The Halloween Three - Part I. Cult Manchester's trio of writers choose their seasonal selection of scares.

It’s nearly Halloween - a time to close the curtains, take the batteries out of your doorbell to avoid sweet-hungry kids and put on a horror film. But, which one? Cult Manchester can help.

Over the next three days, we’ll be putting together three very different sets of suggestions. Something, as they say, for all tastes. First up, Cult Manchester's very own Andy Murray shines a candle on five British horror films that are just… weird.

There's a long, winding tradition of horror film-making in the UK, and like any long tradition, there are times when things have turned very weird indeed - yes, even for horror films. Especially for Cult Manchester, I've dug deep into these particular areas, right into the murkiest corners. As the nights grow darker, then, here's a quick grab-bag list of five of the most satisfyingly off-kilter films of their kind to have been made on these shores.

 Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967).

Legendary scriptwriter Nigel Kneale made quite a habit of not doing what everyone else was doing. During the ‘50s, his Quatermass TV serials told tales of alien invasions but with wit, intelligence and imagination often lacking in his contemporaries. Left field was pretty much his home ground. Then, for the third Quatermass serial, Quatermass and the Pit, he took another sharp turn away from predictability and diminishing returns, by exploring the basis of human nature, the cause of evil and hatred of the other.

It took 10 years for Hammer Films to get round to filming Pit (the previous two had arrived much more swiftly), but it was worth the wait. There's genuine substance here: the original was partly inspired by the 1958 race riots in Notting Hill, whereas the 1967 film was released against a backdrop of widespread social unrest in the UK, the US and elsewhere, and Kneale's story engages with that intelligently, albeit obliquely. The film version might feel out of step with Hammer's usual claret-strewn Gothic fare, but it's a very much of its time, heading off on a strange and fascinating journey, from a curious discovery on the site of building works on the London Underground to, well, an entire new understanding of man's origins and nature. And yes, along the way there are some proper, unforgettable chills - not only that, but also extraordinary ideas that will burrow into your mind and stay there for decades.

 The Abominable Dr Phibes (Robert Fuest, 1971).

It says it's abominable, but actually it's fabulous. The whole thing started out life as a vehicle for ageing horror star Vincent Price, a straight-laced yarn of dark revenge. Then, enter director/writer Robert Fuest, who'd spent the 60s working on the swinging likes of The Avengers and Pete & Dud's Not Only… But Also. Brought in as an up-and-coming film director off the back of a popular big-screen version of Wuthering Heights, Fuest rewrote the Phibes script completely, bringing out the oddness with lashings of gallows humour.

The result is a genuinely bizarre and gorgeous-looking Art Deco romp across 1920s London that's outrageously funny one minute and grimly alarming the next. Brian Eatwell's elegant, eye-popping sets, coupled with Fuest's keen visual sense, create a sense of semi-psychedelic phantasmagoria. The score - assembling strange experimental jazz by Basil Kirchin, more traditional soundtrack work by John Gale, some genuine songs from the period, plus a dash of Mendelssohn - is also fabulous.

And then there's the cast: a quite ridiculous rollcall of ‘now look who's in it!’ British actors, from Peter Jeffrey and John Laurie to Peter Gilmore and Terry-Thomas (and beyond). It wouldn't be out of place for a 'You have been watching' caption to pop up before the credits. From pole position, Price, clocking that this is something special, manages to invest the deranged, ludicrous Anton Phibes with a surprising amount of heart and melancholy.

Fun fact: the film's tagline, 'Love means never having to say you're ugly', was a (not very relevant) play on Love Story's 'Love means never having to say you're sorry'.

  The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984).

Director Neil Jordan would have you know that this isn't a horror film at all, but really that's half the joy of it. It strays into Hammer's Gothic territory, and comes with an atmosphere thick enough to cut, but it's doing something else entirely. Co-scripted by Angela Carter, drawing on the sorts of reimagined fairy stories she'd written for her 1979 novel-cum-story collection The Bloody Chamber - indeed, the film also folds several stories into its narrative - it digs deep into the murky depths of folk tales that really are outlandish when you look into them.

Shot mostly by Jordan in the studio to heighten the dreamlike quality, and complete with a corking array of British and Irish actors (Stephen Rea, David Warner, Brian Glover, an only-just-pre Murder She Wrote Angela Lansbury - plus an uncredited Terence Stamp as The Devil!), it's a fascinating and vivid piece that doesn't get talked about nearly enough.

Oh, and one of Carter's short stories drawn on here is Wolf Alice, which later inspired... oh, you know.

 In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018).

Again, is this even a horror film? It's right on the brink, but it's certainly steeped in a horror tradition, telling as it does the unlikely tale of a cursed dress that bestows bad luck upon the wearer. The whole thing is a whirlwind of astonishing scenes and striking, near-fetishistic visuals - an incredibly bracing aesthetic - all topped with a mesmeric score by Cavern of Anti-Matter (featuring Tim Gane of Stereolab).

Writer/director Strickland really knows how to assemble a fine, unpredictable cast, amongst them Gwendoline Christie, Secrets and Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires from I, Daniel Blake, The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt - and even, in his acting debut, Moss Side-born musician Barry Adamson. What's more, they all risk being upstaged by little-known Romanian actress Fatma Mohamed. Strickland's muse - she's appeared in all five of his feature films - she steals the film as the witchy cashier at a department store.

Genuinely unsettling and simultaneously (but intentionally) laugh-out-loud funny, it tips queasily back and forth between the two, conjuring a compellingly strange world in which viewers can lose themselves, if they dare.

 Oddity (Damian McCarthy, 2024)

Modern horror films tend to fall into one of two different camps: the slightly pretentious, art-housey 'elevated horror' type (terrible phrase - since when did horror need 'elevating?'), occupying territory closer to the dark, psychological thriller and too often falling short of delivering the requisite solid chills. Otherwise, they're more traditional jump-scare-tastic frightfests, too often forgetting to include useful ingredients such as imagination, originality and subtlety.

Rising Irish director McCarthy is ploughing his own furrow though, delivering no-nonsense, unapologetic horror movies complete with lashings of wit, style and ideas. His 2020 debut, Caveat, is very effective, and his latest, Hokum - shifting to a bigger budget - is engaging and entertaining. But his second film, Oddity, probably holds the crowd as his best so far. (Eagle-eyed viewers might like to look out for certain curious objects, not least a toy rabbit, that crop up repeatedly throughout the three films.)

Hokum explores the unusual bond between two twin sisters, both played by Carolyn Bracken, and was mostly shot in a converted barn in County Cork - the same location McCarthy used in Caveat, in fact. It tells a story that wouldn't have felt out of place in Victorian times, but in a manner that feels delightfully fresh and contemporary, and contains some genuinely jaw-droppingly scary moments - and it doesn't shy away from the supernatural aspects of horror. At this rate, there might well be life in the old genre yet.

Andy - along with actor/comic Toby Hadoke - will be introducing a special screening of Quatermass and the Pit at Home on Sunday, 1 November 2026. Details here.

Tomorrow, Brontë Schiltz of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies goes international with her pick.