What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? sees a change of direction for Robert Aldrich's unofficial trilogy which all involve "ageing actresses" in macabre thrillers (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush. Hush, Sweet Charlotte). The busy Aldrich only produced What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, calling in TV director Lee H Katzin (a Mission: Impossible regular) to handle the megaphone. Aldrich also opted to shoot the film in pastel colours appropriate to the unusual Arizona desert setting rather than the gothic black and white of the earlier films. The film cast the less iconic Geraldine Page as the genteelly unpleasant Mrs Clare Marrable. Left apparently penniless by her departed husband, Mrs M opts to keep up appearances by hiring a succession of timid elderly housekeepers, bossing them around with well-spoken nastiness, duping them out of their life savings and, on the pretence of getting help with a midnight tree-planting program, lures them into their own graves, batters them to death and plants lovely pines over them. Page gets her own way with the meek likes of Mildred Dunnock, until the feistier, red-wigged R!uth Gordon applies for the job and gets down to amateur sleuthing. While Bette Davis and her partners went wildly over the top in previous films, Page and Gordon play more subtly, finding odd pathetic moments in between the monstrous, irony-laced horror stuff. [+]

Certain to remain one of the greatest haunted-house movies ever made, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is antithetical to all the gory horror films of subsequent decades, because its considerable frights remain implicitly rooted in the viewer's sensitivity to abject fear. A classic spook-fest based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (which also inspired the 1999 remake directed by Jan de Bont), the film begins with a prologue that concisely establishes the dark history of Hill House, a massive New England mansion (actually filmed in England) that will play host to four daring guests determined to investigate-and hopefully debunk-the legacy of death and ghostly possession that has given the mansion its terrifying reputation. Consumed by guilt and grief over her mother's recent death and driven to adventure by her belief in the supernatural, Eleanor Vance (Julie Harris) is the most unstable-and therefore the most vulnerable-visitor to Hill House. She's invited there by anthropologist Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), along with the bohemian lesbian Theodora (Claire Bloom), who has acute extra-sensory abilities, and glib playboy Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn, from Wise's West Side Story), who will gladly inherit Hill House if it proves to be hospitable. Of course, the shadowy mansion is anything but welcoming to its unwanted intruders. Strange noises, from muffled wails to deafening pounding, set the stage for even scarier occurrences, including a door that appears to breathe (with a slowly turning doorknob that's almost unbearably suspenseful), unexplained writing on walls, and a delicate spiral staircase that seems to have a life of its own. The genius of The Haunting lies in the restraint of Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding, who elicit almost all of the film's mounting terror from the psychology of its characters-particularly Eleanor, whose grip on sanity grows increasingly tenuous. The presence of lurking spirits relies heavily on the power of suggestion (likewise the cautious handling of Theodora's attraction to Eleanor) and the film's use of sound is more terrifying than anything Wise could have shown with his camera. Like Jack Clayton's 1961 chiller, The Innocents, The Haunting knows the value of planting the seeds of terror in the mind, as opposed to letting them blossom graphically on the screen. [+]

It took a long time for Hammer's 1958 version of Dracula to turn into a franchise, and it was ten years before Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, the third film in the series, continued where Dracula-Prince of Darkness (1965) left off. The vampire count is accidentally resurrected by the blood of a priest when Monsignor Muller (the excellent Rupert Davies replacing Peter Cushing, whose Professor Van Helsing is absent) exorcises Castle Dracula. The Lord of the Undead soon has the priest under his power, and sets about claiming the Monsignor's niece Maria (Veronica Carlson) as his bride. Maria is in love with Paul (Barry Andrews), more a 60's English "angry young man" than a Victorian hero, yet only he can save the day, the film contrasting his atheism against much Catholicism. Working as a taut, Gothic thriller, the intensity is maintained to a large degree by James Barnard's excellent score and, of course, by Christopher Lee's magnetic interpretation of Count Dracula. The eroticism is stronger than in previous Hammer Draculas, the palpably electric blood-lust marking the movie as a high-point before the series' gradual decline, beginning with Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970). -Gary S. Dalkin.

If Hammer Studios had ever set up a Japanese franchise, the outcome might have looked rather like this. Kaneto Shindo's film has something of the lurid, full-throated relish for the horror of Hammer at its best, plus a visual elegance all its own. The story is based on a folk tale, set in Japan's war-torn 14th century. The action takes place almost entirely in a riverside marshland overgrown with tall swaying reeds. A woman and her daughter-in-law living in a hut prey on wounded samurai warriors fleeing from a nearby battlefield, killing them and selling their armour for handfuls of rice. When the younger woman falls for a handsome young deserter, the mother decides to put a stop to the affair. But the method she chooses demands a terrible price. Shooting in lustrous widescreen black-and-white, Shindo creates an eerie, atmospheric world haunted by the ceaseless dry whisperings of the reeds. None of the characters is loveable, or even likeable, but the thorough rapacity of the women, and the raw sexuality of the lovers, convey a fierce determination to survive even at the lowest scavenging edge of a violent society. -Philip Kemp.

Vacationing in northern California, Alfred Hitchcock was struck by a story in a Santa Cruz newspaper: "Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes". From this peculiar incident, and his memory of a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the master of suspense created one of his strangest and most terrifying films. The Birds follows a chic blonde, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), as she travels to the coastal town of Bodega Bay to hook up with a rugged fellow (Rod Taylor) she's only just met. Before long the town is attacked by marauding birds, and Hitchcock's skill at staging action is brought to the fore. Beyond the superb effects, however, The Birds is also one of Hitchcock's most psychologically complicated scenarios, a tense study of violence, loneliness, and complacency. What really gets under your skin are not the bird skirmishes but the anxiety and the eerie quiet between attacks. The director elevated an unknown model, Tippi Hedren (mother of Melanie Griffith), to being his latest cool, blond leading lady, an experience that was not always easy on the much-pecked Ms. Hedren. Still, she returned for the next Hitchcock picture, the underrated Marnie. Treated with scant attention by serious critics in 1963, The Birds has grown into a classic and-despite the sci-fi trappings-one of Hitchcock's most serious films. [+]