I wish I had some highly intelligent argument against Daughters of Darkness. The problem comes that on a certain level, the film succeeds. It is an unsettling, mind-screwing horror film, getting under your skin and making you uncomfortable. From the long discussions of death and torture, to the various sequences of the evil lesbians staring in at the blushing bride through the window, this movie just unsettles your stomach.  But the failure comes that this horror is neither thought-provoking nor in any way truly enjoyable.
 

Since its release in 1929, Un Chien Andalou¹ has remained one the best and most famous examples of surrealist cinema.  It does exactly what surrealist works are supposed to do: sequence random images and events so as to touch its audience in a way that logic cannot.  Though it is not a horror film per se, in which the viewer is threatened by a monster, a madman, or some other tangible force, the film does contain a number of horrific images, and its dreamlike construction can at times instill a fear beyond rationality.

Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau's 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, may be the finest of all vampire films; it's certainly one of the best horror films ever made. To even contemplate a remake of such a highly-regarded masterpiece would be thought of as pure folly. Writer/director Werner Herzog, never one to care what others think, mounted just such a remake in 1979.

Before the giallo, there was the krimi – West German crime films frequently based on the works of British novelist Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace. These movies were marked by their sensationalistic content and their tendency to skirt the horror genre when they weren't plunging headlong into it. Alfred Vohrer's The Door with Seven Locks (German title: Die Tür mit den 7 Schlösser) is a horror-skirter, but it also skirts nearly every other genre that doesn't involve bursting into song or traveling back in time.

There are some movies that are avant-garde in their disuse of dialog. There are some movies that are brilliantly post-modern in leaving out most of the soundtrack. There are movies that are insightful because of their dubious logic and shifting plot. Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein isn’t any of those films. It’s possible that I might have missed something on the first viewing, some nugget of inspiration that I’d pick up on if I watched the film again. Unfortunately, you couldn’t pay me to watch Prisoner of Frankenstein a second time.

Whether you believe that prolific multi-hyphenate Jesus Franco, director of over 150 films and writer, co-star, or composer of many of them, is an irritating hack or a secret genius, you have to respect his 1962 film, The Awful Dr. Orlof. You may not admire it, although I certainly do, but its place in film history is set. The first “true” horror movie produced in Spain, The Awful Dr. Orlof is a flash point in the turbulent transition of the horror film from the Gothic to the modern.

Sharon Da Silva (Jodelle Ferland) is a troubled girl: she experiences recurring nightmares, during which she talks about a place called Silent Hill. Her foster mother Rose (Radha Mitchell) discovers that Silent Hill is the name of a ghost town in West Virginia, abandoned after a coal fire thirty years ago. Determined to learn what the town has to do with her daughter and to make the nightmares stop, Rose takes Sharon to Silent Hill, against the wishes of her husband Chris (Sean Bean). Through a set of circumstances, mother and daughter wind up in a car accident.

Sporting one of my favorite movie titles ever, Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace is a prime example of the Italian horror genre known as giallo. Gialli (the plural form of the word) are basically stylized mystery/horror films containing occasional scenes of intense violence. They are often marked by unnatural yet strangely intriguing lighting techniques. Naturally, gialli tend to become efforts in creating a moving atmosphere.

It is impossible to simply watch Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body. You can only hope to experience it, to let it wash over you and consume your senses. A sumptuous visual masterpiece dripping with sadomasochistic eroticism, The Whip and the Body is the most beautiful of all Bava’s films.

Anthologies, movies that are composed of a series of short films, are always hard to characterize. If the film is considered as a whole, does a particularly bad sequence besmirch the merit of the others? Or does a well-shot segment bolster one that's floundering?