In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in contrast to the book’s chill grandeur and the play’s postmodern whimsy), director James Watkins clearly feels there is more to say and, though he often says it with style, it’s a film that sometimes lacks guts.

This Friday sees the release of James Watkins’ bloodcurdling adaptation of The Woman in Black, produced by the recently resurrected Hammer Films, who have risen like one of their macabre creations to torment us once more. With its old dark house spookiness and “bat out of hell” villainess, the screen incarnation of Eel Marsh House is suitably forbidding, but it’s only the latest in a long of line of diabolical dwellings where you reside at your peril and leave - only if you’re lucky - sanity surrendered and trousers browned. Buyer beware: these are the houses that drip blood.

It’s not out until 8 June but fan excitement levels are already feverish. Ridley Scott, who directed the original, groundbreaking science-fiction-horror-classic Alien back in 1979, has said that his new film Prometheus – only his third ever sci-fi outing (the other was Bladerunner) - is not part of the Alien series and won’t feature the snap-jawed xenomorph, last seen battling fellow monster franchise Predator in a series of dismal B-movies.

Filmed and acted with suffocating intensity, Ben Wheatley’s second feature (after 2009’s Down Terrace) is a macabre mutation of horror and crime thriller. Stripped so bare exposition-wise that it’s jolting and intentionally enigmatic, Kill List is a ferocious, promising piece of filmmaking which drenches its audience in various shades of darkness.

John Carpenter's original The Thing from 1982 had punch, pace, shocks, horror, dramatic tension and Kurt Russell in the lead. It also had a great intro, with its scenes of an apparently blameless and photogenic husky being pursued across Antarctica by gunmen in a helicopter. How we cheered when the animal was saved. How we shouldn't have.

Rebecca Hall gets slapped about - and more - during The Awakening, a putative ghost story that lands one of this country's most able and appealing actresses in many a tricky physical but also psychological spot. Whether audiences will go the distance with her may depend on individual tolerance for a film that plays like an overcooked British knock-off of the Nicole Kidman starrer The Others, complete with Dominic West on hand to contribute belated rumpy-pumpy and Imelda Staunton very visibly furrowing her brow.

Witchfinder General, along with The Wicker Man, has latterly been claimed as a pinnacle of a peculiarly British style of film. “Weird Britain” is a default description. It’ll do fine for these unsettling, intense horror films which draw from the British landscape and its history. This sparkling restoration of Witchfinder General can only enhance its status.

In TV's seasonal rush of Spooks, Downton etc, we must also hail the sterling (if gruesome) work going on at the FX channel. Alongside series two of The Walking Dead, they've thrown in the additional delights of gory French cop thriller Braquo and, last night, we saw the debut of the weird and scary American Horror Story.

Oslo, August 31st and The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) share more than a release date. One is a melancholic existential meditation and the other ostensibly a horror film, but both openly draw from earlier films, focus on an outsider unable to connect with society and use capital cities as background noise rather than window dressing. One is wilfully unpleasant.

As this remake’s director Rod Lurie, a former film journalist, well knows, competing with Sam Peckinpah is a loser’s game. His films are no more replicable than a Fred Astaire musical, inseparable from their demonic creator. Straw Dogs was his lone, 1971 excursion to Britain, with Dustin Hoffman as a mousey American mathematician who accompanies new wife Susan George’s return to her rustic Cornish home, which in Peckinpah’s hands is as hostile as the badlands his western heroes rode through.