Making sense of The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is impossible. Beyond some early scene-setting, this Giallo-inspired film has no narrative and, apart from its protagonist, it becomes increasingly difficult to work out who is who, what is what and whether anything relates to anything else. Depicting reality is not on the minds of Belgian director and screenwriter, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. An impressionistic take on Italian genre cinema of the Seventies, it confounds, then delights and ultimately electrifies.

Ealing Studios was known for comedy, but when it released Dead of Night in 1945, it unleashed on movie-goers the classic template of portmanteau horror for decades to come. The film comprises six tales – five supernatural stories and a framing narrative in which architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Jones) arrives at a country house, only to find he recognises not only the house and its rooms but everyone in it, as figures from half-remembered nightmares that slowly, inexorably come to life as each one embarks on a tale of the uncanny.

Dracula, the ultimate symbol of undead power, mystery and evil. As the anti-hero in this action-adventure sequel to the excellent Lords Of Shadow, you'd hope this would make for an epic adventure, or at least some toothsome plotting. Instead we get an enfeebled, old man as main character, a meandering, over-complex plot with ill-judged shock factor elements and far too many dull sections to plod through. It makes Twilight look like The Hunger or Near Dark in comparison.

There aren’t many understated films about cannibal clans. Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, the Mexican original on which this American remake is based, reeked of despair and depravity, in a tainted Mexico City where a family fed on the homeless. Director Jim Mickle has almost inevitably made a sleaker, less disturbing film. More surprising is just how slow a burn it is.

Filmmaking collective Radio Silence - who comprise Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who take on shared directorial duties for this film), Chad Villella and Justin Martinez (Devil's Due's executive producers) - shot to fame on the genre circuit in 2012 with the visceral and funny haunted-house sequence from found-footage anthology V/H/S. Presumably off the back of that they got a deal working with 20th Century Fox to make a feature-length horror film.

Upstream Colour charts the stages of a relationship. First, Kris is introduced as external forces impact on her, turning her life on its head. She then encounters Jeff. As they get to know each other, a medical crisis brings them closer together and they get married. They then realise these forces are affecting them both and are drawn towards a way of taking control by eradicating them. The film ends with them, and others also affected by what was out of their reach, taking charge of their own destiny.

There are some that will tell you that they don't make movies like they used to. But even if that's true, film is an art-form that continues to thrive by moving with the times - reflecting change, reinventing itself and each year we're supplied with no shortage of outstanding cinema from across the globe. It's a fact that makes compiling the traditional end-of-year list far from a chore, and more like greedily picking your way through a banquet.

 “The film too often comes over as a prettily decorated edition of a sick spinster’s diary” was how the Monthly Film Bulletin concluded their review of The Innocents in January 1962. After seeing Jack Clayton’s intense adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw more than 50 years on, the impression left now isn’t so much of an attractively presented chronicle of a breakdown, but a film which paints little of its substance in so clear-cut a fashion.

Raw fear is horror’s ideal state. The vertiginous drop through a trapdoor into primordial, gasping helplessness usually only lasts for the split-second length of a cinema-seat jolt. Jeremy Lovering’s debut aims to scare us for much longer. Unusually, he wanted to scare his actors too, feeding them just enough script to get by as they filmed on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor (standing in for rural Ireland) at night, and he threw shocks at them out of the dark. Fear is his theme and method.

The Dracula story has seen almost infinite permutations, though none of them ever manages to improve on Bram Stoker's still-haunting original. This new Anglo-American production keeps Stoker's late 19th-century setting, but has transformed the befanged Count into a kind of supernatural corporate raider stalking the sneering, avaricious fatcats of the City of London.