You’ll find all of that a little further down. In addition, I’ve posted another Thrillers/Chillers bulletin, in which I offer thumbnail assessments of recent works of dark fiction I’ve read, which includes some exceptional efforts by some equally exceptional authors. As usual, you’ll find that at the lower end of today’s blogpost.
And now…
As an idoliser of all kinds of dark fiction, I gobble up crime, thriller and horror novels like there’s no tomorrow – I posted about this, discussing the reasons why, in my last blogpost (just scroll down past this current one, and you’ll find it – and one area that constantly fascinates me is that twilight zone lying between Thriller and Horror, where a story is so stressful on the reader’s nerves that it could comfortably be classified as either.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with dictionary definitions of what the words ‘thriller’ and ‘horror’ mean. We all know. I’d argue, just for the sake of clarity, that the supernatural, paranormal, weird science etc are more firmly at home in horror, whereas thrillers tend to dwell in the real and recognisable world where we all live. But aside from that, when it comes to hitting the reader hard between the eyes, they can sometimes be indistinguishable from each other.
You won’t need me to tell you that thrillers can also go there, and this is exactly the territory I’ve sought to explore in my upcoming novel, THE LODGE (which, I repeat – sorry – is published this week, on January 15). Without wanting to give too much away, I should add that it contains hefty Gothic overtones as well, so not only is THE LODGE a suspense-laden crime novel and a good old-fashioned murder mystery, it’s also, I trust, a tale riddled with traditional Gothic Horror – Black Tarn Lodge is in so many ways your isolated, mist-enshrouded mansion – and it takes no prisoners in its subjection of everyday humans to a force of utter malevolence (one of the characters is veteran horror star, Edgar Karnwood, an amalgamation of Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, whose movies, while lurid and camp, were built around imaginary characters and scenarios wherein evil reigned supreme – but what happens if some of these horrors are acted out for real?).
Anyway, that’s THE LODGE, and it’s out this Thursday. But, as promised before, and just to show that I’m not the only person who’s ever done this, here are ten movies (in order of release, not preference), which have also crossed the line from real-world thriller into nightmarish horror.
NB: I’m not going to waste your time with big, well-known movies that have done this. So, to avoid stating the obvious, I won’t be bothering to mention Psycho, From Hell, Cape Fear (pictured above), Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, The Hound of the Baskervilles, or Phantom of the Rue Morgue (pictured at the top) etc.
What, you may be wondering, have we got left? Well, let’s see …
In fogbound London, a young woman becomes fascinated by the mysterious lodger upstairs, not least because he increasingly seems to match the description of the Ripper-like killer terrorising her neighbourhood … Hitch makes his first big impact in the movies, transforming an original narrative about Jack the Ripper into an immersive trip through a world of shadow and mist. Expressionistic in style, but already rich in Hitchcockian visual suspense. With its extreme emphasis on terror and madness, it was controversial on release but is today regarded as a classic.
In the early days of swinging London, a seemingly harmless cameraman films the terror in the faces of his models as he kills them with an impalement device of his own construction, but finally arouses the suspicion of a kindly neighbour ... It is difficult to know what was more startling about this very early slasher, the fact that its mild-mannered antagonist was clocking up victims in order to create Snuf movies for his own vile pleasures (way back in 1960!), or the fact that it came from revered director Michael Powell, whose career was visibly damaged by the critics' hostile response. Only in later years, was its psychological complexity and cinematic artistry rightly recognised.
A Scotland Yard cop investigates a series of crazily gruesome slayings in which the victims are always found with mutilated dolls, in due course uncovering much more than just a serial murder case … At first glance not especially original, a masked killer butchering his victims one-by-one in grisly and theatrical fashion, though the back-story is more complex than usual (and the murders more imaginative), and while it’s been described as overlong, a range of famous old character actors have an awful lot of fun, which adds to the experience. Something of a British Giallo, it was unsurprisingly a very big hit in Italy.
Two British nurses take a cycling holiday in central France, but when one of them unaccountably disappears, the other can get no assistance from a rural community that has suddenly gone suspiciously quiet … A genuinely stylish chiller, Rob Fuest making amazing use of the eerily empty French countryside and thus scaring and disorienting us even in a beautiful setting and broad daylight. Hailing from the era of psycho-sexual exploitation, it would be easy to dismiss this one as more of the same, but there’s no time for sexual shenanigans. Tension swiftly becomes terror as appealingly innocent heroine Pamela Franklin faces the constant threat of an unknown menace.
The true story of London’s wartime strangler, John Christie, and the various means by which he lured young women into his house … Divisive stuff from Dick Fleischer, who’d met similar opposition two years earlier with his movie, The Boston Strangler. In this case, no real effort is made to examine the killer. Instead, we focus on his spider-like existence in the depths of the grimly realised 1940s slums, and the cold, efficient manner by which he reeled in his victims. Richard Attenborough won praise as the quietly deranged Christie, laurels also going to John Hurt as the wrongly hanged Timothy Evans. A dark drama rather than a thriller but laced with horror throughout.
A lone babysitter in a remote rural residence faces a night of terror as she struggles to prevent a madman from gaining entry … In the opinion of many, the original ‘babysitter in peril’ movie, though here the besieged heroine is not pitted against a wandering maniac, but the mentally imbalanced former husband of her employer. This brings a touch of realism, which is added to by a central performance from Susan George that proved she wasn’t just a kittenish beauty. Lots of familiar but effective tricks of the trade are utilised: a mostly unseen enemy, heavy breathing, POVs through exterior windows. A low-key, low-budget British effort that does exactly what it says on the tin.
A US academic relocates to the UK and falls foul of Cornish rednecks when he offers sanctuary to a mentally ill man suspected of murdering a child … The most controversial film on this list, Sam Peckinpah’s notoriously ‘no holds barred’ British western shocked its audiences even in 1971. The violent rape is a scene of horror on its own, but the real unease stems from the presence of a bunch of bullying, uneducated louts at the heart of an otherwise placid community, a story replicated across towns and cities everywhere. Gordon Williams absolutely hated the film, Sam Peckinpah didn’t care what Williams thought, and star, Dustin Hoffman is later said to have felt ‘queasy’ about it. It still ranks as one of the best British thrillers around if only for its sheer, unapologetic grit.
A supposedly deceased actor enacts a long revenge on the theatre critics who ruined his career by executing them all using Shakespearean methods … Horror veteran Vincent Price hams it up wonderfully in this breezy, campy and yet often quite violent pastiche of so many other films he made (in particular, the Dr Phibes duology), but is ably assisted by the sort of cast most directors could only dream of: Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Diana Dors, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley and Dennis Price to name a few. It never takes itself too seriously, and at times perhaps overdoes that a little, but the genuine London locations give it an air of authenticity, while the regular comedy asides from the star are a joy. Price fans and Shakespeare addicts still adore it.
Sherlock Holmes joins the hunt for Jack the Ripper, uncovering a complex, bloody conspiracy, which may have consequences for the very highest in society … The idea that a masonic plot lay behind the 1888 Ripper slayings was not a new one even in 1979. But this was probably the first time it had been fully investigated on film. Christopher Plummer and James Mason give us a warmer-than-usual relationship between Holmes and Watson, and this sits at the heart of an engaging and satisfying, if fog-shrouded, Holmes adventure. In addition, attention is also paid to the lives and sufferings of the victims, which makes for a welcome change. Still one of the go-to Jack the Ripper movies, even if it’s all very far-fetched. Warning: contains terrifying murders.
US Marshals visit a high security mental hospital on an isolated island to investigate the escape of one of its most dangerous inmates, only to find themselves enmeshed in a progressively more disturbing mystery … Martin Scorsese said almost from the start that this hugely successful outing was intended to be ‘his horror movie’. If so, it’s horror of the ‘psychological breakdown’ variety rather than a stalk-and-slash, while it maintains the look and feel of a Neo-Noir throughout. Contains some exceptionally chilling moments, and the denouement, while a kind of redemption, is also horrifying as well as heart-breakingly sad. A deep and serious movie to end our list on, but if you just want to be scared, hell, it works on that level too.
METROPOLIS – Philip Kerr (2019)
Hard-drinking cop, Bernie Gunther, is tasked with capturing two serial killers working simultaneously through the chaos of Weimar Berlin. The last in the classic series, even though it takes us to the dawn of Gunther’s career. The atmosphere of pre-WW2 Germany is astonishing, the country’s economy devastated, lawless immorality the rule not the exception, and all the while, the Nazi influence spreading. Vivid work by Kerr, the city crumbling, the investigation looping, the tough hero meeting no one he can trust. Compulsive, hair-raising reading. Euro-Noir on a grand scale.
THE HEATHEN HORDE – Steven A McKay (2023)
England, 864 AD, and Alfred the Great, still an unprepared princeling, takes on a key leadership role as a vast Viking army attacks his brother’s kingdom of Wessex. A dramatized but blow-by-blow account – quite literally – of major events in British history, as seen through the eyes of a young noble coming of age in a crucible of war. Enjoyable and accessible Dark Age epic, focussed on the main characters, packed with action and reading at great pace. Thundering good stuff.
INCIDENTS AROUND THE HOUSE – Josh Malerman (2025)
A young family are terrorised out of their Michigan home by a malignant entity. An Amityville-type suburban chiller, as told by an eight-year-old child. An unusually formatted but, overall, rewarding tale of domestic supernatural horror. The immediately undeniable existence of the demon jars a little – manifestations like these make the movie, Poltergeist, seem tame! – but the utter isolation of the afflicted family is hugely effective, while the scare moments are top drawer.
THE TRIBE – Bari Wood (1981)
A rabbi’s son is murdered by a Brooklyn street gang, only for the killers themselves to be murdered afterwards by a hulking, superstrong assailant. A stressed-out cop joins forces with the original victim’s widow to track a killer who may well be the mythical golem. It sags a little mid-narrative, and the monster is underused, but it’s crammed with engrossing cabalistic detail and rises several times to moments of high nightmare. Another quality repub by Valancourt.
DEADWOOD – Pete Dexter (1986)
In 1876, Bill Hickock arrives in the Dakota mining town of Deadwood and finds it a chaotic hellhole. Wild Bill has a reputation for cleaning up lawless towns, but the legendary gunfighter is ageing and sickening, and Deadwood harbours some very bad men. Real life Wild West history given an unforgettable fictional spin by one of America’s great chroniclers of its inner darkness. Not just a western. Both funny and tragic, gritty, dogged, crammed with real-life characters, and atmospheric of the Old West as it was, not as you’d want it.
CREEPERS – David Morrell (2005)
A band of New Jersey urban explorers seek to conquer a century-old hotel built by a prohibition-era eccentric and said to be packed with bootlegger treasure, only to find themselves the object of a deadly hunt. The ultra eeriness of the rain-soaked ruin soon shifts aside for thrills of the action-movie variety, making this rapid-fire page-turner a little like two novels pressed into one. Despite slimmer than usual characterisation, Morrell entertains throughout, hitting us with multiple desperate scenarios and constant hair-trigger violence.
HARE HOUSE – Sally Hinchcliffe (2022)
A disgraced teacher arrives in a remote community in the Scottish Lowlands, where she encounters an atmosphere of mystery and rumours of witchcraft. A twisty psychological thriller with a rural setting rather than a typical folk horror, but very intriguing and filled with menacing and macabre touches. Concisely but exquisitely written and featuring characters so real you can touch them (not least the Galloway landscape itself). Enigmatic and effective scare-fare.
THE BLUE RING – A.J. Quinnell (1993)
A former French Foreign legionnaire vows to destroy a Mediterranean-based sex trafficking ring. Rousing, butt-kicking actioner of the old school. I didn’t believe the character of Michael, a 19-year-old lethal weapon wise beyond his years, but Creasy (about whom five novels have been written, and who was portrayed by Denzel Washington in Man on Fire) is a cold, hard hero who makes 007 look tame. Committed revenge thriller of a sort you tend not to see these days.
The hideous thing that lived deep in the pool. The note on the door that spelled utter disaster. The effigy they should have burned, and the horrors it wreaked. The living curse that worked its way through one generation after the next … and more. Another eclectic anthology of gut-chilling fiction from Flame Tree, again as edited by horror polymath, Mark Morris. Ranges from unsettling to smack-in-the-face terrifying, with wow!-quality writing always at the fore. Long may the ABC of Horror reign over us.
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