Guest post by The Sound of the Dark author Daniel Church
Daniel Church grew up in Manchester, and he still lives in the North of England. His first novel, THE HOLLOWS, was short-listed for the 2023 British Fantasy Society’s Horror Novel of the Year, and THE RAVENING was published in September 2024.
About The Sound of the Dark: Fans of Catriona Ward and Stephen King will find plenty to enjoy in this biting horror novel where not all is what you see… or hear. Out October 28th.
Spooky season is at last upon us! I don’t know about you, but it’s my favourite time of year. The falling leaves, that slight chill in the air, the nights drawing in. It’s a time for hearty home cooking and pumpkin spice lattes… and, of course, a good horror film.
Sometimes, though, you feel as if you’ve watched all your favourite films too many times and you want something… new. But what? There’s so much out there, and it can be hard to tell the good from the bad.
Well, fret no more! Here’s a list of excellent horror movies – ghostly and psychological, gory and blackly comic – that are criminally underappreciated. All but one are from the past couple of decades. Maybe you’ve seen some of these, but with any luck there’ll be at least a couple of unfamiliar titles here to darken up your evenings in the countdown to Halloween…
The Awakening (dir. Nick Murphy, 2011)
What would spooky season be without a few ghosts? With a screenplay by Stephen Volk (creator of Ghostwatch and Afterlife,) and set in in the aftermath of World War One, The Awakening follows ghost-hunter Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall,) as she investigates a haunting at a boys’ school in the North of England. At first all goes smoothly, and the ghost is exposed as a fake – but as the pupils abandon the school for the holidays, it becomes clear that the haunting isn’t over – but is the school haunted, or Florence? And is the danger supernatural, all too human, or in the secrets of her own past?
The Harbinger (dir. Andy Mitton, 2022)
Andy Mitton’s made some of the best and most original horror films of the 2010s and 2020s – The Witch in the Window, We Go On, YellowBrickRoad – and his most recent, set during the COVID pandemic, is a real chiller. Monique (Gabby Beans,) keeping a long-ago promise, breaks quarantine to visit her college friend Mavis (Emily Davis,) who is living alone and plagued with horrific nightmares about a creature dressed as a mediaeval plague doctor– nightmares which Monique begins to share. They’re dreaming of The Harbinger, a monster that threatens its victims with a particularly terrible fate. What fate is that? You’ll have to watch the film to find out…
The Droving (dir. George Popov, 2020)
It wouldn’t be much of a spooky season without folk horror, either, and this taut, intense offering delivers beautifully. A year ago, a young woman disappeared during the Winter Droving (a real-life festival that takes place in Penrith, Cumbria.) Now her brother, ex-soldier Martin (Daniel Oldroyd) is out to discover what happened to her.
I will admit I put off watching The Droving for a while because I thought I could predict exactly where the story was going to go. I was wrong: it goes somewhere very different, and much darker. The supernatural elements are very low-key – some have called it as much folk thriller as folk horror. Oldroyd, who’s on-screen in virtually every shot, owns the film with a performance of ever-growing intensity (there’s a scene in a bothy which still haunts me) and the film reaches a chilling climax during the Droving itself.
Ils (Them) (dir. David Moreau and Xavier Pelaud, 2006)
As Joseph Conrad wrote, the Devil is unnecessary because humankind on its own is capable of every kind of wickedness, and Ils – the only foreign-language film on this list – demonstrates that to perfection. Set in Romania, it revolves around a French couple (Olivia Bonamy and Michael Cohen) who are in the middle of renovating their newly-bought house when unseen intruders steal their car, stranding them in the middle of the unfamiliar countryside in the dead of night. They’re all alone in their big, isolated house – and then the intruders break in.
Ils isn’t a long film – barely an hour and ten minutes – but it gets to work very quickly, with an opening scene that ratchets up the tension without showing a drop of blood – and remains one of the most edge-of-the-seat psychological thrillers I’ve ever seen. Just make sure all the doors and windows are securely locked before watching, and you may want to stay up a while afterwards with all the lights on…
The Ghoul (1975, dir. Freddie Francis)
Sometimes you want a classic, something from the days of Hammer and Amicus. If so, seek out this lesser-known gem starring the one and only Peter Cushing and a terrific supporting cast: Alexandra Bastedo, Veronica Carlson, Ian McCulloch, and – in one of his first film roles – an excellently creepy John Hurt. In 1920s England, four young flappers (the film was shot on sets left over from a production of The Great Gatsby) attempt to race to the coast, but one of the cars gets lost and runs out of petrol on a mist-ershrouded moor. Going for help, the young woman finds an old house, occupied by Dr Laurence (Cushing,) a man with a haunted past and a dark secret lurking in an upstairs room. What could easily have been a run-of-the-mill B-movie is elevated by the atmosphere and the performances. Cushing had recently lost his wife, making the grief that haunts his character so real it reduced members of the film crew to tears.
