In 1921, Anton Phibes was killed in a fiery car crash. Horribly disfigured, he returns to avenge the death of his beautiful wife. So goes the set-up for The Abominable Dr Phibes, one of the UK’s finest cult horror films and very clearly a precursor to the Saw franchise, among others. Originally released in 1971, it has lost none of its camp splendour. This is a film like no other – except, of course, its sequel Dr Phibes Rises Again. Vincent Price is the eccentric and cruel Phibes, Caroline Munro (uncredited) is his wife.

We've had endless waves of vampires, zombies and Frankenstein's monsters, so why not bundle them all together under the same doomily Gothic roof? Welcome to Penny Dreadful, created by writer John Logan and producer Sam Mendes (who previously worked together on the Bond movie Skyfall), in which we descend into a "demi-monde" of monsters and necromancy in Victorian London.

Many films fuse humour with horror and many of those fail to be accomplished in either genre. Bringing fun to the scary often results in a clunkiness which neither raises laughs or goosebumps. The worst example might be the utterly awful Bloodbath at the House of Death, a 1984 film which teamed all-round showbiz eccentric Kenny Everett with veteran actor Vincent Price. What Price thought as he navigated his way through this stinker is not a matter of record, but he may have ruefully cast his mind back a decade to the contrastingly wonderful Theatre of Blood.

The Bigfoot legend rests on something close to found-footage: 1967’s grainy film of a large ape-like creature loping through the remote American North-west. The Patterson-Gimlin expedition’s reels are the Sasquatch conspiracy theorists version of the Zapruder footage.

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.