Cult horror continues to provide when the current era of on-screen scares does not. The reboot and legacy sequel industrial complex shows no signs of stopping, and while recent acclaimed horrors have offered some interesting new tweaks on the genre, there is nothing quite like an obscure independent film from 1972 that none of your friends on Letterboxd have logged.

What cult horror offers is true perversion, genuine terror and murky morals. It’s partly why The Substance has become the biggest, most talked about films of the year – its ideas around beauty and women are as queasy as the gross-out special effects. There’s an appetite for something more twisted than meagre jump scares. Possession, for example, has become a much-memed example of a thrillingly berserk horror; it’s unhinged and outré and all the more scary because of it. Not everything needs to be loudly and confidently about capital ‘T’ trauma; there were no guardrails in old school horror. 

Below, we’ve picked out six twisted and monstrous horrors that pushed the envelope on what the genre could achieve.

Black Christmas (1974)

Easily the most chilling film on this list, Black Christmas is the proto-slasher film. Influenced by Psycho and later influential on Halloween, Black Christmas’ genuine innovation of the slasher model – the then-novel concept of teenage girls being threatened by an elusive male killer – resulted in it both being genuinely terrifying and also having something interesting to say.

Olivia Hussey plays Jess, a college student who, amid the brutal slaying of her sorority sisters, discovers she’s pregnant and wants an abortion. Her prick of a boyfriend, Peter (Keir Dullea), intimidates her into keeping it. It’s a subplot you wouldn’t find in the genre nowadays – it wouldn’t be handled so subtly – and adds real shades of grey to a film that would otherwise just be about young girls getting hacked up. It’s a shame Black Christmas has often been retroactively tainted by the deterioration of the slasher genre because on its own, it’s a great horror film.

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

The late Ken Russell, who was both the puckish enfant terrible and the sleazy uncle of 20th-century British cinema, never directed anything you could call simple. He specialised in high camp maximalist moviemaking, always locating the latent ridiculousness in postwar Britain and cheekily shaking up its staid sensibilities. The Lair of the White Worm is arguably one of Russell’s more accessible works and probably his most straightforwardly ‘horror’, but even then, you still feel like you’ve been huffing paint.

Following an ancient, snake-worshipping priestess (Amanda Donohoe) and the attempts to stop her by the local lord of the manor (Hugh Grant) and a bagpipe-tooting Scot (Peter Capaldi), Russell seizes every opportunity for a phallic metaphor, a Jesus hallucination, and Donohoe to strip nude. The result is a garish, erotic and ridiculous horror comedy, complete with a gigantic Doctor Who-ish snake.

The Beast (1975)

Opening with the close-up of an erect horse penis, this 70s arthouse horror from Walerian Borowczyk is a provocative and thrillingly disturbing exercise in erotic cinema. Borowcyzk, who, like Russell, was hardly known for his restraint, takes on the tale of Beauty and the Beast and fully embraces the bestiality that the Disney animation sidestepped.

Set around a crumbling estate in rural France, The Beast is light on plot, heavy on heavy petting. Heiress Lucy (Lisbeth Hummel) chafes against an arranged marriage to an inbred count and discovers true pleasure in the woods with a furry monster that may or may not be real. Everything climaxes with an extended sex scene that Borowcyzk originally intended to use in another erotic drama and retrofitted it for The Beast. Corsets are ripped asunder, monster penises cum in abundance. It’s all the right kind of tasteless and makes for a weird, unsavoury classic.

Repulsion (1965)

One of the most nauseating parts of Roman Polanski’s defacing of his filmography is that two of his greatest works, Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, excel at their portrayal of women under threat from misogyny. Both are deeply political horrors as a result, both centring the violation of a woman’s agency, but the legacy of these films is forever tainted by Polanski’s crimes. It is a difficult combination of context and content that film fans will forever be reckoning with.

Repulsion was Polanski’s first English language film, a tight psychological drama about Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a fey, introspective manicurist living with her sister in London. When her sister goes on holiday, Carol descends into schizophrenic delirium, exacerbated by the misogyny and persecution of local men. It is an extraordinarily prescient film with regards to how horror now handles gendered violence, and brought to life by Deneuve’s vulnerable, dead-eyed performance. For multiple reasons it’s a claustrophobic, disturbing watch.

Phenomena (1985)

Dario Argento’s penchant for blending European and American cultures and sensibilities reached its peak with Phenomena, a bizarro masterwork from the Italian director. Jennifer Connelly plays the daughter of a famous American actor (Argento originally wanted her to be the fictional child of Al Pacino because sure, why not) who, after being shipped off to a mysterious Swiss boarding school, discovers she can psychically communicate with insects. This ability, naturally, helps her investigate and take down a serial killer targeting her schoolmates.

There is majestic location photography of the remote Swiss countryside, a prominent acting role for horror legend Donald Pleasence and a chimpanzee named Tanga, and a deliciously icy performance by Argento’s muse, the late, great Daria Nicolodi. None of it holds up under much scrutiny but Argento was impeccable at creating atmosphere and Phenomena is as tense as the likes of Suspiria and Deep Red but (somehow) a few notches more bizarre.

Read our guide to the films of Dario Argento here. 

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò has become a bit of a joke in film circles – a too-obvious example of truly nasty, traumatic horror; a go-to flex for those willing to show they’re Not Like Other Film Fans. But this overemphasis on the disgusting nature of Salò does fail to understand its importance as a striking work of political art.

In a remote Italian palace during the Republic of Salò in the 1940s, 18 teenagers are abducted and subjected to rounds of psychological, sexual and mercilessly sadistic torture – from force-feeding them feces, to molestation, to scalping them and removing their tongues. It is, undoubtedly, a difficult watch, and Salò’s critique of fascism and consumerism can often get lost in all the pearl-clutching, but it’s still an insane feat of cinema; a full-throated commitment to portraying humanity’s capacity for abjection.