34. The City of the Dead (1960)
I really enjoyed this movie. It was more of a thriller than a horror movie, featuring a very young Christopher Lee (young to the point where it took me half the movie before I recognised him). The movie opens on a village in New England in 1692 where a witch is about to be burned at the stake, as that happens she curses the village and everyone in it. Fast-forward to modern day and we're at college where history professor Alan Driscoll is giving a lecture on historic witchcraft in New England. One of the students wishes to make her final paper something special and tells her professor that she'd like to go stay in an old, rural New England village and dig through the history of the place. The professor sends her to Whitewood, where he says he knows some people, and from there the young woman gets entangled in real-life witchcraft. The movie was chilling and thrilling, and really holds up to today. Except of course the weird close-ups of staring faces that happened several times in the movie. I think they were supposed to be chilling, but they came off as ridiculous. All in all, one of my favourites on the list so far.
Original title: Il mulino delle donne di pietra. To someone who finds dubbing to be jarring, Italian movies from this period are very hard to watch. This is because they used international actors, allowing them to speak the lines in their own languages while filming, and then recorded the sound elsewhere and just put it over the film. The Italian movies I've watched so far have had two versions: one with English sound and one with Italian sound. La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday) was good enough that it almost didn't matter, but this movie was jarring from end to finish. The plot was weak and the voice acting was absolutely terrible. I dislike the whole notion of "I met you two seconds ago but I love you and I want to marry you and spend my whole life with you" and the first half of this movie centers around that idea. In the second half it abruptly turns into a game of resurrection and murder and conquering death. It's like it made a complete turnaround from a silly romantic drama to a paranormal murder-mystery. The storytelling was janky and disjointed and I feel like they could've gone two different directions with the story, but chose the one that made the least sense. Turning it into a straight-up haunted house movie probably would've been better than the mess this is.
36. Dead of Night (1945)
When I started watching this movie I really wasn't sure at first, but it turned into one of the best films on this list. It starts with a man arriving at an old farm house where a bunch of people are having tea. The man is an architect who's been called down to a friend of a friend to do a reconstruction job over the weekend. The other people are old friends. The architect arrives and is immediately frazzled and when he explains that he's having a major case of déjà vu despite never having been there or seen these people before, but everything that's happening is part of a recurring nightmare that he's been having, the whole group starts to offer up their own tales of the supernatural. The first story "The Hearse Driver" didn't do anything for me. The second one "Christmas Story" was a classic tale of a girl who stumbles upon a ghost of a boy in an old house. Creepy, but predictable. The third story was "The Haunted Mirror", which was also a classic tale of a haunted object affecting the person using it. It was a classic, but this story is when my interest was piqued. Unfortunately, the fourth one "Golfing Story" was pretty dumb and my interest was lost and I started scrolling through my phone and only listening to the movie. Then came the last story called "The Ventriloquist's Dummy". Anyone who knows me knows that dolls creep me out, especially those kinds of dummies. So to me this story was creepy from the get-go. It turned into a classic tale of a possessed doll compelling a person to do its bidding. I know how these stories usually go, but this one had a very simple but also very elegant twist at the end that I really enjoyed. That last story was absolutely the highlight of the movie. After all of the stories are told, the scenario unfolds exactly like the architect's dream predicted, and although the sudden change of pace in the movie's storytelling at first seems kind of jarring, the end of the movie offers a completely unexpected twist (for my part) and I really enjoyed seeing the whole thing unfold. Definitely one of the most enjoyable movies on the list.
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