Released in the U.S. as The Girl Was Young, this Hitchcock film was based on the novel A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey. In the book, the storyline involving Robert, Erica, and the missing coat is a subplot, not the main tale.

Christine Clay (Pamela Carne), a successful actress, and her ex-husband, Guy (George Curzon), are arguing over whether their quick Reno divorce is final. What is final is her washing up dead on a beach and the cops blaming the man who found her body, writer Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney). He’s defended by a cop’s daughter, Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), and sneaks out of the courtroom and rides on the running board of her car to escape the law.

One of Robert’s old coats is behind the killing; the belt was used. He can’t find that coat until he sees it on a homeless man. The belt is missing, however, and the man tells Robert and Erica that a man with twitchy eyes — just like the one we saw Guy have at the beginning — gave him the overcoat. 

Despite how long ago this came out, the end is still great, as a crane shot reveals that Guy is a drummer in a band — in blackface — and he starts twitching so much when the cops arrive that he has to take medicine that knocks him out. Hitchcock said that it took two days to shoot the long tracking shot in the dance hall, as the camera pans from the ceiling to the band to Guy’s eyes.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

“One Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) is defeated by Australian heavyweight champion Bob Corby (Ian Hunter), whose manager offers to have Jack be Bob’s full-time sparring partner. But oh, Bob— he’s all over Jack’s girlfriend, Mabel (Lillian Hall-Davis), buying her a bracelet and canoodling with her. On their wedding day, Jack starts to believe that Bob is trying to steal his wife. He’s right, so he trains hard to be in contention for the title, wanting to take away the only thing that matters more to boxers than their women. You know how it ends? Mabel decides to leave Bob for Jack, giving him the power in their fight to knock out his former friend.

Yes, Alfred Hitchcock directed and wrote a boxing movie. At the age of 28, this was only his fourth movie, yet he was already demonstrating his unique storytelling skills. Despite his young age, Hitchcock used advanced camera tricks, like the Schüfftan process, to simulate a large audience for the Royal Albert Hall final fight, a technique he would later use in ‘ The Man Who Knew Too Much. The Ring is also significant as Hitchcock’s only “original” film, one not based on a play or book with no other published writers collaborating. 

It may also be the first movie where someone gives the finger.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Released in the U.S. as The Woman Alone, this Alfred Hitchcock film starts with movie theater owner Karl Verloc (Oskar Homolka) shutting down the power in London before working with a group of terrorists to leave bombs all over the city. Detective Sergeant Ted Spencer (John Loder) is working undercover to catch him, posing as a grocery store owner while starting to fall for the man’s wife, played by Sylvia Sidney.

The machinations of the terrorists lead to her brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) being killed, and a depressed Verloc literally walks into a knife that his wife is holding, ending his life. Spencer tries to keep her from confessing to the murder, and when the final bomb explodes, destroying Verloc’s body, she is able to get away with it. 

This was loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a story about a woman who learns that her husband is a terrorist. As Hitchcock had already made another movie called Secret Agent. When this was remade in 1959 for the Canadian TV series Startime, Homolka reprised the same role.

When the bus driver remarks in Inglorious Basterds that  “You can’t bring that on here. It’s flammable,” it comes from this.

In one of his interviews with François Truffaut, Hitchcock claimed he was wrong to shoot the scene where Stevie dies, because the character received too much sympathy and “the public was resentful”. Truffaut commented that having a child die in a movie is a “ticklish matter” and an “an abuse of cinematic power.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

La Noche de Walpurgis (released in the United States as The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman and in the UK as both Shadow of the Werewolf and Werewolf Shadow) was the fifth time that Paul Naschy played the doomed lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky.

Written by Naschy and directed by Leon Klimovsky (The People Who Own the Dark, The Dracula Saga), this film seems to come from another planet, perhaps because so much of it is in slow motion. It also kicked off a horror craze in Spain that maniacs like me are still enjoying to this day.

After the last film — The Fury of the Wolf Man — Waldemar Daninsky is brought back to life during his autopsy. After all, you don’t remove silver bullets from a werewolf’s heart and expect him to treat you nicely. He kills both for their trouble and runs into the night.

Meanwhile, Elvira and her friend Genevieve are looking for the tomb of Countess Wandessa de Nadasdy. Coincidentally, as these things happen, her grave is near Daninsky’s castle, so our dashing werewolf friend invites them to stay. Within hours, Elvira has bled all over the corpse of the Countess (Patty Shepard, Hannah, Queen of the Vampires), who soon rises and turns both girls into her slaves.

But what of the werewolf, you ask? Don’t worry — he shows up too, after we get our fill of the ladies slowly murdering people in the forest. Also, as these things happen, Waldemar must fight the Countess before the only woman who ever loved him, Elvira (Yelena Samarina, The House of 1,000 Dolls), finally kills him again.

There’s also a scene where our furry friend battles a skeleton wearing the robes of a monk in the graveyard. Some claim that this scene inspired Spanish director Amando de Ossorio to write Tombs of the Blind Dead just a few months later.

Daninsky’s lycanthropy is not explained in this one. Was it the bite of a yeti that made him howl at the moon? Is he a college professor or a count? Who cares!

Based on The Ticket-of-Leave Man, an 1863 play by Tom Taylor that introduced the character Hawkshaw the Detective, a popular figure in Victorian literature known for his cunning and relentless pursuit of justice, the name of this movie is a reference to the ticket of leave issued to convicts upon release.

Robert Brierly (John Warwick) and the notorious criminal, The Tiger (Tod Slaughter), both find themselves entangled in a love triangle with May Edwards (Marjorie Taylor). The Tiger, in a bid to separate Brierly from his beloved, orchestrates a cunning plan. He manipulates the situation to send Brierly to jail for passing bad checks, and then attempts to frame him for a heinous crime.

Another film that teams up Slaughter with director George King, this also has Hawkshaw the detective (Robert Adair) as the hero, stalking beer gardens for info on The Tiger and his henchmen. Soon, The Tiger has become Purvis, CEO of The Good Samaritan Help Society, presiding over this charity but really committing villainous deeds. I mean, the dude sets his office on fire and watches as one of his men burns inside, laughing like a lunatic. 

And of course, what’s a Tod Slaughter movie without his signature performance? His over-the-top cackling and scene-stealing antics are what you’re here for.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Bill from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum always jokes about movies where nothing happens as being his favorite movies. If that’s true, he must absolutely adore this movie.

Christopher Lee, the main selling point of this movie, said, “Some of the films I’ve been in I regret making. I got conned into making these pictures in almost every case by people who lied to me. Some years ago, I got a call from my producers saying that they were sending me a script and that five very distinguished American actors were also going to be in the film. Actors like José Ferrer, Dean Jagger, and John Carradine. So I thought “Well, that’s all right by me”. But it turned out it was a complete lie. Appropriately the film was called End Of The World.”

The film opens with a shaken Lee as a Catholic priest trying to get to a phone call. All hell breaks loose and a diner is destroyed, with the owner blinded by coffee before being killed and the pay phone being blown up. Turns out that Father Pergado is due to be replaced by the alien Zindar. Good start. And it was the trailer, filled with science fiction machines and evil nuns that got me interested in this picture!

Professor Andrew Boran discovers radio signals that predict natural disasters.   He and his wife investigate, discovering that they come from a convent where aliens have taken over. The aliens want him to join them, as the Earth is too diseased to exist.

The leads are wooden and only seem to want to have sex with one another, yet there are no love scenes. They’re utter failures at being heroic and simply move the plot along to its conclusion, where we learn that the Earth is filled with glitter. It blows up real good!

There are some ridiculous moments, such as Lee’s true form and seeing nuns operate supercomputers. Seriously, if I just read the description of this movie, it’d sound like everything I love. But seeing the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Man, what a title. Better than the original one, Dracula is Dead…and Well and Living in London, which upset Christoper Lee so much that he was outspoken at the press conference that introduced the movie: “I’m doing it under protest… I think it is fatuous. I can think of twenty adjectives — fatuous, pointless, absurd. It’s not a comedy, but it’s got a comic title. I don’t see the point.”

The eighth Hammer Dracula movie, the seventh and final to star Lee (John Forbes-Robertson played Dracula with David de Keyser as the voice in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires) and the third and last to put Lee’s vampire against Cushing’s Van Helsing (they would appear in only one more movie together, House of the Long Shadows), this is pretty much the end of an era.

Every time I think of this movie, I remember Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum excitedly saying to me — after we saw the trailer at a drive-in — “It’s not enough that Dracula is a vampire. Now he has an entire army of Satanists and he wants to rule the world and he has a plague!”

It turns out there’s a government occult conspiracy that only Van Helsing can stop, and he’s bringing along his granddaughter, Patsy Stone, err, Jessica Van Helsing.

As the cabal prepares for the Sabbath of the Undead, their mysterious fifth member is revealed to be, of course, Dracula, using the identity of reclusive property developer D. D. Denham and operating out of the very same churchyard where he died in Dracula A.D. 1972.

Somehow, this is more of an Eurospy science-fiction movie than a traditional horror film, and that’s kind of the beauty of the whole thing.

Somehow, this fell into the public domain in the U.S. That’s why it’s on so many Mill Creek sets under this title and the edited TV version Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This is based on a true story, as The Red Barn Murder refers to an 1827 murder in Polstead, Suffolk, England. There, a young woman named Maria Marten was shot dead by her lover, William Corder, at the Red Barn, which was a local landmark. The two were going to elope, and afterward, Corder sent letters to Marten’s family claiming they were married and living on the Isle of Wight, but that she was not well. Maria’s stepmother had a dream that Maria had been murdered, and soon, her body was discovered in the barn. 

Corder wanted to keep his relationship with Marten a secret, but she gave birth to their child in 1827 and wanted to be his wife. He may have killed the child, but still agreed to the wedding. The murder was investigated by James Lea, who was one of the police officers who tried to find the legendary Spring-Heeled Jack later. 

In this, Tod Slaughter is Corder, who murders the pregnant Maria (Sophie Stewart) and buries her beneath the barn. She had another lover, Carlos (Eric Portman), who found and brought Corder to the law.

Slaughter debuted on screen in this at the age of 49!

The honest Maria Marten already had two children out of wedlock and “was notoriously free with her affections.” Carlos isn’t a real person; as for the stepmother’s dream, research today believes that she was an accomplice to the murder. As for how old Corder is, that’s also made up, as well as his being a rich man.

You can watch this on Tubi.

A series of murders happens with a face appearing at each victim’s window, the image of what people begin to call the Wolf Man. A bank clerk named Lucien Cortier (John Warwick) is blamed, which pleases Chevalier Lucio del Gardo (Tod Slaughter), as he’s the real killer. 

According to Wikipedia, “Slaughter’s blood-and-thunder films were too British in theme, too old-fashioned and broadly played for mainstream audiences, and thus they were not released by any of the major film companies. Instead, they were handled by independent distributors in New York (usually Select Attractions or Arthur Ziehm, Inc.), and they did attract a specialized following among horror fans.”

The fourth time this story had been filmed — it started as a play by F. Brooke Warren and was also made in 1919, 1920 and 1932 — it did play on TV in the U.S. American Broadcasting Company’s short-lived First Nighter Theatre aired it in New York City on November 15, 1950, while it also played Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Philadelphia on the Friday TV Thriller. 

There’s also a scientist, Professor LeBlanc (Wallace Evennett), who wants to use electricity to stop the murders and even uses a zap of the juice to bring a dead person back to life! Obviously, none of this movie is based on reality and that’s how I like it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Daphne Du Maurier wrote the books that Hitchcock based Rebecca and The Birds, as well as this, his last British movie. Those two are way better, trust me. 

Mary Yellan (Maureen O’Hara), with her Aunt Patience (Marie Ney) and Uncle Joss (Leslie Banks), works at the Jamaica Inn, which kind of does what Antonio Bay did to ships full of lepers: lure them to the rocks, shipwreck them and take whatever they have. Sir Humphrey Pengallan (Charles Laughton) is the one making it happen, and Mary soon learns that her family is involved. Only lawman Jem Trehearne (Robert Newton) can help.

This is an entire movie of Laughton mugging and being out of control. If you like that, good news! Everyone else is in a different film, a more serious one! It looks great, though. The ships are gorgeous and, well, O’Hara is beautiful.

Hitchcock said he felt caught between Laughton and the actor’s business partners; he stated that he didn’t direct this movie as referee, but as a director. Laughton also asked to be filmed only in close-ups, as he had not yet learned how his character should walk. Ten days into filming, he started to waltz.  

You can watch this on Tubi.