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13 Obscure and Underrated Horror Movies to Watch This Halloween

At the very least, these 13 weird movies can hold your attention, and deliver decent chills, especially with a nice buzz and low expectations.

13 Obscure Horror Films
Photo: Paramount Pictures

Halloween is a time for horror, and if you’re no stranger to John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Val Lewton, George A. Romero, Alfred Hitchcock, the Italian giallo, or Universal Horror, then you may be hankering to unearth a few obscure sleepers made by directors and stars half-forgotten in the sludge of time. This list of 13 weird movies all seem to reflect fear of their own obscurity: aging actresses camping it up before the mirror with highballs and axes; younger actresses having Antonioni-esque meltdowns; and space ships following the Alien slime breadcrumb trail. They throw normal reality to the wind, yet never lapse into whimsy or sentiment. They explore collective human mythos with a stout heart of darkness, and with scant budgetary means. At the very least, they can hold your attention, and deliver decent chills, especially with a nice buzz and low expectations.

Editor’s Note: This entry was originally published on October 31, 2014.


The Black Pit of Dr. M.

The Black Pit of Dr. M (1959)

The Black Pit of Dr. M’s plot unfolds like a whole season of The Twilight Zone collapsed into a single surrealist fever dream. Dr. Mazali (Rafael Bertrand) asks his dying colleague to arrange a means by which he can visit the realm beyond death and then return to tell the tale. A pretty difficult thing to ask, but after his death, his colleague’s spirit appears to assure him an elaborate chain of coincidence is in play that will fulfill the macabre request. A beautiful dancer, an dangerous female lunatic, an acid-scarred orderly all play parts in an experience that will answer all Dr. M’s questions. The bombastic plodding score is like an inexorable countdown to some horrific destiny, and some of the light and shadow patterns recall early Orson Welles. In sum, 71 minutes of unusually mature and poetic Mexican horror cinema, its rich minimalist dream ambience worthy of Edgar G. Ulmer or Val Letwon.

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Tormented

Tormented (1960)

Juli Reding is a ’50s pulp-novel cover come to life as Vi, a jealous jazz pianist’s ex-lover turned ghost, haunting the louche Tom (Richard Carlson) after he lets her fall from the top of a lighthouse so that he can marry Meg (Lugene Sanders) and her money. The next morning, footprints appear in the sand following Tom home, and soon Vi’s disembodied head is taunting him and her hand scuttling after his. He has to keep killing to keep his shadiness a secret until after the wedding, and it’s up to Meg’s younger sister (Susan Gordon) to convince the adults to call the whole thing off before she’s next on Tom’s kill list. Joe Turkel makes a rare early appearance as a hipster beatnik, dropping crazy slang that no real beatnik probably ever said while still maintaining that Satanic stare as he shakes Tom down for a cut of the take. (Carlson, the terminally sincere good-guy scientist in so many ’50s horror movies, also gamely plays against type.) Director Bert I. Gordon gets a lot of flak for his chintzy special effects, but he usually brought some bizarre twists and humanity to his films, and here the double-exposure effect fits the ghost material, which works as a masculine character study as well as a streamlined all-American pulp-horror romance.


Vampire and the Ballerina

Vampire and the Ballerina (1960)

Tina Gloriani, who plays the gorgeous heroine in this atmospheric Italian horror film by Renato Polselli, looks a lot like Eva Marie Saint, and though the “busload of dancing girls stranded on tour near an old castle menaced by a vampire” plot was old-hat even in 1960, she’s so luminous, and the crumbling castle ruins so atmospheric in crisp black and white, that it feels fresh. The troupe’s improv vampire dance routines, and the natural rapport between Gloriani’s Francesca and her equally blond roommate, Luisa (Hélène Rémy), conjures weird echoes of Stage Door and Persona. The male vampire wears a goofy mask with ping-pong eyeballs when he needs blood, becoming younger and normal-looking after drinking some—an unusually smart touch that taps into the vanity at the dark heart of Italian masculinity (as soon as his lovely young victims come back, he stakes them, shouting “I’m master of my domain!” as he kicks their coffins shut). Most available versions of the film are in Italian with English subtitles, which is the ideal way to soak up the arty, weirdly neorealist vibe.

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Let’s Scare Jessica to Death

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

With its child nursery rhyme-style title, naturalistic acting, eerie ambiguity, complex portrait of mental illness, and sense of America as a land of eternal limbo, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death has a uniquely ’70s approach to horror, one borne of encounter groups, Valium, women’s lib, LSD, and suburban swinging. Zohra Lampert stars as Jessica, a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown by moving with her husband and a Meathead-mustached buddy to a remote island apple orchard, where she soon learns that just because you’re delusional doesn’t mean the constant whispering you hear is an auditory hallucination or that the hippie chick (Gretchen Corbett) squatter you let stay over isn’t a vampire, or that she’s just trying to seduce you rather than drown you. Horror films from the ’70s were steeped in such paralyzing self-doubt, and this is perhaps the subtlest, creepiest example.


Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye

Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye (1973)

Jane Birkin—her long straight hair like gossamer gold in the candle light as her character, Corringa, investigates strange goings on in her aunt’s mansion—is just one reason to discover this European mod update to the dark-house horrors of the 1930s. Genre staples abound: secret passages, secret heirs, even a guy in an ape suit. The plot involves the usual ornate mansion full of scheming eccentrics, one of whom killed Corringa’s mother; the doctor says it was natural causes, but he’s sleeping with Corringa’s aunt, who’ll hold onto the mansion at any cost to those around her. At night, Corringa’s mother appears as a vampire, invoking her lineage’s birthright, declaring that Corringa must avenge her death. The killings are strangely observed by a big orange tabby cat, and the suspects include Doris Kunstman as a bisexual, self-diagnosed “slut” and Hiram Keller as a cloistered, Byronic pretty boy. (Birkin’s husband, Serge Gainsbourg, even appears as a drowsy constable.) It’s not particularly scary, but the Ennio Morricone-esque score by Riz Ortolani and the fairy-tale tableaux conveyed by Carlo Carlini’s beautiful cinematography make it ethereal.

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Messiah of Evil

Messiah of Evil (1976)

This impressive debut feature from future Lucasfilm writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz stars Mariana Hill as Arletty, the emotionally vacant daughter of a disappeared artist (Royal Dano). There’s a hushed quality to Messiah of Evil, all the better to hear the waves crashing in the distance. Nobody shouts until they’re about to die, usually at the hands of cannibal mobs. A super-chill dandy, Thom (Michael Greer), and his two girlfriends, Laura (Anitra Ford) and Toni (Joy Bang), join Arletty in an attempt to unravel the mysteries afoot in this secluded, unfriendly location, and as Thom busts a move on Arletty, the girlfriends disappear into the ominous blackness. Among the film’s more haunting elements: photorealist faces peering through windows and a wall weirdly painted with a full-size escalator. At any moment, this empty house seems as if it could warp into a nightmarish shopping mall—one of many bizarre evocations of a film that cannily mixes Lovecraftian dread with Antonioni-esque alienation.


Burnt Offerings

Burnt Offerings (1976)

Something’s very strange about Dan Curtis’s slow-burn and disturbingly ambiguous horror film: Oliver Reed’s Ben Rolf hallucinates a skinny chauffeur attached to some buried childhood trauma, and then almost drowns his son during some pool roughhousing. His wife, Marian (Karen Black), meanwhile becomes morbidly obsessed with the never-seen old lady upstairs, and as the cigarette-smoking aunt just along for the ride, Bette Davis has a rare role as the one bastion of sanity as the family falls into the grip of the story’s bizarre haunted house. There’s no earthly reason why anyone would want to rent this decaying mansion in the middle of nowhere for the summer, and as the first half slogs along, you may wish they chose the beach. But stick with it, because Burnt Offerings is trying to find new sources of fear and anxiety, and does so through brilliant acting, enigmatic dialogue (“Yesterday was so long ago”), sophisticated family dynamics, subtle changes in décor, creepy old people, and evocations of the dangers of isolation and how any family can fall prey to madness without a supportive social structure. And the ending is a stone-cold shocker.

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Ruby

Ruby (1977)

We knew from Carrie the year before that Piper Laurie could chew scenery clear down to the nub. She does the same in Ruby as a former nightclub singer running a drive-in with a bunch of the old guys who gunned down her man, Nicky, right in front of her freshly born daughter. This all leads to big poltergeist action 15 years later, as Leslie (Janit Baldwin), stricken mute since birth, is possessed by her vengeance-minded pops. Home viewers will appreciate the postmodern winkery of having the drive-in screen Attack of the 50 Foot Woman as the mob guys die, but the best parts belong to Ruby at the bar in her cavernous basement, getting royally sloshed while singing and hallucinating with her long-smitten handyman (Stuart Whitman), and half-succumbing to her Nicky-possessed daughter’s sexual advance.


The Evil

The Evil (1978)

This Roger Corman production stars Richard Crenna as a bearded psychiatrist setting up his troubled youth clinic in a big former mental hospital dance studio. Naturally, the “evil” kept trapped in the basement is released, and it locks them all in for a night of malicious echoing laughter, telekinetic death blows, “accidental” electric shock, attack dogs lunging out of a cupboard, and a near ghost-rape. Joanna Pettet—with her two-tone lipstick and flare slacks—plays it rivetingly straight as his psychic girlfriend, Caroline, who can’t convince him that the ghost she sees is real, and that his diary holds the clues. It takes a few minutes for The Evil to get rolling, but once the Evil’s loose, the action never lets up, and the “visual effects” are old-school endearing, from the tiny pin scratches on the celluloid standing in for electric shocks to the actors rolling back and forth on the stairs while the camera shakes to simulate earthquakes. For me, that’s part of what Halloween is about: the sense that the shocks are all for show, a chance to face our childhood demons in effigy, and cathartically laugh them away.

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Tourist Trap

Tourist Trap (1979)

This tale of a crazed telekinetic cowboy and his house full of mannequins visited by a co-ed jeep load of youths used to show up on TV once in a while, traumatizing us kids who happened to come across it. Hard to believe that it was rated PG, but when you look close, there’s no gore, sex, nudity, or swearing. The scares are genuine, earned the hard way, with attention to surreal ambiguity in the way glass-eyed figures all seem to oscillate between the human-like and the artificial, moving mannequins and stock still people interchanging until memorable fade-out. The rugged, dependable TV stalwart Chuck Connors seizes the chance to go full-bore multiple-personality crazy, and even then can never quite lose our sympathy, as we feel how crushing grief (his dead wife is the star mannequin attraction) and being alone in the woods too long can make anyone lose their mind. And it can feel like you’re losing your own mind just watching this bizarre treat, but there’s no reason you can’t show it to your own kids: The sooner they learn to fear mannequins the better.


Creature

Creature (1985)

The urge to recreate the boffo box office of Alien led to a host of imitations, most of them pretty lame, but some work seeking out, like William Malone’s Creature. Sure, it’s Alien down to its claws, but it also borrows from Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (one of the Ridley Scott film’s own inspirations), as well as The Thing from Another World and Forbidden Planet, so you know that Malone loves the classics. Final girl Wendy Schaal’s elfin profile looks great in the fog and blue light; the schizophrenic score throws in a string quartet amid the wondrously tacky synths; and the creature is a hilarious fusion of Giger’s alien and a garden hose. The co-ed crew has a nice feminist air, and Klaus Kinski shows up halfway through as a lecherous survivor from a past expeditions.

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After Midnight

After Midnight (1989)

Trilogy movies abound in horror. Most suffer from a leaden, uneven pace, and are mired in predictable supernatural comeuppance and “gotcha” twists. But a few, like After Midnight, zig-zag off the familiar paths and keep even a seasoned horror fan guessing. Ramy Zada stars as Professor Derek, who opens his class on fear by pulling a gun on a snickering jock (who pees his pants in fear), and then inviting students to his house during a dark and stormy night to tell allegedly true urban-myth horror stories, while the jock breaks in through the basement with an axe, and psychic student Allison (Jillian McWhirter) senses immanent jeopardy. One story involves a haunted-house prank that goes awry, another a vicious pack of dogs chasing a carload of girls through the bad part of town; the scariest, though, stars Marg Helgenberger as the night operator for a private answering service who winds up caught in the middle between a homicidal stalker and his celebrity prey. Professor Derek concludes his story hour with a series of shocks and surprises that leave Allison being chased by, among other things, a Harryhausen-esque stop-motion skeleton; Zada might not be Vincent Price, but he’s swinging for the same bleachers, and the Wheat Brothers sidestep most of the over-used clichés.


The Oregonian

The Oregonian (2011)

This surrealist nightmare road odyssey will thrill fans of David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Edward D. Wood, and aggravate everyone else, but they should try it anyway, let go of their need for a linear narrative, and just sink into the madness. Lindsay Pulsipher stars as a hitchhiking girl who winds up on a bizarre Northwestern odyssey involving a drunken llama-ranch boyfriend, a stalker in a bright green frog costume, and some hipster girls who stare at her with humorless, terrifying laughter, all set to a hypnotic droning post-rock score. It makes Jacob’s Ladder and Hellraiser seem like ’80s sex comedies, without resorting to overt sex or violence, for the most part—except as shocking nightmare tableaux. Not safe for children, but the best late-night jaw-drop a Halloween post-party or insane asylum could ask for.

Erich Kuersten

Erich Kuersten writes for the Acidemic Film and Media and Bright Lights Film Journal, and has had work appear in The Decadence Handbook, McSweeney’s, and Pop Matters. He lives in Brooklyn and works at Pratt Institute.

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