5 best lesser-known horror films for Halloween

Charlie Lyne’s top five lesser-known horrors

Roger Moore in The Man Who Haunted Himself (Warner-Pathé)

The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)

Roger Moore delivers the performance of a lifetime in a camp but surprisingly intoxicating slice of 70s psychedelia in which a buttoned-down City worker named Harold Pelham finds himself shadowed by an outgoing metrosexual doppelganger, whose shady business dealings and extramarital affairs are inevitably blamed on our uptight hero.

The House with Laughing Windows (1976)

Italian “giallo” cinema — a horror subgenre populated by blood-soaked murder mysteries — produced a string of hits through the 1970s, but today it’s the trend’s minor entries that prove most fascinating, not least this unnerving story of an art restorer sent to repair a mysterious fresco.

Parents (1989)

Acclaimed character actor Bob Balaban’s little-seen directorial debut takes a Lynchian subversion of 1950s American suburbia and pushes it to its very limits with the story of a youngster who, following a series of bizarre nightmares, begins to suspect that his parents might be ritualistic cannibals.

Der Todesking (1990)

German provocateur Jörg Buttgereit’s wildly uncommercial opus explores death in all its forms through a series of unconnected surrealist shorts. The individual episodes may bore you to tears but the framing narrative —

featuring vividly realistic time-lapse footage of a body decomposing — is can’t-look-away stuff.

Amber Alert (2012)

This US film possesses many of the 21st Century’s worst horror tropes: a found footage gimmick, a selection of gormless protagonists, and a tired insistence that it’s all “a true story”. But against all odds, this low-key tale of two witnesses to a child abduction is one of the most terrifying scary movies in years.