Horror comes in many forms. In writer-director Jed Hart’s feature debut Restless, it’s visited on middle-aged nurse Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal) by thirtyish Deano (Aston McAuley), the superficially affable toxic male who moves in next door with two mates and holds raves in their living room, “all night and every night”.

In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised film language – cult movies indeed.

Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982) with his biggest budget from hack mavericks Cannon Films. He characteristically determined to “make it as wild as I can”.

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was uniquely disturbing, with its monster Leatherface’s first primal eruption to hang a victim on a meat-hook rivalling Psycho’s murders for shock and fright. It was only as the bludgeoning effect faded on subsequent viewings that the film’s pitch-black comedy became clear.

Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.

The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled daughter Chloe (Callina Liang, pictured below). Presence is a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view, piecing together who and why it’s haunting as it eavesdrops on the fractured family.

There are no white-sheeted ghosts in this year’s A Ghost Story for Christmas. The BBC’s annual adaptations of MR James’s best-known stories have been a holiday favourite since the 1970s.

Robert Eggers' strength as a director is his ability to bring historical periods alive with gritty, tactile realism. He does this successfully because of his anthropological attention to props, costume and language, but also his willingness to treat the era’s belief system as concrete reality. There’s nothing glib or anachronistic about his films set among 17th century New England Puritans, 19th century fishermen or 11th century Icelandic vikings. 

The Oblong Box is a phantom 1969 follow-up to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, sharing star Vincent Price and much cast and crew, after the brilliant young British director’s OD forced his dismissal days before shooting. It also began replacement Gordon Hessler and co-writer Christopher Wicking’s own Price-starring horror sequence, notably the bizarre, Mod anti-fascist Scream and Scream Again (1970), placing this obscure film at a packed cult crossroads.