In announcing his status as a young director to be reckoned with, Dario Argento couldn’t have picked a more provocative opening gambit, one that unapologetically, if surreptitiously, seeds his future career into one scene. Witnessing a silent murder attempt in an art museum, protagonist Sam Dalmas (Tony Muante) runs to the aid of the wounded woman, only for the would-be murderer’s ghostly-gloved hand to push a button, trapping him in between the two glass panes in the museum entrance. Neither in the museum nor outside, all he can do is hopelessly watch an imminent demise he cannot even hear. Both of these people do leave the scene of the crime alive, but for the moment, Argento lets us linger in a liminal zone between reality and art, life and death, sound and silence, helpless and unwitting voyeurs to a killing that appears to be posed for him – and painted like an art object for us – but which he can only tenuously interfere in.

Positioned between Mario Bava’s earlier Hitchcock riffs and Lucio Fulci’s (and Argento’s own) later, lurid arias of psychedelic blood, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage also feels like a liminal realm for Italian horror in general. In 1970, Argento was clearly a director poised to move the genre from hell to purgatory, from brutally experimenting with society’s sins to exploring the very limits of narrative consciousness in a miasmic middle-ground. But Bird is not as demonic, nor as speculative, as his imminent, genre-transforming works. He’s still the lizard cleverly stalking his prey, not the shape-shifting chameleon daring us to join him in the abyss of cinematic solidity itself. The opening’s portrait of embroiled masculinity and helpless passivity obviously recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and The Bird with the Crustal Plumage never quite escapes the Hitchcock obsession of the earliest giallos (and the likes of Brian De Palma), nor achieves the infectiously fractal vision of a completely broken world that Mario Bava unleashed with Bay of Blood one year later.

Yet Bird, like many great horror films, is already marvelously holding a knife to its own throat, achieving a kind of perverse self-awareness about its own debt to cinema history and the limits of its moral imagination. This is a film that knows how troubled it is, that senses its own participation in modernity’s foibles all too well. It opens with a man witnessing a helpless woman about to be murdered, framed as an art object worthy of the classics, and it closes with a reminder of just how blind he truly is. If the film, too, is myopic in many ways, it also exhibits the genre’s gleefully cruel ability to remind us that we, after all, are the ones who clicked play. The film, like most giallos, seems like a sledgehammer or a machete. We don’t notice it sneaking up on us with a scalpel, hellbent on disfiguring both its genre and our viewing habits, reminding us of the consequences of our inattention.

Night Train to Terror is undeniably trash, but its pleasures, paradoxically, are entirely intellectual. In its own unintentional, mercenary way, it severs the tension cord linking high and low art. It is, finally, only really valuable as a theoretical exercise, a strange cinematic mad science experiment (a connection that runs deep in cinematic history) in which several unfinished older films have been sliced and diced to pieces and reassembled into walking corpses of their ostensibly living selves. Born out of the forgotten remainders of unfinished horror pictures, this is an avowedly monstrous exercise in revivifying films that, as Frankenstein’s Monster himself once said, “belong dead.” That the film itself admits that this undertaking may itself be an immoral act – “bodies for money,” one character remarks in the first short film – is simply part of the fun. Night Train to Terror is a strange kind of cinematic meta-archive that salvages films while also working as proof for both the argument that this very salvaging is a heroic act and, conversely, that the films should have never been salvaged in the first place. It is, in the most literal possible sense, hack work.

All of this is to say: Night Train is probably an un-reviewable cinematic object. It feels like outsider art, so anything like a conventional standard of textual coherence or roundness seems essentially meaningless for parsing it or accessing its soul. Make no mistake, though: this is no labor of love. Its only investment is ensuring that scraps of lost and found footage might make a few dollars when unleashed on the unsuspecting, or on those who have deluded themselves into thinking this is a real movie, or on people like me who, apparently, hate themselves. For director Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, this is self-evidently an attempt to salvage a collection of films that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cohere the first time around, footage that, as if by some demonic force, simply would not coagulate into a stable form.

William Castle wasn’t a natural artist, but he was certainly an organic showman of the P.T. Barnum tradition, a skillful and wily craftsman with a populist’s canny sensibility for manipulating without upsetting the status quo to his liking and a magician’s eye for how to do more with less and play in the realm between appearance and reality. Case in point, Strait-Jacket, a self-evident Alfred Hitchcock knock-off with no new ideas, and which doesn’t even try to pretend like it has any actual ideas, but whose successes still, through some magical sleight-of-cinematic-hand, somehow feel entirely its own.

Strait-Jacket is certainly a copy-cat, but then, the writer Robert Bloch did write the story upon which Psycho was based, so it’s hard to criticize him for that. Plus, while Strait-Jacket shares Psycho’s lurid morbidity and fascination with the darker regions of America lurking beneath the facades of normality, Castle’s film mostly wants to play with us rather than to play us, as Hitch always essentially did. This is an essentially democratic film. Rather than exercise a cruel, conniving, beautiful mastery, it invites us in to a strange corner of America for a little while and then lets us leave. Straight-Jacket’s raison d’etre, certainly, is the sudden success of Psycho, which sent a dark chord down the spine of an already decaying Hollywood and threatened America with the sudden fragility of notions like “protagonist.” But Castle’s soul was that of a playful huckster just delighted to show us how he can, technically, show several heads being lobbed off in 1962 because they look cartoon-y enough to get by the censors, who don’t really seem to care when the film is this off-brand. That may be a gross reduction, even a debasement, of Hitchcock’s seminal masterpiece, but it isn’t exactly a rip-off.

First things first: a film that begins with a thank you to the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia, immediately propositioning the audience with a fantasy of verisimilitude and access, and then immediately cuts to a totally opaque, ethereal non-space while an elderly John Huston, fresh off of voicing Gandalf in the animated Rankin & Bass The Hobbit,  appears as an unknown prophet on an alien planet that looks like Mos Eisley, isn’t ever going to lose me completely. We seem not to be in Kansas anymore, and this high up in the sublime tornado of chaotic-evil cinema, we’re probably doomed to fall.

Yet, amazingly, The Visitor holds up its end of the bargain. It is only when we cut to a basketball game that the real mystery of the film reveals itself: how is it that essentially unknown director Giulio Paradisi never made another horror film, and his subsequent two films were apparently easy-going Italian comedies, before he unceremoniously never directed again?  The Visitor’s opening basketball game is a beautifully opaque textual object, a killer opening to a film that is a bricolage of genres and textures and uncanny thematic and technical juxtapositions revealing a director of real mettle and a vision of extraordinary curiosity. This is a stupendously unsettling game of hoops, a cut-up event in which the camera floats around with haunting observational acuity, like a deconstruction of a sporting event from a ghost’s alienated perspective.

Perhaps even more interesting: a latter combination gymnastics event/bullet-removal surgery sequence (you know, one of those type-deals) clarifies that much of The Visitor is an experiment in mobilizing giallo-style filmmaking for primarily non-kill sequences. While some of the set-pieces do technically result in dead bodies, as in a phenomenal bird-in-a-car dive bomb, even they are far-removed from the giallo’s usual stalking ground. Instead, we explore everything from public sporting events to overcrowded hospitals to an abandoned apartment building to the innards of machinery scaffolding, each of which the film turns into a genuinely ethereal cinematic experiment in sheer observation.

Twenty-five years after his last genuinely worthwhile non-animated film, it’s hard to not see any Tim Burton film, even the best ones, as anything other than a walking corpse on an inevitable path to the director’s premature artistic demise. Burton’s style has become a transparently corporate product, an obvious manifestation of Hollywood’s ability to cannibalize anything that might challenge it. Burton’s story is really a tragedy. One year after 1988’s Beetlejuice, his box-office-bludgeoning, trend-setting Batman would reveal that beneath the oddball hell he could raise and the anarchy he could unleash, he always really, only, just wanted to be loved by the masses. Love, the desire for beauty, would kill the proverbial beast in him.

A couple of masterpieces like Ed Wood and one nihilistic blockbuster in Batman Returns aside, Burton’s parade of cinematic renegades now feels like a procession of the damned, a carnival of once-living, gleefully-manicured monstrosities having become a wax museum.In this sense, Beetlejuice’s sympathies are perhaps a telling metaphor for Burton’s internal tensions. He obviously self-identifies with the protagonists of Beetlejuice, the Maitlands, two everyday people who take irrepressible joy in the capacity to tinker in the attics of America, who hide pleasure and play within the carbon-copy domiciles of suburbia. But it’s hard not to see him as the interloping Deetzes, so fascinated with a facsimile of weirdness and its capacity to be monopolized for personal gain that they sell their souls for a simulacrum of adoration. Burton’s soul is laid bare, two entangled forces warring in the same Hollywood house. Over the past quarter century, the man has become a corporate shell cynically selling the very thing he once genuinely loved. Viewing it from 2024, 1988’s Beetlejuice can be depressing stuff. 

In 1988 though? I mean, Jesus. Burton had already lovingly skewered mid-century iconography and narrative structure with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the most spirited tale of mid-century America’s love affair with vehicular culture this side of John Carpenter’s Christine. Looking forward rather than back, Beetlejuice feels much more radical, like an open canvas for a diabolical energy eager to be unleashed. Instead of seeing it as a prelude to Burton’s later misfires, it can be read along the likes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona, scions of another America, an alternative 1980s trying to escape from the corporate world around it. These pop versions of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas suggest a wandering America both trying to cut itself off from its past and hopelessly being drawn back. Rather than itself being trapped, Beetlejuice seems to recognize that we’re all trapped in an American dream that became a nightmare.

Def by Temptation is a self-evident labor of love, a film made by one man with no filmmaking experience and little money, a conspiracy between necessity and invention. The cinematic progeny of twenty-four-year-old James Bond III, who wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the film, Def by Temptation is an allegory of a young man dunked head-first into a world thoroughly alien to him. It could, with a squint, be Bond’s own tale, his fire-and-brimstone account of life on the other side of the cinematic veil. (Tellingly, while Bond plays Joel, an aspiring minister from North Carolina, his childhood best friend K is a film actor in New York). LikeBill Gunn’s masterful Ganja & Hess from seventeen years beforehand, another film by a lost voice of African American horror cinema unceremoniously ousted from the industry, Def by Temptation is a kind of poison pen love letter to the art form itself, a kind of baptism by fire in the cinematic world.

Def by Temptation, in other words, is a film that deeply appreciates the clarifying, messianic powers of the medium, the gift of viewing life darkly through a warped cinematic perspective, of using the weapon of art to transfigure life’s surfaces to reveal its true, awful self. Yet it is also a film that recognizes the dangers of playing with smoke and mirrors, that recoils at the cost to the soul of participating in, being tempted by the hope of success in, such a cruel and life-draining industry. Like Gunn’s film, it understands horror cinema as a hell and a home, asking us to seek sanctuary in the sacrilegious.

A cruel dispatch from the less traversed regions of the burgeoning late ‘80s video industry, Evil Dead Trap anticipates the much more famous Japanese horror explosion of the late 1990s and early ‘00s that cast such a frigid, despairing shadow on the international horror scene. Following the likes of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Evil Dead Trap is a brutal and deeply disturbed portrait of modern urban ennui that turns a videotape – nominally a flourishing frontier of futuristic possibility – into a rumination of the darker side of technological democratization. In director Toshiharu Ikeda’s film, industrial modification and media transfiguration become conduits for a world on the edge of something fundamentally other than whatever it might have been before. In its disturbing force and multi-media experimentation, it sometimes plays like the grimy, unholy B-side to the Japanese sequences of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, framing modernity as something almost alien to itself.

Evil Dead Trap wastes no time winding and rewinding us. After a series of dismembered close-ups of bodies typing, watching, and bruising shot on video tape, the film cuts to a long cinematic shot of TV station employee Nami (Miyuki Ono) walking through the bowels of her office building to a backroom in search of a monitor and VCR to watch a recently arrived video cassette, to discover what alternative view of the world hides within its tape. The sudden shift – from a montage of cut-up incisions to a winding image of connective tissue – not only generates a frictive charge but directly engages the transition from one medium to another. By sheer force of its insatiable need to search for new technological life, to propel modernity, the cinematic detective slowly inevitably approaches the destructive monster of videotape which may doom it but which it simply cannot avoid.

Lady Snowblood, the mirthless title of director Toshiya Fujita’s savagely beautiful film, suggests a woman with ice in her veins. In an opening, pre-title sequence of uncomfortable intimacy and grimy immediacy, Fujita clarifies the implications of this title for the life of a woman who is destined, pre-birth, to carry on a vendetta her mother did not complete. In a sober and ethereal pre-title sequence, we watch the mother give birth and hold her baby accountable to avenge the violence inflicted upon her. Obviously disturbed by the demand she is bestowing on her child, she shudders with fright at the life she is asking her to live through.

The film’s evocative epithet also implies a kind of cosmic cast, a person whose very soul is connected to – either kindled via or entrapped by – the very matter of the world around her. The film’s introduction occurs in a cloistered prison room with wooden slats offering a spectral view of the wintry outside world, which Fujita shoots as a forbidding, ghostly wave of snow falling to the ground. The snow doesn’t so much invade the frame, taking over the promise of a spring that will soon return, as bond with the frame itself, becoming the very canvas upon which the film takes place. This woman who takes the snow as her name will be an omnipresent specter gliding through life, a one-sided quest for vengeance as a perpetual winter haunting the men who destroyed her opportunity for another world. One oneiric image features her dying mother’s profile in front of a prison window, the snowy light shining through on her body suggesting her life force literally seeping out of her, both into her daughter and into the world. Despite technically growing up, we are meant to understand her as essentially stillborn, the replacement of a potentially agentive person with the corporeal puppet of a transhistorical, predetermined, unavoidable craving for revenge.

Pursued is a Western noir where panoramic prospects are limned by opaque shadows, where even the idea of a landscape being available for a person to fasten their own future gives way to the gaping maw of the past ready to seek vengeance upon your every attempt.  The preeminent Old Hollywood cinematographer James Wong Howe shoots the natural scenery of Gallup, New Mexico not with a hopeful Western’s sense of uncluttered expanse and possibility but, rather, a cloistered helplessness. A gloomy chiaroscuro contours the film’s moral perspective, figuring a shadowy backdrop for the story of a man beset from youth by histories far beyond his own abilities. Less overtly, the claustrophobic, closing-in-on-you texture of the visuals reveal a post-WWII nation whose abiding myths of natural possibility and individual capability were increasingly revealed to be lies. Pursued offers no blinding frontier of sublime possibility, only a dense effusion of subterfuge. Its characters are governed by forces they cannot even envision, subject to decades-long debts they cannot even name.