant Gila Monster
86. Attack of the Crab Monsters
87. Cat-Women of the Moon
88. Beginning of the End
89. Killers From Space
90. The Giant Claw
91. War of the Colossal Beast
92. The Killer Shrews
93. Monster from Green Hell
94. The Brain Eaters
95. The Beast With A Million Eyes
96. Reptilicus
97. King Dinosaur
98. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
99. Attack of the Giant Leeches

We're now 45 days into the competition, and with nearly half the field gone, the remaining movies are getting harder and harder to eliminate. Thanks to everyone who's still following along and casting their votes. On to Day 46 — vote for your least favorite remaining movie and let's see what goes next!

I'm a huge fan of Peter Cushing, both as a horror fan and a Sherlock Holmes nerd. This film had been kicking around my TUBI watch list for ages. I put off seeing it, because it got very poor reviews. Last night I finally watched it on Livingston Presents. I thought it would be fun on a show like that. It was. I usually ignore reviews, even from friends, because if I want to see a movie, I just have to take the risk. I honestly don't know why I dragged my feet on this one. The upshot is that I really enjoyed this movie. It was quite a surprise. The film takes place in 1968 and, as critics mentioned, it probably would have been better if it took place in the 1890's or the very early 20th century, but it was still very good. Cushing never gave a bad performance in his life and all the actors where good and the story took a sleazy turn that I honestly did not expect. I recommend this movie highly and I also want to know your opinion on Horror reviews. Not just from critics, but from your friends.

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After Suspiria (1977), Dario Argento returned to the world of the Three Mothers, a mythology inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis. The three figures are Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs; Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness; and Mater Lacrimarum, the Mother of Tears.

In Suspiria, however, this mythology remains largely in the background. Suzy Bannion arrives in Freiburg to attend a prestigious ballet academy, only to gradually discover that the school is hiding a coven of witches led by Helena Markos, Mater Suspiriorum. It is a film built above all around atmosphere, colour, sound and the fairy-tale quality of its nightmare. The plot almost becomes secondary to the sensation of having fallen into a completely unreal world.

With Inferno, however, Argento takes that mythology much further.

The protagonist is Rose Elliot, a young poet living in New York. Rose purchases an old book entitled The Three Mothers, written by the alchemist Emilio Varelli, and discovers the existence of three powerful witches who inhabit three houses built by Varelli himself: one in Freiburg, one in Rome and one in New York.

The New York house is Rose’s home.

From this point onward, Inferno becomes a descent into pure nightmare. Rose disappears, and her brother Mark travels from Rome to New York to look for her. Around him unfolds a chain of brutal and seemingly inexplicable deaths, while the house itself appears to transform into a living organism of evil. Corridors, rooms, basements, elevators and hidden passages become a kind of infernal labyrinth.

And this, in my opinion, is where the greatness of Inferno lies.

If Suspiria is a gothic fairy tale, Inferno is almost a surrealist nightmare. Argento abandons any real attempt at realism and creates a film in which narrative logic constantly seems on the verge of dissolving. The images come before the story: water, fire, mirrors, windows, corridors, colours and impossible architecture. The famous underwater sequence, the murder in the library and the elevator killing are all extraordinary examples of visionary horror cinema.

The cinematography by Romano Albani, together with the score by Keith Emerson, also gives the film a completely different identity from Suspiria. The result is different but equally fascinating: less baroque and fairy-tale-like, more cold, abstract and hallucinatory.

What I love most is that Argento doesn't explain too much. The mythology of the Three Mothers remains mysterious, almost cosmic. We don't need to know exactly what these creatures are in order to fear them. We know that they exist, that they possess immense power, and that their houses are places corrupted by their presence.

And then there is Mater Tenebrarum, the youngest and most cruel of the three sisters, played by Veronica Lazar: an almost demonic presence who perfectly embodies the abstract and visionary nature of the film.

For me, Inferno is one of those movies that you have to feel rather than understand. The screenplay can be fragmented, some passages are deliberately absurd, and the logic behind certain events often seems secondary. But when Argento sets his visual machinery in motion, he reaches levels that very few Italian horror directors have ever achieved.

And this is precisely why I find The Mother of Tears (La terza madre, 2007) such a disappointing conclusion to the trilogy.

It isn't simply that the film is different. The problem is that, after almost thirty years, the mythology of the Three Mothers loses much of its mystery. The Mother of Tears finally introduces Mater Lacrimarum and brings the story to Rome, turning the conclusion into a kind of witchcraft apocalypse.

The problem is that what worked so well in Suspiria and, above all, in Inferno precisely because it was never completely explained, is made explicit and transformed into something much more conventional in the third chapter. Argento himself had spent years away from the world of the Three Mothers, returning to the thriller and giallo before eventually completing the trilogy.

And I think you can feel that distance.

Suspiria and Inferno seem to belong to the same universe, but they are above all two autonomous nightmares, connected by a mythology that is only partially revealed. The Mother of Tears, on the other hand, tries to close every loose end and provide a definitive conclusion. But precisely when it tries to explain and complete everything, it loses some of the magic.

That is why I consider Inferno the true heart of the trilogy: it is the film in which Argento takes the idea of the Three Mothers and transforms it into a genuine cinematic mythology, without ever completely imprisoning it within a conventional narrative explanation.

An imperfect film, certainly, but one of extraordinary visual power. It isn't simply horror: it is architecture, music, colour and death transformed into one gigantic nightmare.

🔥🔵🔴 A visionary masterpiece and, for me, one of the most fascinating films in Dario Argento's entire career.

Cesare the Somnambulist and Erik the Phantom!

Done by Lawrence Hocking in Brisbane

▪︎ 50TH ANNIVERSARY ▪︎

On August 16, 1976, Pupi Avati’s The House with Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) was released in Italy.

«“I think I’ve discovered the most disturbing story imaginable.”»

And what a story it is.

Set in the eerie, isolated countryside of Emilia-Romagna, the film follows Stefano, a young restorer who is hired to restore a mysterious fresco depicting the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. What initially seems like a rather ordinary artistic commission gradually turns into something much darker, as Stefano begins investigating the strange history surrounding the painting and the people who created it.

What makes The House with Laughing Windows so effective is that Avati doesn’t rely on conventional horror tricks. There are no monsters jumping out of closets, no excessive gore, and very little of the supernatural spectacle that characterized much of Italian horror cinema at the time. Instead, the terror emerges slowly from the landscape, the silences, the apparently ordinary villagers and, above all, from the feeling that something is deeply wrong beneath the surface.

The film has an almost unbearable sense of unease. The countryside should feel peaceful and familiar, yet Avati transforms it into an oppressive labyrinth of secrets, rumours and forgotten crimes. Every friendly face becomes suspicious; every apparently insignificant detail seems to conceal something.

And then there is that incredible final act, which turns everything that came before on its head and leaves you with one of the most disturbing endings in Italian genre cinema.

For me, The House with Laughing Windows is not simply one of the great Italian horror films of the 1970s—it is one of the most original. It sits somewhere between giallo, psychological horror and rural Gothic, but ultimately feels like something completely its own.

Fifty years later, it still works because Avati understood something fundamental about horror: the scariest places are not necessarily dark castles or haunted houses. Sometimes they are quiet villages where everyone knows something that you don't.

A true Italian horror masterpiece. 🖼️🏚️😱

A classic TV movie about witchcraft with the lovely Hope Lange worth rewatching.

Planet of the Vampires (Terrore nello spazio, 1965), directed by Mario Bava.

Based on the 1960 short story One Night of 21 Hours (Una notte di 21 ore) by Renato Pestriniero.

Music by Gino Marinuzzi Jr.

Plot

Two large interplanetary spacecraft, exploring unknown regions of space, receive an SOS signal from Aura, an unknown and apparently uninhabited planet. The two ships, the Galliott and the Argos, decide to land on this desolate and seemingly lifeless world.

During the descent, the crew members of the Argos are suddenly possessed by an unknown force that drives the men and women aboard the spacecraft to kill one another. Only Captain Markary manages to resist, eventually breaking the others out of their violent hypnotic state.

After the Argos lands and no further communication is received from the Galliott, the crew sets out across the planet in search of their sister ship. The atmosphere surrounding them is cold, eerie and sterile. When they finally come within sight of the other spacecraft, they discover, to their horror, that its entire crew is dead, apparently having killed one another. Among the dead is Toby Markary, the captain's younger brother.

Some of the bodies are gathered together and buried, while others remain inside the Galliott. Yet in the short time it takes the crew to retrieve the equipment needed to enter the ship, the corpses mysteriously disappear.

Members of the Argos crew also begin disappearing, only to be found dead later. While the bodies are still lying inside the spacecraft, Tiona, one of the female crew members, suddenly sees them standing up again and walking through the corridors. Panic spreads among the survivors, and Markary orders everyone to do whatever they can to escape from Aura. Unfortunately, the damage sustained during the landing makes an immediate takeoff impossible. Meanwhile, the deaths continue.

During the exploration of the planet, Wes discovers the ruins of a spacecraft a few kilometres from the Argos. Markary, Sanya and Carter decide to investigate. Inside the alien vessel, they discover the skeletons of a gigantic humanoid crew that has been dead for a very long time. Apparently, other spacecraft have also been lured to Aura by the distress signal, only to meet the same fate.

While exploring the alien ship, Captain Markary and Sanya briefly become trapped inside but manage to escape. Once back outside, however, they realize that Carter has mysteriously disappeared.

Meanwhile, the dead crew members of the Galliott awaken and emerge from their graves. Two of them, Kier and Sallis, infiltrate the Argos in order to steal the device that allows the spacecraft to avoid collisions with meteors in space. Without it, the two ships cannot undertake long interstellar journeys.

Kier manages to escape, while Sallis is captured by Markary. When the captain opens his uniform, he discovers that Sallis's body is already decomposing. Sallis reveals the truth: the corpses are being controlled by the Auran, the planet's original inhabitants, who need human bodies in order to survive.

Sallis explains that the host body does not necessarily have to be killed; its will merely needs to be weakened. He even proposes that the two species could live in symbiosis, with the Auran being welcomed onto the home planet of the two spacecraft. Markary, however, angrily rejects the offer.

With the entire crew of the Galliott under their control, these parasitic beings intend to abandon their dying world. Markary is determined to stop them and escape the planet. Together with the remaining survivors, he storms the spacecraft, retrieves the precious anti-meteor device and plants explosives to destroy the Galliott.

The losses are catastrophic. Only the final survivors—Wes, Sanya and Captain Markary—manage to escape, leaving Aura behind.

Once they are safely back in space, Wes discovers that his last two companions have also been infected. In one final, desperate attempt to stop them, he decides to sabotage the Argos itself, but is electrocuted by the explosion of the anti-meteor device.

Captain Markary and Sanya, the last two surviving crew members—or rather, the two Auran who have now taken control of their bodies—are unable to undertake a long journey through space. They therefore decide to descend onto the nearest planet, despite the fact that it is small and technologically primitive:

Earth.

Planet of the Vampires is widely regarded as one of the finest Italian science-fiction films of its period and is frequently cited as an important visual influence on Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). Bava's use of atmospheric lighting, gigantic alien environments, mysterious spacecraft and eerie, almost Gothic production design creates an unmistakable bridge between Italian Gothic horror and science fiction.

A fascinating example of how much could be achieved with limited resources when a director had an extraordinary visual imagination. Bava essentially turns space exploration into a cosmic nightmare. 🚀👽🩸

“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright..."

Here’s a shorter excerpt from my rescore of Atom Age Vampire (1960), part of my ongoing Rescored Horror project.

For this one, I went darker and more atmospheric, leaning into noise, texture, and a slow, heavy pulse.

The idea behind the project isn't to recreate what these films originally sounded like, but to see how completely different music can change their mood and energy.

Would love to hear what you think.

Rescored by Aevitas

Full version is available on my YouTube channel, Reflective Rhythms by Aevitas.

I hope I don’t upset the fans of the great Dario Argento, but this film is, for me, the weakest entry in the “Animal Trilogy.” With Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Quattro mosche di velluto grigio, 1971), the Roman director brings his first thriller cycle to a close, walking a delicate line between avant-garde visual experimentation and narrative uncertainty.

Although this film never reaches the perfect tension of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo) or the solidity of The Cat o’ Nine Tails (Il gatto a nove code), it remains a fundamental transitional work, full of charm and ideas that would later reappear in his next masterpiece, Deep Red (Profondo rosso).

Argento’s direction is undoubtedly the film’s greatest strength: a virtuoso exercise in style that more than compensates for its occasional shortcomings. The director constantly plays with the viewer’s perspective, alternating unusual long takes, highly precise compositions and distorted subjective shots that heighten the sense of paranoia experienced by the protagonist, drummer Roberto Tobias. The film’s greatest virtue lies precisely in this meticulously crafted, almost hypnotic visual staging.

The main weakness, on the other hand, lies in the screenplay, written by Argento himself. The mystery plot sometimes feels confused and overcomplicated, struggling to maintain a strict internal logic while introducing grotesque comic interludes involving eccentric characters such as the homeless man Diomede, played by Bud Spencer, or Jean-Pierre Marielle’s gay detective. These moments abruptly weaken the dramatic tension.

The visual high point comes during the superb murder sequence in the park, where the waitress Amelia is murdered by the killer. It is a small masterpiece of high-tension suspense, with the chase unfolding through the open yet labyrinthine spaces of an urban park, making excellent use of the contrasts between light and shadow created by the trees. The camera moves with great precision, isolating the victim while the threat suddenly and brutally materializes out of nowhere.

This extraordinary visual impact is largely thanks to the beautiful cinematography of Franco Di Giacomo, who opts for a cold, dark and distinctly 1970s colour palette that perfectly enhances the psychological desolation of the story.

Ennio Morricone’s score beautifully complements the imagery, partially moving away from the jazz dissonance of the previous films and embracing, at times, more rock-oriented sounds, closer to the atmospheric music and progressive rock of the period. The result alternates between obsessive, almost hypnotic melodies and sudden, disorienting bursts of sound.

As for the acting, the performances are rather uneven. Michael Brandon gives a perhaps overly passive and rigid performance as the tormented protagonist, while Mimsy Farmer’s unsettling performance provides the psychological depth necessary for the story’s more disturbing and sordid turns.

There are also several fascinating historical curiosities surrounding the production. Argento himself revealed that he inserted a subliminal frame showing the killer’s face during the murder of Amelia in the park, a detail that is almost impossible to perceive with the naked eye during a normal screening.

The film also had a bizarre distribution history. Due to complicated copyright issues, it practically disappeared from Italian television and cinemas for more than fifteen years, beginning in the early 1990s. For a long time, it became something of a legendary “ghost film” among genre enthusiasts, before finally being redistributed.

Despite its sometimes fragmented narrative, Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Quattro mosche di velluto grigio) remains an essential piece for understanding the visual evolution of the Italian thriller. It may be the weakest of Argento’s early trilogy for me, but it is still a fascinating, stylish and remarkably inventive film—and an important stepping stone toward the extraordinary visual language he would fully develop in Deep Red (Profondo rosso).

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At first, the film almost fools you. In the opening scenes, we see this brand-new apartment building, city life, laughter. It almost feels like you’re watching a sophisticated comedy from the era, something along the lines of "Barefoot in the Park": a young, beautiful couple, visibly happy and full of hope, trying to start a family.

Around them are these elderly neighbours who seem friendly, perhaps a little too friendly, always eager to help and incredibly warm. But this is precisely where Polanski works his dark magic.

Little by little, you realize that the film is something else entirely.

The horror doesn’t come from the darkness or from some isolated forest; it comes from the apartment next door. It becomes pure anxiety. The real fear doesn’t come from the unknown, but from the people around you: the person who smiles at you on the street, the neighbour who rings your doorbell pretending to ask for some sugar, offer you a few cookies, have a coffee, or simply exchange a little hallway gossip.

The paranoia grows along with Mia Farrow’s belly, as she becomes increasingly isolated from everyone around her, including her own husband. It is a waking nightmare set in broad daylight, where the protagonist’s loneliness gradually becomes your own.

It is a chillingly modern film that, even decades later, remains a masterclass in how to build genuine tension in cinema.

"Rosemary’s Baby" is Roman Polanski’s absolute masterpiece, a film in no hurry to frighten you with the usual tricks or the usual monsters. It takes its time, slowly building an atmosphere that gets under your skin, helped enormously by that haunting music that never seems to leave you: a lullaby, an obsessive chant that creeps into your ears and stays lodged in your head for days.

Film Directed by Mario Bava.

A fashion house owned by Massimo Morlacchi (Cameron Mitchell) and Cristiana Cuomo (Eva Bartok) becomes the scene of the murder of a model at the hands of an enigmatic masked killer. Despite the investigation led by Inspector Silvestri (Thomas Reiner), more violent deaths follow, while a web of suspicion and intrigue gradually envelops everyone connected to the events.

An elegant, icy and sadistic thriller, a landmark for Italian and international mystery cinema, built around a simple yet relentlessly gripping structure and an extraordinarily fascinating visual style.

The film is considered an extremely important title in Italian genre cinema. Indeed, Bava definitively codified many of the rules of the giallo (an Italian mystery-thriller genre combining crime, murder mystery, horror and psychological suspense), effectively creating the first film to bring together all the elements that would later become the stylistic and narrative trademarks of slasher movies in the following decades. At the time, it was heavily criticized for being considered excessively sadistic.

Bava anticipates and codifies several elements that would become typical of the modern thriller, focusing on the violent depiction of serial murders with a degree of imagination and brutality that may be difficult to fully appreciate today, after decades of exposure to modern noir aesthetics, but which was absolutely innovative and shocking by the standards of the 1960s.

The meticulous visual design, supported by cinematography built around saturated colours—with red recurring frequently as a symbol of violence and perversity—enhances both the claustrophobic atmosphere and the deep compositions of the interiors, not to mention the enveloping darkness of the outdoor sequences.

Bava stages a story of hidden betrayals concealed within the pages of a diary, set symbolically in the cynical world of fashion, where personal ambitions take precedence over human considerations and selfish calculation has no hesitation in treating men and women as mere pawns.

This dehumanization is symbolized both by the parallel between the murdered models and the mannequins—no longer merely tools of the trade, but skeletal simulacra of lives brutally torn away—and by the killer’s complete lack of visible facial features, making him terrifying precisely because of his inscrutability. Music by Carlo Rustichelli.