Primal fear of the forest plus new technology made The Blair Witch Project a micro-budget phenomenon in 1999. Its “found footage” premise, with student film-makers’ tapes showing their gradual unhinging by a witch-haunted Maryland forest, has been widely copied. This and a poorly received sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, stymied further attempts to franchise what seemed to be a freak hit.

Fusing genres to come up with unique takes on familiar tropes can be risky. The unwieldy results may be an unappetising mess. Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, where Arthur Lucan and Bela Lugosi fought for space in an unfunny 1952 fusion of comedy and horror was dreadful. Then there was 1966’s unwatchable Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, which drew the line between beach movie froth and (once again) horror. With its gang of leather-clad undead, Psychomania (1973), recast the biker film. Unlike many horror syntheses, it was deadly serious.

A woman cowers beneath her bedclothes, building a useless barrier against the thing she hears creeping and scraping across the room, the thing that only appears when she turns off the light. This is the most primal image of domestic terror in the homemade short film whose viral success took its Swedish director, David F Sandberg, to Hollywood.

Although Audition was released in 1999, seeing it again reveals it as neither dated or blunted by subsequent, more alarming horror films whether Japanese or otherwise. As it was then, Takashi Miike’s study of a romantic relationship gone wrong remains out there on its own. Audition is arguably ground-zero for torture porn and would go on to influence films like Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005: in which Miike made a brief appearance) but the films made in its wake have none of its subtlety or flair with shockingly juxtaposing the day-to-day and the horrifying.

Television has been quite obsessed of late with reinterpreting horror myths, whether it’s Penny Dreadful’s gothic melange of vampires, werewolves and man-made monsters, Jekyll & Hyde, or The Frankenstein Chronicles, with Sean Bean currently playing a Victorian plod in pursuit of an evil, child-snatching surgeon.

Fritz Haarmann was – although the term wasn’t in use at the time – the first murderer to be recognised in Germany as a serial killer. He was executed in 1925 after being found guilty of 24 killings. Filmed in late 1973, Tenderness of the Wolves dramatises aspects of the case. It is directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s frequent collaborator Ulli Lomell – they had most recently worked together on Effi Briest.

However it is looked at, Sleepwalker is one of British cinema’s strangest films. What initially seems to be a Mike Leigh-style, Abigail’s Party-ish hyper-real take on middle class mores quickly becomes an intense journey into dystopian horror which nods to both Italian gialli and films which deconstruct the nuts and bolts of British social attitudes. If late-period Mario Bava and Lindsay Anderson had collaborated to direct an episode of The Good Life, this might have been the result.

A Hawksmoor church ought to be the right setting for the psychological terror of Britten’s great chamber opera, a slanted but still chilling adaptation of Henry James's novella. True, the once-deroofed interior has been coolly revamped as a rehearsal and performance venue, but imaginative lighting and a clear acting space, with room for a 13-piece ensemble to the side, ought to do the trick.

A haunted house, a mental asylum, a witch’s coven, a circus freak show. Check, check, check. And check. Is there no horror trope left unturned in American Horror Story? Nope. And that’s precisely the point – familiarity and postmodern camp go a long way to explaining the runaway success of the series. 

As well as releasing electronic music on Ron Morelli’s feted L.I.E.S. label, and the sporadically brilliant Ghost Box, as well a particularly impressive outing on Static Caravan (as Primitive Neural Pathways), Steve Moore is the bass- and synth-playing half of Zombi. On Shape Shift, a heavier, darker and more rock-sounding record than fans of 2009’s Escape Velocity might be expecting, he is doing his utmost to show the acceptable face of horror-suited post-rock.