Directed by Dario Argento • 1977 • Italy
Starring Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci
One of cinema’s most potent hallucinogens, Dario Argento’s witchy freak-out is a sustained spectacle of outrageously stylized violence and eye-popping art direction. When doe-eyed American ballerina Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in Germany to study at a renowned dance academy, she stumbles through the looking glass into a maze of mayhem, murder, and maggots. It all takes place in one of film history’s most outlandish haunted houses: a riot of demonic neon lighting and surrealist-baroque décor complete with a barbed-wire room. Add the eardrum-shattering score by prog-occultists Goblin and you’ve got the most extravagant slasher movie of all time.
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Il demonio
Directed by Brunello Rondi • 1963 • Italy
Starring Daliah Lavi, Frank Wolff, Dario DolciFor his second film as a director, famed screenwriter and Fellini collaborator Brunello Rondi (LA DOLCE VITA, 8½) created this shocking and deeply unsettling folk horror nightmare that would influence a wave...
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Viy
Directed by Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov • 1967 • Soviet Union
Starring Leonid Kuravlyov, Natalya Varley, Vadim ZakharchenkoIn nineteenth-century Ukraine, a seminary student (Leonid Kuravlyov) is forced to spend three nights with the corpse of a beautiful young witch (Natalya Varley...
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Lifeforce
Directed by Tobe Hooper • 1985 • United States
Starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Patrick StewartA mind-scrambling alien-zombie-vampire sextravaganza unlike any other horror film of the 1980s, this wildly out-there sci-fi spectacle from THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE director Tobe Hooper flop...
