Be afraid ... be very afraid

There is blood. There is grisly murder. And there is no happy ending. Get ready to scream, says Ryan Gilbey, a new breed of British horror film is coming your way

Do you want to hear something really scary? The last time there was anything resembling a British horror movie industry, most of the directors to whom the task of reviving it now falls were having nightmares about Daleks. There have been bright-spots since then – a Hellraiser here or a Paperhouse there. But I spy, in My Little Eye, something beginning with "B" – British horror risen from its cobwebbed tomb to set nerves and cinema cash registers jangling again.

Marc Evans' supremely confident picture – My Little Eye – is one of the first examples of this new generation of British horror, with more than 20 others currently in production or poised for release. Dog Soldiers and Long Time Dead made little impact in cinemas earlier this year, while the problem with Lighthouse was not its shoestring budget but its shoestring imagination. Such films don't even deserve to compete with churn-'em-out US slasher films like this year's Jason X or the upcoming Halloween: Resurrection. But hopes are high for Deathwatch, a World War I ghost story that marks Jamie Bell's first role since Billy Elliot; then there is The Gathering, starring Christina Ricci as a backpacker who experiences hallucinations after being involved in a car accident in rural England; and The Dark House, an adaptation of MR James' story The Haunted Dolls House. And hopefully the collapse of FilmFour will not be enough to kill off horror-tinged productions planned by directors Lynne Ramsey and Jonathan Glazer.

Perhaps the prospect of this horror revival would not be quite so tantalising if it wasn't spearheaded by My Little Eye, a work of uncommon daring. Evans' film is a deceptive beast. For a start, you would never guess that it was British, at least not until the audience becomes the target of the picture's unsparing sadism. No valuable lessons are learned here, unless you count the obvious ones like, "get out of the way of that man with the big axe". And there is no closure, except of the axe-swinging kind, obviously. We are left alone with our terror at the end of the film, rather than being given instructions on how to process it into a learning experience. They wouldn't be that cruel in LA.

And yet the film pretends to be American, the better to maximise our surprise when its biting cynicism takes hold. "The Americans own that kind of film," Evans has said, "and yet I felt like I was saying, 'Can I have my turn to try and make a film about that house, but to make it in a very British way?'" The cast is comprised of those Californian cookie-cutter types who routinely turn up playing 11th victim in the 12th part of Friday the 13th – the sort of jobbing actors that no one misses when they decide to wander off into the forest in their underwear to investigate that strange noise that sounds vaguely like a chainsaw. In My Little Eye, that's precisely the point. These five sacrificial lambs are taking part in a live reality-show webcast; they're exactly the kind of nobodies who wander distractedly around the sets of series like The Real World and Big Brother.

Like The Blair Witch Project, My Little Eye faithfully adheres to the conceit that this is all really happening before us. Evans shoots the film in the style of a webcast, utilising security cameras that whirr ominously as they track their subjects. His trump card is the night-vision that turns the air itself the colour of Linda Blair's vomit, and bestows upon every face, no matter how innocuous, a pair of piercing lycanthropic eyes. That's fitting, since the real horror here is human. That was arguably the case in The Blair Witch Project – wasn't it a teensy bit disturbing that even as Heather felt the Grim Reaper's breath on her neck, she made certain diligently to photograph her own terror? Just as she represented media-queen ambition gone berserk, so My Little Eye implicitly signals the hazards of media-age passivity – the brutal detachment nurtured in anyone who just prefers to watch.

Evans isn't the first homegrown director to indict the audience for its bloodthirsty voyeurism. The classics of that strain of cinema – Hitchcock's Rear Window and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom – were also the work of icy British hands, demented British minds. But he is the first of this country's filmmakers to locate that subversive argument within a conventional horror format, and a traditionally American one at that.

Even at the peak of its horror industry, Britain had looked to America for inspiration. Horror movies centering on Frankenstein, Dracula and various species of werewolf had been the stock-in-trade of US studios like Universal. But UK companies like Hammer and Amicus brought to its own productions a heightened Gothic eeriness that endured through to their decline in the mid-1970s. The quality control might have been slipping by the time of poppycock such as And Now The Screaming Starts, in which Ian Ogilvy and Stephanie Beacham were menaced by a severed hand, or the laughable portmanteau films (Asylum, Tales From The Crypt) lampooned in Steve Coogan's spoof series Dr Terrible's House of Horrible. But a British primness remained. That air of repression frequently identified as our defining national characteristic is also a crucial component of Gothic art, and at its most effective can result in something as agonisingly measured as The Innocents, Jack Clayton's film of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw – itself a primary influence on last year's hit The Others.

If there is a glaring difference between British and American horror movies, it is that restraint generally has less currency once you get to the other side of the Atlantic. Take the US industry's current boy wonder, the 31-year-old writer-director M Night Shyamalan. His 1999 ghost story The Sixth Sense is credited as the catalyst for the current horror revival, and visually at least it knew when to rely on understatement for its shocks. A UK production executive said last year: "A lot of people saw The Sixth Sense and said 'That could be done in Britain.'" You can just picture those producers studying the film with the same disbelief with which two Sopranos characters commiserated over Italy's failure to grasp the potential of coffee-houses and sun-dried tomatoes.

But what Shyamalan's films withhold in terms of gore, they over-compensate for in life lessons. The heroes of these movies have emotional ghosts that need laying to rest. The horror is always tediously metaphorical, always punctured by self-discovery, redemption, and other ingredients guaranteed to banish your nightmares (not to mention the likelihood of you ever enduring another M Night Shyamalan movie). The finest British horror movies – Witchfinder General, Don't Look Now, The Wicker Man – actively thwarted all attempts at finality with endings that raised more questions than they answered. It's hard even to know with The Wicker Man exactly what genre it is, at least until the devastating final scene provides dreadful confirmation.

Although only the most inattentive viewer will have that problem with My Little Eye, it retains that ambiguity which has frequently made the British horror film such a difficult and disturbing thing. The picture also indicates where the horror genre might be headed in the wake of the tongue-in-cheek slasher movies that boosted its value in the mid-1990s: the Scream trilogy, I Know What You Did Last Summer. My Little Eye uses the audience's knowingness to facilitate fear rather than facetiousness. We're not sharing in the gag anymore. Rather, the joke is on us. The laughter has died down. Now the screaming starts.

'My Little Eye' opens 4 October. 'Deathwatch' opens 31 October. 'The Gathering' is out next year