Viy
In 1966, two Moscow film students pitched a horror feature based on a classic Slavic witch tale, Nikolai Gogol’s Viy (1833). The khudsovety (artistic committees) that evaluated film proposals in the USSR scowled at the genre as catering to base instincts and superstition.
Black Sabbath
Mario Bava was a living embodiment of Italian genre cinema, working credited and uncredited on nearly a hundred films.
Planet of the Vampires
Planet of the Vampires is a film you haven’t seen at all if you haven’t seen it in the wee hours, with the lights off, and its hypnotic sound turned way up.
Laurín
Like the best fairy tales, which often portray darkness through the lens of childhood innocence, Laurín tells a dreamily surreal story of hardened youth.