October is when many viewers begin looking for spooky Halloween movies, not that fans of horror films need an excuse. As long as people feel fear, and that seems wired into our brainware, filmmakers will find a profitable vein by tapping into our personal and social jitters for quick catharsis.
In the last few years, we have seen plenty of new films worth your while amid the formulaic routines, and even formulaic routines can work. Examples include Ben Wheatley‘s In the Earth (2021), Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me (2023), Ti West‘s MaXXXine (2024), Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs (2024), and any number of things about evil children, dolls, or aliens.
Still, horror films have been around almost as long as film history, so we’ve gathered five recent Blu-rays comprising ten movies that fall into the “classic” category. In other words, they’re old. The newest title came out 44 years ago. The oldest is 94 years old, and it’s spry. It’s time to explore the gold in them thar oldies, so let’s consider them chronologically.
1. The Bat Whispers (1930), directed by Roland West
(VCI Entertainment)
The late silent and early talkie era saw a wave, a plethora, an abundance, and a non-shortage of Old Dark House movies, usually based on stage plays. Among these items, The Bat Whispers is important for many reasons, including that it inspired young Bob Kane to create Batman. Most importantly, it happens to be fun.
Independent producer-director Roland West had made a silent film called The Bat (1926), based on a hit play derived from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1908 bestseller The Circular Staircase. The Bat Whispers is West’s remake for the talkies, and it’s also an early experiment in a 65mm widescreen process called Magnifilm.
The Blu-ray has three different prints. Two standard versions were shot for most theatres, one for the US and one for the UK. Special theatres could project the Magnifilm version, whose negatives were discovered in Mary Pickford‘s film collection and restored by the Library of Congress.
While heavy cameras and sound equipment intimidated some filmmakers into static approaches, West is “in your face” with zooms and pans emphasizing forward motion and imagination. The dazzling opening shot begins with a lighted clock tolling at the top of a skyscraper, then pulls back and flies toward the street of traffic and pedestrians. You can tell it’s done with models, but who cares? Then, an invisible cut brings us to a real street set.
As the camera looks out the windshield of a police car speeding through the night, we hear on the radio about “the mysterious madman who signs himself The Bat.” Other shots race forward on trains or streetcars, leading to expressionist overhead shots like a skylight view of an enormous bank vault being robbed as a bat shadow waves in the corner. Aficionados of visual style will swoon.
Extras on this two-disc release of The Bat Whispers include a critical commentary track, a comparison of the three versions, a comparison with the silent original, and (“just for fun”, says the package) the 1959 incarnation of The Bat, a remake starring Vincent Price.
2. Republic Pictures Horror Collection (Kino Lorber)
Republic Pictures was a small studio that cranked out many a B film. Westerns and serials were its bread and butter, but spooky chillers could be on the program. This two-disc set gathers four items in spiffy prints with commentaries. George Sherman’s The Lady and the Monster (1944) generates enough fannish salivation to justify a solo release, but genre buffs will greatly appreciate adding the other three films.
The Lady and the Monster is the first film based on Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain (1942). Erich von Stroheim plays another of his demented autocrats, this time a mad scientist who wants to keep people alive by removing their brains. Don’t think about it.
He meets his match when a rich businessman dies in a plane crash nearby, allowing the doctor to test his theories. Alas, keeping a brain alive somehow gives it telepathic powers to control men’s minds. Who knew? That’s why science believes in pure research.
The Phantom Speaks (1945), directed by John English, finds its mad scientist (Stanley Ridges) possessed by the vengeful spirit of an executed man (Tom Powers), never a good thing. This tale is another warning about where man wasn’t meant to poke his fingers. “We can prove that there’s no such thing as insanity!” exclaims the doctor, oblivious that he’s proving the opposite. It’s unclear whether these proceedings amount to a critique of capital punishment or an endorsement.
Lesley Selander‘s The Catman of Paris (1946) is a mystery about murders by a seeming catman. Carl Esmond plays a controversial writer inspired by Émile Zola, and he’s told, “Governments are like women. They weep and they pout and they threaten, but the more you scorn them, the more they respect you.” Do his weird hallucinations make him the killer? For good measure, we get a can-can number in a nightclub. Today’s movies need more gratuitous nightclub scenes.
In Valley of the Zombies (1946), directed by Philip Ford, Ian Keith plays another mad researcher who believes he can achieve immortality with blood transfusions and proves it after his nominal death. Possibly inspired by the Bat, he climbs roofs in a batlike cape; surely that’s a hindrance. “When I need blood, I must have it,” he informs his “dear brother” while putting him “under a hypnotic spell.” Then, people run around until it’s wrapped up.
3. The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals (1969), directed by Oliver Drake (Severin Films)
Hands down, here’s the wildest movie on the list from any rational point of view and a film guaranteed to provoke more giggles than shivers. It’s the kind of creation that makes you marvel at how it ever got made, and the story of its making and rediscovery is part of the package.
An entrepreneur named Williams Edward wrote and produced The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals in Las Vegas, directed by one Oliver Drake. The perfectly preserved Egyptian Princess Ankana, or whatever, calls forth the curse upon another misguided scientific boffin. “What could possibly happen here? This is the 20th Century. This is Nevada, good old USA. Don’t worry, I’ll be just fine,” says the nitwit played by Anthony Eisley, best known for the television series Hawaiian Eye (1959-63).
The Princess (eye-shadowed exotic dancer Marliza Pons) revives with reasonable majesty, but her enwrapped minion (“Saul Goldsmith as The Mummy”) turns out to be someone you just can’t take anywhere. The mummy would be a disaster even if the professor weren’t turned into a jackal-headed doofus, but the free extras strolling the Vegas strip act like it’s just another Tuesday.
This festival of blunt dialogue, cheap effects, endless groovy music, and random plot points had been available only as a super-obscure and lousy VHS until the negative was discovered in a Los Angeles estate sale, and now it’s here in all its gaudy, grainy glory for the first time on any disc. This also happens to be one of dozens of movies in which John Carradine has a cameo. We might almost say one of dozens he made that year.
Researcher Shawn Langrick provides commentary that might be more fun to hear than the film’s dialogue. Author Stephen Thrower discusses the production company Vega International, while historian C. Courtney Joyner tells us who Oliver Drake was. There’s even an interview with the son of the film’s investors. It turns out Vega had better luck with softcore sex (go figure), and the Blu-ray throws in a sample, the lone battered print of Drake’s Angelica, the Young Vixen (1974). Severin Films lavishes much love on a movie virtually unknown to anybody, but at last, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals prepares to take its place in our hearts and entrails.
See the age-restricted trailer for The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals here.
4. Cruel Britannia (Vinegar Syndrome)
Cruel Britannia is a canny two-disc package of three 1970s British films that may have been too obscure to support solo releases. They go well together as an index of where the UK industry’s decapitated head was at during that grimy, gritty, grotty decade for melodrama.
Ted Hooker’s Crucible of Terror (1971) is about the lengths we go to for art. The premise is that old standby of the committed artist who really deserves to be committed, in this case a sculptor who goes a bit too far with the use of live models until the matter is resolved via supernatural feminist comeuppance. The driven artist is played by glowering, grey-goatee’d Mike Raven, identified by Wikipedia as “a British radio disc jockey, actor, sculptor, sheep farmer, writer, TV presenter and producer, ballet dancer, flamenco guitarist and photographer.”
Penny Gold (1973) is a mystery and police procedural in which the dazzling Francesca Annis plays twins. The title refers not to a woman but to a valuable stamp. Many recognizable British players include James Booth, Joss Ackland, Penelope Keith, and John Rhys-Davies. The director is Jack Cardiff, the great cinematographer, and he pulls off excellent action and set-ups amid the time capsule fashions. While no masterpiece, Penny Gold deserved better than oblivion.
Another brilliant photographer turned director was Freddie Francis, which brings us to Craze (1974). Jack Palance masticates all scenery in this film and whatever they were shooting next door as an antiques dealer who worships an African idol named Chuku, as one does. When he accidentally learns that human sacrifice has tangible benefits, it’s hell on the tourist trade. The wonderful cast includes Diana Dors, Trevor Howard, Edith Evans, Hugh Griffith, Julie Ege, Suzy Kendall, Michael Jayston, Martin Potter, and Kathleen Byron.
All three transfers are terrific, and the films have informative commentaries. It’s a matter of taste, and I don’t mean to sell short the charms of the other Blu-rays on this list, but I believe Cruel Britannia offers the highest rewards to the discriminating connoisseur. Even the undiscriminating, for that matter.
5. Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), directed by Antonio Margheriti
(Kino Lorber)
Inspired by George Romero’s zombie films, the Italian industry fashioned a wave of English-language gut-munchers with American stars. While fans extol the virtues of this or that favorite, Cannibal Apocalypse is among the most important and thoughtful.
Cannibal Apocalypse brings its social dimensions up front instead of leaving them open to interpretation, and the results are harrowing and tragic. The driving subject is the legacy of the Vietnam War on American soldiers and the homefront. The title directly references Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), creating a hybrid of zombie film and war action.
John Saxon (excellent) is a veteran who experiences a dream flashback of being bitten during the war by a buddy infected with a zombie virus. This is one of those films positing that zombies aren’t dead but infected. The concept that veterans have been contaminated, that they belong to a camaraderie of “Others” unified by shared experience, and that they carry a contagion that infects people at home is explored in a scenario with brutal gore sequences. Bringing the war home, indeed.
Genre vet Antonio Margheriti (billed as Anthony M. Dawson) shot Cannibal Apocalypse in Atlanta, Georgia, so it looks American despite its Italian genre sensibility. Whereas Kino Lorber previously released this film in 2020, the new release is a 4K Ultra HD combo and a standard Blu-ray. There’s a making-of and an excellent commentary by genre historian Tim Lucas.
See the age-restricted trailer for Cannibal Apocalypse here.