Considerable quantities of bile have been hosed over Silent House by American critics, who have found its premise flimsy and its execution dismally predictable. It was made by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, who were also responsible for 2003's low-budget hit Open Water. That was the one where a couple of objectionable yuppies were left behind by their dive-boat and we bobbed about in the ocean with them as they succumbed to terror, hypothermia and hungry sharks.

The Wicker Man is a great British film, one of the top horror films of all time. Since its release in 1973, its curious combination of queasily jolly folkloric ritual and sinister paganism has only grown to seem more discomfiting, reeking of the uncanny, and flavouring new films as recently as the extraordinary Kill List.

Next week sees the release of Shimon Peres, the second instalment in Spirit Level Film’s The Price of Kings series. A president of Israel who refers to leadership as “not a very happy engagement,” a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who says he has never slept easy, Peres is about as good a subject for a political doco as you’re likely to get. He’s the world’s oldest elected head of state (his political career having begun in the early Fifties!) and the only Israeli PM (two-and-a-half times) to have made it to the top step in their political pantheon.

Like an adrenalin injection straight to the heart of a flagging horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods is fresh, funny and teeming with deliciously nasty surprises which - have no fear - will not be revealed to you here. Although it’s helmed by first-time director Drew Goddard (the Cloverfield scribe and co-producer of Lost and Alias), for many the key name attached to The Cabin in the Woods will be Joss Whedon, the film’s co-writer and producer.

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.