Whatever else can be said about Paul Schrader’s 1982 adaptation of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 shadow cat of the same name, it is a wonderfully interesting film of contradictory textures, a fiendish, feral text that is also a cold and mercurial thing. It feels like looking at fog condense on glass: a text of lustful energies clamped down on hard. Its director, Paul Schrader, so abstract and theoretical in his inclinations, is perhaps the worst man to take up the original’s suggestively cinematic mantle, but his discomfit benefits the material. He seems fundamentally alienated from this film. The camera floats around the humid streets of New Orleans like a disembodied spectre, or a trail of smoke. Ethereal and animalistic, the film feels like it could either diffuse into the atmosphere or lash out at our throats and splinter in our eyes at any moment, like it either wants to dissipate from this world or to seek revenge on us for bringing it into being. Much like its central protagonist, this Cat People seems unsure of its own ability to settle down in the world it depicts.

For a film so adrift and evanescent, to have a director so tortured by the limits of human freedom in the world, and perhaps so uncertain of his own capacity to exist in that world, ends up being an oddly perfect fit. Schrader’s points of ingress into the material are so esoteric. Here is a man who really never has anything to say about gender adapting a seminal text of feminist (or anti-feminist, depending on your analysis) horror. The screenplay by Alan Ormsby, the unsung, nefarious accomplice of horror director Bob Clark in the mid-‘70s, implies that the original was also a film about alienation more broadly (of obvious interest to Schrader), about one’s attempt to create oneself in the world and finding oneself occupying spaces with thick histories that one feels fundamentally disconnected from. Finally, the material becomes a folktale, an age-old fable about our un-fitness for a world we can’t refuse.

Cat People begins in America’s most exceptional – as in, abnormal –  city, New Orleans, essayed here as a sort of old-world summoning, a place out-of-time and, thus, the only space in which protagonist Irena (Natassja Kinski) might feel home. Recently transplanted to the U.S. in search of her estranged brother Paul (Malcolm McDowall), she finds herself in a phantasmagoria of thoroughly uncoupled spaces. Schrader sees the city as America’s closest linkage to European sensibilities but frames the tension between America and Europe as a subterranean pressure fissuring the film apart at the seams. Geography seems to break again and again. Within a cut, we’ve moved from seemingly antediluvian scaffolding barely holding chthonic forces at bay to a confrontation with a grotesque caricature of Marilyn Monroe. Another cut, and we’re in a thoroughly unclarifiable building that looks like a gaudy, iridescent Emerald City castaway (marking this film as a darker cousin to Coppola’s One From the Heart and beating Lynch’s Wild at Heart absurdist Wizard of Oz by nearly a decade), before finding ourselves hovering over a candy-coated floorboard, as though we’re witnessing a polymorphous Americana’s dreams of itself. John Bailey’s cinematography is phenomenally suggestive: lurid giallo colors washed out into hazy afterimages, like the fire of hell dulled but expanded by the passage of time into a smoky effusion forever suspended between states of being, drifting between kinds of matter. One of the most sensual sequences occurs in an airport, perhaps the most liminal of spaces, but this is always a film travelling from station to station.

The first two minutes of The Tall Target are more inventive than the entirety of any average Best Picture Oscar winner. The credits creep slowly but surely, with a stately, methodical gait evoking both a reportorial matter-of-factness – a ripped-from-the-headlines present-tense – and a fatalistic timelessness, as though whatever is about to happen is on an inexorable march to eternity. This credit crawl tells not of a galaxy long ago and far, far away that still feels like the future but, rather, a century of American history compressed into the tightest cloister and pushing, like a piston, right up against America’s present.

The train on which the film is set functions as a kind of metaphor for modernity itself: an intersection of inevitability and contingency that marks the vehicle as both a beacon of an imminent, impending, unavoidable modernity and, paradoxically, a herald of an uncertain world and a country whose obsession with national redemption and unearned consensus had been fissured and cracked open.

The Man from Planet X is certainly not the greatest work of director Edgar G. Ulmer, but it may be his greatest work. The Black Cat and Detour are stone-cold minimalist masterpieces. The former is an enigmatic, lacerating post-mortem of World War I’s phantasmagorical hold on the 20^th century, a past that was no past at all. The latter is a soul-crushing existential excavation of an aimless present, a portrait of mid-century Americana going around and around to nowhere. Man from Planet X turns the dial forward to a new decade and a new set of concerns: a ‘50s film about ’50s anxieties done up in ‘50s Poverty Row ramshackle-ness, a sci-fi potboiler about an alien creature lost amidst foreign souls. This being, the titular Man from Planet X, has nothing to survive on: he can’t even communicate with anyone around him, yet he manages to command dozens of people nonetheless. This abject outsider, working with nothing yet exercising unexpected power nonetheless, could be a melancholic echo of Ulmer himself, and his alienated entity of a film.

Perhaps the most primordial display of his talents, The Man from Planet X stands, literally, on only Ulmer’s skill and nothing more. This film barely exists, and its bareness is poetic, a mise en abyme of reality laid bare, an abyss with absolutely nothing up its sleeve. “Yet they have a grim beauty of their own,” a character remarks, and you can see Ulmer’s dejection about his career trajectory slowly etch into a grin at a description of his own oeuvre.

The Black Pit of Dr. M opens on a scientist’s rotting manse, its architecture crumbled and malformed into forbidding Xs: a bare geometry of egotism brought to its knees. When we see the building in its prime, though, its pretensions already seem pathetic. Pivotal early shots of the scientist’s laboratory present the impossible-to-describe location with natural outgrowths hovering just into the frame, fraying the clean edges of this image of modern science failing to keep the forces of nature at bay. The clarity of the frame itself, or rather the lack of clarity, becomes an evocation of the film’s critique of scientific hubris, an insidious reminder about the dangers of “the impossible … always within the realm of the possible.”

When it begins, The Black Pit of Dr. M seems almost fearlessly classical. Its major theme is horror’s ur-concern: the exploration of scientists searching beyond the pale of knowledge. We begin with two esteemed men of science promising one another that when one dies, they will find a way to inform the other about the secrets of death, the mysteries of the universe itself, from beyond the grave. When Dr. Jacinto Aldama (Antonio Raxel) does indeed pass away, his first ghostly call is to his daughter Patricia (Mapita Cortés), a more intimate encounter that will only figure in to the story much later. When Dr. Masali (Rafael Bertrand) is finally visited, though, the elusive nature of their encounter comes with unexpected consequences that expose the fault-lines of his quest to frame the essence of life as a question of rote knowledge of death.

1968 was a year on the edge of eternity, a transformational vortex of social revolution and political stress. Hammer Horror was, to put it kindly, not a company fit to weather the storm. Their moral universe was mostly conservative (in the small “c” sense). Their films, skulking with fiendishly recalcitrant minor currents though they could be, were fundamentally about staving off the forces of darkness, typically equated with dissent. While their films drew new blood from old horror chestnuts, they were very much playing the classics. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, horror cinema became very much contemporary. Anxiety about nuclear catastrophe and new technologies of mass destruction produced modern-set horror films with distinctly present-tense fears. The late ‘60s, meanwhile, would thrash horror into the future: influenced by the post-modern fragments of shattered reality coming from Europe and the acid baths of ‘60s psychedelia, they erupted the social canvas rather than creeping in the background. Hammer Horror’s heyday was in between these channels, the late 1950s and early 1960s, racing against a tide of history that would wash the company into oblivion.

The company’s most adept conduit of that fear was director Terrence Fisher. One of his final films with the company, The Devil Rides Out, is perhaps the paradigmatic ideal of a mainstream British horror film negotiating the Apollonian pull of order and the Dionysian energies teeming underneath society. The film exhibits a brutal, stone-faced rigidity, the product of obvious fear about the world coming undone around it and its own attempts to straight-jacket those tremblings. In its fear, perhaps without intending to, it also gives voice to that uncertainty, becoming a herald of an unquiet society. That it can’t fully appreciate its own tensions, can’t quite admit to its own inner restlessness, is all the more potent a suggestion that it knows the complexities of the world around it, and needs to deny them to survive.

For many film viewers, Ishiro Honda’s legacy rests almost entirely on one film. More populist than the Japanese masters like Ozu or Mizoguchi, less frenetic and frazzled than, say, Seijun Suzuki, and more sober and sophisticated, and thus more chaste, than the exploitation pictures riding in his wake in the 1970s, his films, eminently corporate in their way, can be parsimonious in doling out satisfaction for auteurists looking for the trademark stamp of a recalcitrant, personal touch. Functionally, this means that his straight-and-narrow sensibilities sometimes flatten his oeuvre out for an audience who mostly remember his epochal 1954 celestial howl Gojira and forget that the man who unleashed that scathing, wounded critique on the world had a career lasting several decades. While his style was more streamlined than many other concurrent Japanese directors, Matango serves him well: it boils down his populist horror sensibilities to the bone, perhaps because it is about the streamlining of humanity into a smooth paste of consumerist pulp. While Gojira lets the blood run raw, demanding to be witnessed in all its sublime monstrousness, Matango cauterizes the wound, slowing things way down for examination. And then it picks at the scab. It simmers down the former’s cosmic canvas of international panic for a seven-person cast waywardly trapped on a forgotten island of the soul.

Released a decade after Gojira, Matango depicts a recovering Japan, or one that never actually bothered to ask what genuine recovery would mean. It begins with a newly resurgent, distinctly modern bourgeoisie, twenty years on from the war and, apparently, relatively untroubled by and weathered from the immediate shock of absolute destruction. Although we know, beforehand, who the designated “survivor” of this story is, there’s little sense in which psychology professor Kenji Murai (Akira Kubo) is a protagonist, other than being slightly more level-headed than the other characters, all of whom, finally, prove susceptible to the call of another life beyond the one humanity has made for itself. Each, in their way, is entirely amenable to the siren song of a scientific homogeneity that presents itself as a radical otherization but, in fact, simply marks the blasé hollowness they’ve already accepted as their daily livelihood.