The Trollenberg Terror (1958)

In a small Swiss village near Trollenberg Mountain, a series of climbers are found decapitated. Alan Brooks, a UN investigator, is sent to the area to look into unusual radiation levels, and he helps with the investigation. While investigating he meets Anne Pilgrim, a psychic who experiences visions of the deaths and is drawn to the mountain.

Thank you to Film Masters
for making The Trollenberg Terror aka The Crawling Eye available online.

Part Quatermass, part The Thing From Another World and based on a 1956 ITV Saturday Serial  television programme, The Trollenberg Terror (or The Crawling Eye) by the legendary Hammer horror writer Jimmy Sangster, is the story of scientist Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker) summoned to the Swiss Alps to investigate some mysterious goings-on.

On the way, he meets up with the Pilgrim Sisters, Sarah (Jennifer Jayne) and Anne (Janet Munro), a theatrical mind-reading act, heading to Geneva. Only Anne is actually truly psychic and feels compelled to disembark at the same train station as Brooks... that is, Trollenberg, where there have been a number of unexplained climbing accidents.

Visiting the mountainside observatory, Brooks is also informed of an unnatural cloud that has been hanging around the mountain and giving off radiation. This reminds him - and the observatory's Professor Crevett (Warren Mitchell) - of a similar mysterious incident they investigated in the Andes and that Crevett had attributed to extraterrestrials.

In the meantime, Anne has received a physic summons to the mountain and after she is prevented from going, a climber - presumed missing - returns from the mountain and attempts to kill her.

The Trollenberg Terror is a pot-boiler, slowly building to its dramatic climax (perhaps too slowly for modern audiences), when the true face of the monster on the mountain shows itself out of the fog.

Before that though we get a couple of decapitations and a surprising "head in a rucksack" shot that I wasn't expecting.

As well as playing out like a high-altitude reworking of The Thing, withholding the big reveal until the final act adds a layer of Lovecraftian paranoia to The Trollenberg Terror as well.

The film doesn't so much create a sense of tension as one of scientific enquiry, a desire to know what's going on and, as long as you love giant monsters, then you're not going to be disappointed by this atmospheric slice of '50s schlock horror.

Bringing The Horror of Mothership to Your Games

If Adventure Has A Name, It Must Be The Tuesday Knights

On and off, the Tuesday Knights (my gaming group) has been playing Pete's period pulp action campaign for 32 sessions over three years. He likes to keep things fresh by switching the rules system for every story arc.

We started in the 1950's, fighting zombies and giant monsters - even travelling to an alien world at one point - using GURPS Atomic Horror, then we slipped through a portal to the 1930's for an extended Hollow Earth Expedition-fuelled hike from New York to Antarctica, punching villains in the face along the way, and finally being drawn into some Lovecraftian cosmic horror shenanigans that were a delicious blend of John Carpenter's The Thing and old HPL's At The Mountains of Madness.

That adventure culminated with my character Buck Hansen, a world-weary big game hunter and explorer, managing to blow up - rather impressively - a newly-risen ancient god.

The other members of the team are Kevin as former G-man Dick Tate, Mark as daredevil aviatrix Onyx Jones (he took over Erica's character when she left the group), and Clare as photojournalist Freya Larson.

For the next stage of the campaign - which is scheduled to begin in December (all being well) - Pete is turning to Outgunned Adventures, a standalone spin-off of the popular Outgunned system from Two Little Mice.

I think we're staying in the 1930's for the moment, but hopefully there will be an in-game explanation for the subtle changes in our characters (and the new rules mechanics).

The other night Pete came round to talk through the new game with me and seek my assistance in roughing out conversions of the characters from HEX to Outgunned.

I was extremely flattered by this, especially given that my recent attempts to get a campaign going (a Shadowdark game that lasted one session and a Villains & Vigilantes one that lasted three sessions) both fizzled out in most depressing manners.

The Outgunned Adventures rules book is gorgeous, both in its layout and art, and full of homages to the Indiana Jones movies (particularly Raiders of The Lost Ark).

The game's core system seems elegantly straight-forward (but then again so did HEX - in theory - which turned into a confusing mess in play).

Tests in Outgunned are made with small dice pools of two to nine six-sided dice and you are looking to match numbers to score successes (e.g. roll 5d6 and threes come up on four of the dice, then that's four successes).

Although I'm still not a massive fan of dice pool mechanics, as I grow older and more befuddled I've come to really appreciate simplicity at the heart of my games (which was one of ways I went wrong with Villains & Vigilantes game).

Outgunned's dice pool mechanics are rather different than the HEX approach to generating successes, but hopefully the Tuesday Knights will latch on quickly.

Pete and I were able to find pre-generated templates that matched the characters in our little group, and then went through the personalisation process of picking out various traits and abilities that matched those that our characters had used in the earlier adventures.

Flicking through the book, I couldn't help but keep catching myself thinking "this looks really nice, perhaps I could use Outgunned to run something in a different setting".

Well, in the cold light of day, I don't know about that, but - while I'm taking a break from sitting behind the GM's screen - it's certainly got me thinking more positively about running a game again... at some point in the future. 

Indiana Jones much?

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Color Out Of Space (2019)

Nathan Gardner (Nic Cage) and his wife, Theresa (Joely Richardson), have moved, with their three children, out of the big city to a secluded farm in the woods outside Arkham, Massachusetts, for a bit of peace and quiet.

Stockbroker Theresa is recovering from cancer and Nathan is trying his hand at becoming a self-sufficient farmer.

However their lives are disrupted when a strange meteorite crashes on their land, polluting the area with a paranormal alien radiation.

HP Lovecraft's original story of The Colour Out Of Space has been adapted many times, but, beyond a shadow of a doubt the latest iteration, from writer/director Richard Stanely, is the most Lovecraftian.

A gorgeous, mind-bending, blend of the cosmic with the body horror of The Thing and Society,  Color Out Of Space focuses on a trapped - and doomed - family, slowly worn down by an unknowable, extraterrestrial invader.

Certainly not for everyone, Color Out Of Space isn't a trashy teen slasher flick with obvious heroes and villains, but a terrifying encapsulation of the central theme of Lovecraft's oeuvre that "common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large".

There is never really any serious suggestion that the alien entity is even aware of the humans it is transforming by its simple presence.

My Copy - Not Used In Any Rituals!

The film bears obvious similarities with 2018's Annihilation, but Color Out Of Space is the stronger work of art by a country mile.

Across the board, the central performances are superb. Nic Cage channels Nic Cage as only he can, exhibiting the convincing levels of madness and sudden rage that he does so well, while The Magicians' Madeleine Arthur is impressive as teen daughter, Lavinia, whose rebellious nature expresses itself through dabbling in witchcraft.

Beyond the gooey body horror, there's some cringe-inducing - but thankfully brief - self-mutilation that might require some eye-covering by those of us with a particular aversion to such things.

As well as rooting the story squarely in Lovecraft country, Richard Stanley has sown his tale with Lovecraftian Easter Eggs, such as the Miskatonic University sweat shirt worn by visiting surveyor Ward (Elliot Knight, sadly no relation) and the tatty, cheap paperback copy - "by Simon" - of the Necronomicon (which we all own) that Lavina consults.

Quite possibly my favourite film of 2020, Color Out Of Space is breathtaking in the audacity of its vision, a modern rendition of a Lovecraft story that truly captures the horror of its set-up and the terror of those trapped within its incidental and inescapable prison.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Gorge (2025)

To date, I've pretty much loved everything I've seen on Apple TV: the puzzle box that is Severance is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the best TV shows ever; Slow Horses is near-perfection; the retro-futurism of Hello Tomorrow is wonderful; The Morning Show is great, engaging drama; and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a fascinating insight into the kaiju-filled world of the Monsterverse.

So, I wasn't worried clicking on The Gorge, especially as it has the added bonus of starring the flawless Anya Taylor-Joy who is incapable of making a bad movie. Even her co-star, Miles Teller (despite appearing as Reed Richards in the worst Fantastic Four movie of all time... and, yes, I'm including the unreleased Corman version), is generally seen as a safe pair of hands.

I couldn't have been more wrong. 

The Gorge is two hours and seven minutes of utter tedium. Our stars are a pair of elite snipers - Levi 'Married To His Job' Kane and Drasa - tasked with guarding a mysterious, smoke-filled, gorge and preventing whatever is down there from getting out.

Each stands guard in a tower on either side of the gorge, both forbidden to communicate with the other side.

The trouble from the get-go is that both characters are walking clichés (very early on Teller's Levi is sitting on a beach, cuddling a random dog, and I said to myself: 'I bet he writes poetry'... and an hour later, when Levi and Drasa finally get to meet he starts telling her about his poetry).

But it's also very obviously slightly racist/sexist because while both are supposedly the best at what they do, the implication is that Levi - representing America - is slightly better than - not-America - Drasa (who doesn't even warrant a surname), has slightly better technology, and so on.

For the first, painfully long, hour the couple are getting used to their new jobs and, as the months pass, starting to break the rules and communicate across the gorge.

This segment could easily have been compressed into 15 or 20 minutes, which might then have made what follows a bit more bearable.

Eventually, after a sneaky romantic rendezvous, they find themselves in the gorge, getting to the bottom of the mystery.

The trouble is there's a very strong chance that if you'd been thinking about what might be going on yourself you probably would have come up with something way more interesting than the 1950's B-movie explanation we get served up with.

At one point, I'd even wondered - when they were fighting giant insects - if The Gorge was somehow connected to Monarch: Legacy of The Monsters. But no such luck.

And the thing about the monsters our heroes find hidden in the mists is that we don't see enough of them. Perhaps horror-leaning director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone) should have put more focus on the critters and less on the turgid banality of the padded first act.

There is absolutely no need for this Asylum-movie-on-an-Apple-budget to have been over two hours long. An hour and a half would have been fine and might have kept the pace (and my engagement) up a bit more. 

It's not that toothless creature feature The Gorge is really that bad, it's more a case that there's nothing memorable about it, from its generic stunts and forgettable monsters to its uninteresting explanation and predictable resolution.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Void (2016)

Late at night, on a deserted road outside of town, Sheriff Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) comes across a wounded man stumbling out of the woods.

The lawman rushes the injured man to the nearest hospital, a fire-damaged building on the point of closure, operated by a skeleton staff, including the sheriff's estranged wife, Allison (Kathleen Munroe).

Within moments of their arrival - and a nurse going insane - the dilapidated hospital is besieged by knife-wielding, sheet-wearing, cultists.

From there The Void is a non-stop, violent, gore-splattered, thrill-ride through Lovecraft country by way of Assault On Precinct 13, The Thing and Hellraiser.

This is a film - whose plot unfolds over a single night - that just doesn't let up. The action kicks off from the opening scene, backstories are sketched in with deft brevity, and the viewers find themselves sucked into the absorbing, claustrophobic, horror.

Malleable architecture, hallucinations, and shapeshifting, tentacled, monsters are just part of the sanity-assaulting fun that the writing-directing team of Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie bombard the audience with.

And it's probably worth drawing attention to a couple of extended scenes that feature bright, rapidly flashing lights that could affect people susceptible to such light shows.

There's a strong flavour of vintage '80s horror here (but delivered with ichor-dripping 21st Century practical effects) that should satisfy any fan of HP Lovecraft's cosmic horror who tends to find the best cinematic realisations of his themes come in films not directly based on his stories (such as the aforementioned The Thing, In The Mouth Of Madness, Event Horizon etc).

It would be a gross exaggeration to say The Void is wholly original, but the diverse recipe of influences tap into so  many of my favourite movies, sub-genres, and ideas of what makes good horror, that I embraced it all the more warmly.

In fact there was a part of me that couldn't help wondering if this script was lifted from a game of Call Of Cthulhu, with pointless gunplay, fire-axe-swinging, and pulp novel machismo in the face of monstrosities not meant for the eyes of man.

Annihilation (2018)

Three years ago, something alien crash landed in an isolated, swampy, region of southern America, creating an expanding field of energy known as The Shimmer.

While the government has been able to keep this classified so far, every expedition sent inside to investigate has failed to return.

That is, until special forces operative Kane (Oscar Isaac), the husband of biologist Lena (Natalie Portman), suddenly appears back at their house.

He is unable to tell her anything about where he has been, and quickly falls ill.

As they are being rushed to hospital, the government swoops in and Lena and her dying husband are taken to the Southern Reach, a top secret scientific outpost monitoring the growth of The Shimmer.

In an effort to help save her husband - and understand what happened to him - Lena agrees to accompany a new team venturing into the strange phenomenon.

As they enter, they quickly begin to grasp the extent of the mutative effects of the alien field, not just on the landscape and wildlife, but on themselves.

Released on Netflix today, Annihilation deserves a place amongst the rarefied Lovecraftian horrors of In The Mouth Of Madness, Event Horizon, The Thing et al that encapsulate the style and feel of HP Lovecraft's work without actually being based directly on anything he wrote.

That said, in part, it feels like an updated spin on the Lovecraft classic Colour Out Of Space, with a side order of 2001: A Space Odyssey for flavouring.

Written and directed by Alex Garland - adapted from the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's critically-acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy - Annihilation initially unfolds beautifully, dazzling with its blend of disorientating sci-fi and atmospheric horror.

From the get-go, it's obvious that this is not a horror film for everyone, it's a slow burn, not relying on jump scares, but rather on the audience imagining themselves in that predicament, as everything they think is true begins to unravel.

However, where the film disappoints is its climactic "kill it with fire" resolution to the unearthly situation, rather than anything more cerebral as one might have hoped after the build-up.

Although blurred - and missing - time is a factor within The Shimmer, towards the climax of Annihilation it's clear that the story has a pacing issue.

While it may not have been able to attract the big name stars, I came away from this eagerly-anticipated film thinking that it would have worked better as, say, a six-part mini-series.

That way we could have been drawn in to, and experienced, the strange goings-on of The Shimmer on a deeper level.

So, while I say it deserves to be counted amongst those other legendary Lovecraftian horror movies, Annihilation is sadly the 'also ran' of the group.

It feels as though Garland couldn't decide whether to go full gonzo - as the set-up deserves - or play it safe with a more commercial horror flick, and in the end settled on something that was a bit of both and a lot of neither.

MONSTER MAYHEM: Prince of Darkness (1987)

When the last member of a secret Catholic sect, The Brother of Sleep, dies before he can nominate a successor, a nameless priest (Halloween's Donald Pleasence) discovers what the sect has been concealing under a seemingly abandoned church in Los Angeles.

He finds a subterranean laboratory containing a large, sealed cylinder of swirling green liquid and an ancient book of encoded warnings.

The priest seeks assistance from quantum physicist, Professor Howard Birack (Big Trouble in Little China's Victor Wong), who enlists a team of students and fellow scientists to investigate the impossible liquid.

As hordes of vagrant, street people - led by Alice Cooper - gather around the building, some of the liquid escapes, defying gravity and dripping upwards, before infecting one of the students, Susan (Anne Howard).

She then embarks on a conversion and killing spree in the shadowy corridors of the old building.

Meanwhile, Lisa (Ann Yen) translates the mysterious book, revealing a very HP Lovecraft reimaging of the Bible, with God, Jesus, and The Devil actually being extra-terrestrial entities.

The tightly sealed, millennia-old, canister - which, it turns out, can only be opened from the inside - is said to contain "The Devil" and should he escape he plans to open a portal to the "Dark Side" and liberate his imprisoned "father", The Anti-God.

Alice Cooper leads his horde of possessed street people to besiege the scientists in the old church

Prince of Darkness is the second - and weakest - in John Carpenter's Lovecraft-influenced, self-styled, Apocalypse Trilogy, bookended by two of the greatest horror films ever made, 1982's The Thing and 1994's In The Mouth of Madness.

Compared to Carpenter's better works, Prince of Darkness is narratively a bit of a mess, yet still highly entertaining, occasionally quite gruesome, and centred around a really intriguing concept.

From the first notes of the film's score, the font used in the credits, and the way it's shot, you know this is a John Carpenter movie.

Prince of Darkness shares tropes with the other parts of his Apocalypse Trilogy, such as the 'scientists in a base under siege' setting of The Thing, and the questioning of reality as evidenced in In The Mouth of Madness.

Given my love and admiration for these latter two movies, I'll admit it's a bit of surprise that this is the first time I've actually seen Prince of Darkness, but, honestly, it pales to comparison to those other flawless masterpieces.

While the core concept is a fascinating idea, Carpenter's actual script and some of the performances are not up to the level we'd normally expect from a piece of his art.

It's hard to believe that the "comic relief" character of student Walter Fong is played by the same Dennis Dun who was so good as Kurt Russell's co-lead in the previous year's Big Trouble In Little China.

Ignoring the mostly failed attempts at humour (such as the running "who's Susan?" gag and Walter Fong's casual racism), the characters don't feel as developed as one would hope (Donald Pleasence's priest doesn't even have a name, for crying out loud).

There's also an uncomfortable 'romance' between two of the main students, the reticent Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount) and moustachioed stalker Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker) that strongly suggested - to me - that Marsh was going to turn out to be a "bad guy" and get his well-deserved "comeuppence". But it turns out he was just an '80s dude!

Conversely, this frisson between Brian and Catherine heightened the heroic sacrifice of the movie's climax and certainly makes sure Prince of Darkness goes out with a bang.

MONSTER MAYHEM: The Tingler (1959)

Horror icon Vincent Price stars in director William Castle's The Tingler, a very Lovecraftian tale of weird science and creatures that feed on fear inside the human body.

The movie opens with Castle addressing the audience, warning them that some will feel similar effects to those experienced by the characters on the screen and the only way to shake this off is to scream!

What he doesn't mention is that when this delightful B-movie was first being shown in the 1950s some seats in the auditoriums were wired up with electrical buzzers to give anyone sitting in them "the tingles" at key moments in the film.

Price plays pathologist Dr Warren Chapin, whose experiments into the nature of fear reveal a parasite growing inside every human being - a tingler - that feeds off a person's fear until it grows strong enough to kill them (i.e. dying of fright).

Because he devotes all his time to his research, his wife, Isabel Stevens Chapin (Patricia Cutts), a rich heiress that he suspects of poisoning her father, is blantantly cheating on him, but the doctor draws her into a cruel experiment which helps him prove the existence of the tingler.

Through his work, he has befriended Oliver Higgins (Philip Coolidge), who operates a silent movie theatre with his deaf and mute wife, Martha (a stellar performance from Judith Evelyn).

The tingler's only weakness is the sound of a human scream, but Dr Chapin realises that because Martha cannot scream she would make a great test subject for his experiments.

After conducting a failed test on himself, with a shot of LSD (the drug's first depiction in a major motion picture) to induce fearful hallucinations, Chapin then turns his attention to Martha - little realising that the creepy vibes her husband is always giving off isn't just because he's a lush.

Dr Chapin trippin' on LSD

For an 82-minute weird science and monster movie from master showman William Castle - penned by his frequent collaborator Robb White - the story of The Tingler is surprisingly layered, and elements that could easily be dismissed as "that's just because it's a B-movie" are actually justified and explained in the script.

Other exquisite Castle touches include an unexpected splash of colour in this otherwise black and white movie and some delightfully meta sequences during the movie's climax in the auditorium of Oliver and Martha's movie theatre.

The cinema is screening an old silent movie, but every so often Dr Chapin has to stop the film - turning the screen we are watching black - and announcing in voice-over that there is a tingler on the loose. I can only imagine what a hit this trick was watching it all unfold in an actual cinema in the 1950s.

As to the tingler itself, it's a two-foot long, bulky, rubbery centipede creature with a pair of enormous pincers at its head, very similar to an enlarged version of the parasites that tried to take over Star Fleet in the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Conspiracy (and were never mentioned ever again!)

Yes, The Tingler is cheesy by modern standards and the monster effects quite basic, yet it still sits comfortably in the ranks of movies that feel like they were based upon the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft (like In The Mouth of Madness and The Thing) but have, in fact, tapped into their own, very similar, vein of horror.

The tingler in all its rubbery glory

The Wind (2019)

Following such delights as Curse of The Demon Mountain and Bone Tomahawk, 2019's The Wind combines two of my favourite genres - horror and Western - to create a compelling, character-driven, psychological drama.

In the late 19th Century, Lizzy Macklin (Caitlin Gerard) and her husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman) have carved themselves out a homestead on the desolate American frontier.

When a new couple of settlers - Emma (Julia Goldani Telles) and Gideon Harper (Dylan McTee) - set up home about a mile away, the Macklins are initially delighted to have company, but become increasingly concerned that the new arrivals aren't cut out for the hardships required for living off the land.

The film, written by Teresa Sutherland (one of the staff writer's on Netflix's new Midnight Mass) and directed by Emma Tammi, opens with the aftermath of pregnant Emma's suicide. 

Gideon and Isaac then ride off to the nearest settlement to make arrangements for the Harper's property to be shipped back East, leaving Lizzy to clean up and attend to the Macklin's smallholding.

The narrative then unfolds in a series of flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks, intercut with Lizzy trying to cope on her own.

As well as learning that Lizzy and Isaac's son, Samuel, was still born, we also see that Emma was instantly attracted to the more "manly" Isaac, with the suggestion that the attraction may have been mutual.

However, when she falls pregnant, Emma - possibly influenced by a pamphlet on Demons of The Plains - rapidly descends into madness, making wild assertions about "something" being after her child.

She tells Lizzy that Gideon refused to believe her, dismissing her claims of hearing strange voices as simply "the wind".

In due course, though, we discover that when she was pregnant with Samuel, Lizzy also became convinced that there was some demonic force living in the area as well.

Are the women really being hunted by a "demon of the plains" or is it all in their imagination?

It's nearly impossible for most of us to comprehend the sense of terrifying, utter isolation and loneliness a person would feel in this situation, trying to carve out a living under such unforgiving conditions, without any semblance of modern communication nor any other living soul within miles. 

Beautifully shot in New Mexico, The Wind does a magnificent job of charting the mental toll of this lifestyle, particularly as exemplified by the barnstorming central performance of Caitlin Gerard, who you might recognise from Insidious: The Last Key, American Crime, or The Last Ship.

With its emphasis on the atmospheric Western setting, there is an ambiguous, folkloric rural horror aspect to The Wind, which has led people to compare it to The Witch and - with its strong female cast - The Babadook.

The film has a Gothic quality to its narrative, heightened by Emma's own passion for Gothic literature, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

I would also add there's an element of John Carpenter's The Thing here as well, given how central feelings of isolation and paranoia are in Lizzy's story.

While the bulk of the horror is psychological, there's a single jump scare that works surprisingly effectively because this doesn't feel like a film where such a gimmick would be appropriate. 

Initially a slow burn, The Wind gradually develops its creepy and unsettling tone as the layers of the onion skin are peeled back and we finally get a picture of what's truly happening.