h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

MM, well, I'll try and keep it chronological, if nothing else...

The German expressionists virtually defined horror for a two decade period btween 1920 and 1940, and produced some of the most staggeringly beautiful films ever made - Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Murnau's haunting Nosferatu (so good that Coppolla kept in several key elements for his silly remake of Dracula) and perhaps most extraordinary, the halucinogenic, claustrophibic Vampyre from Denmark's Karl Dryer.

And they didn't give up when they came to Hollywood - young upstart studio Universal wanted a quick buck, and went after the horror market with a vengeance, virtually cornering the market between 1933 and 1945 with a series of filmas that have since become synomnymous with the Universal House style, amongst them the brillant Frankenstein, which gave the world one of the most powerful images of horror ever in Boris Karloff's square-headed monster, by james Whale (director of the notorious Freaks) and Karl Fruend's The Mummy (also starring Karloff), which was perhaps the pinnacle of the marriage of commercial and artistic success for the Expressionists.

Another whole style of film-making was given to us by a Frenchman, director Jacques Tourneur and an Englishman, producer Val Lewton who produced a series of wonderful films in the forties and fifties, kicking of with the startlingly feminist Cat People (far superior to Schraders awful blood and sex remake), the childs fantasy like Return of the cat people, the simply stunning I walked with Zombie and culminating with The Night of the Demon, a stunning example of what can be achieved with tight direction, excellent scripts and little budget.

Meanwhile, in the States, the cold war was on and the invaders took strange shapes indeed. Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing taught us to Look to the Skies for our enemies, and both set new standards for clammy palmed paranoia about the identity of our neighbours. Jack Arnold went to South America and unearthed The Creature From the Black Lagoon, a film which was hugely influential on the young Steven Speilberg (In particular, Arnold's use of water level cameras was to imprint itself on the young Speilberg and re-emerge in Jaws).

By then, young English company Hammer had indentified a market in horror, and set about exploiting it with a vengeance. With a cast of great British character actors, Freddie Francis' lurid clour photography, hammer churned out movies as great as Dracula and Frankenstein, and as bad as Dracula AD 1972...In 1967 they gave young Tyro Michael Reeves (only 23) a chance to make Witchfinder General, and it remains one of the greatest achievements of British Cinema.

Roger Corman had ploughinhg his own route back in the US, learning how to make movies without losing a cent, and what wonderful films they were - The Fall of the House of Usher, Tomb of Lygeia (somewhat spoiled by Vincent Price's ridiculous blonde wig), and best of all, The Masque of the Red Death.

As the sixties drew to a close, George Romero took horror by the collar and gave it a shake it would never forget. His 1967 <?> cheapie Night of the Living Dead marked the beginning of a new, highly politically charged horror cinema - the first movie dealt with racism, the second, Dawn of the dead, with consumerism, the third Day of the Dead with the relationship between science and the military. The horror in Romero's films was the realization that we, the survivors might be worse monsters than the zombies themselves...

And then there's Dario Argento, whose warped imagination brought us Suspiria, Inferno and Tenebrae films that dripped menace and conspiracy, where things whispered in the shadows and spoke of things beyond our knowledge. David Cronenbourg taught us to fear our own bodies, which are, in his films, ready to rebel and betray us at any time. Wes Craven gave us Nightmares that could kill us and horror with a dream logic. Sam raimi told us that the only way to deal with horrors with excessive force and hysterical laughter. The Blair Witch taught us again what we had always known - that there are wild places on the earth where we are not be, and where we cannot control things. The Ring gave us rebellious technology and scientific programmes that backfire.

I've loved them all. Pick a favourite, I couldn't possibly...

Of course, james wjhale didn't direct Freaks, but Tod Browning (who directed Universal's Dracula).

I also appearto have forgotten to mention John Carpenter's mould breaking teen slasher flick, Halloween, which is an unforgiveable oversight as it is probably my favourite of all horror movies if I'm pushed...

What I remember about the Karloff-starring version of "The Mummy" was reading the mini-preview in the Guardian in which some hack enthused about Karloff's bandages.

In the final film, of course, Karloff is only briefly glimpsed in his bandages (scaring the s**t out of some poor soul guarding the tomb) and then becomes a "normal" (if rather gaunt and shadowy) person.