Welcome to Culture Vulture, and a special Halloween edition for the week of 31 October to 6 November 2026.
I’ve always enjoyed a good horror film, although the best ones offer rather more than blood, screams and an unfortunate teenager opening the wrong door.
Horror can expose our fears, our prejudices, and the darker side of perfectly ordinary people.
This week, we’ve got an excellent selection of films and programmes. So, dim the lights, and let’s begin.
First, John Carpenter’s The Fog, showing on Sky Arts at nine on Halloween night.
A small Californian town is preparing to celebrate its centenary. Unfortunately, its prosperity was founded upon a terrible betrayal, and the dead are returning to settle the account.
They come concealed in a luminous fog that rolls towards the shore.
Carpenter understood that anticipation can be far more frightening than spectacle. A lighthouse, an isolated radio station and a street disappearing into mist become instruments of terror.
We know something is approaching, but we can’t quite see it.
Underneath this beautifully constructed ghost story is a sharp idea: respectable communities often prefer to forget the injustices upon which their comfort was built.
The victims, it seems, have rather longer memories.
Next, Ghostwatch: The Night That Terrified Britain, on Channel 5 at quarter past nine.
In 1992, the BBC broadcast what appeared to be a live investigation into a haunted house.
Michael Parkinson and Sarah Greene were among the familiar presenters. That was the trick.
Viewers knew these people and trusted the BBC, so the increasingly bizarre events seemed alarmingly credible.
Ghostwatch was fiction, but some people believed they were watching real supernatural activity.
This retrospective explores the controversy and the cleverness of the original production.
It’s also remarkably relevant today. When something arrives in the familiar clothing of news or documentary, we may accept it rather too readily.
Ghostwatch knew that long before social media.
Film4 has Talk to Me at ten o’clock.
This Australian horror begins with a wonderfully unpleasant object: an embalmed hand which allows a group of teenagers to contact the dead.
Rather than treating this discovery with caution, they turn it into a party game.
There’s something horribly convincing about that. The séances are filmed, shared and repeated, until the desire to impress friends becomes more important than common sense.
But the film isn’t merely sneering at teenage foolishness.
Beneath its increasingly disturbing events is a serious story about grief, isolation and the need to feel connected to somebody.
I like horror that makes its violence matter.
Here, terrible choices have physical and emotional consequences.
It’s unsettling, sometimes brutal, and more intelligent than the premise initially suggests.
At ten forty-five, Sky Arts offers The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee.
Lee remains one of my favourite British actors.
His extraordinary height, commanding voice and ability to communicate menace with the slightest movement made him unforgettable as Dracula.
But I think the success of that role sometimes obscured how versatile he really was.
Consider The Wicker Man, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars.
These aren’t simply different costumes for the same Gothic monster. Lee could suggest intelligence, authority, humour and even vulnerability.
He was a genuinely impressive performer who sometimes had to fight against his own legend.
This documentary should be a welcome reminder that an actor’s most famous role isn’t necessarily the measure of his entire career.
That leads naturally to Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters, available on Prime Video.
Hammer transformed British horror cinema, bringing colour, sensuality and a distinctly Gothic extravagance to stories critics often dismissed as cheap thrills.
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing became international stars, but the studio’s influence went well beyond its leading actors.
Its costumes, sets, atmosphere and willingness to disturb the supposedly respectable made a lasting impression.
There’s a certain pleasure in watching the films today: they’re imaginative, unmistakably British, and often far more sophisticated than their reputation suggests.
Staying with Christopher Lee, The Wicker Man is available on BBC iPlayer until Sunday 1 November.
If you haven’t seen the original 1973 film, make it a priority.
A devout Christian policeman travels to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a girl.
What he finds is a community whose beliefs and customs are unlike anything he expects.
Lee plays Lord Summerisle, the island’s charismatic leader, with wonderful assurance.
What makes this folk horror so fascinating isn’t simply its increasingly sinister atmosphere.
It’s the confrontation between people absolutely convinced that their own beliefs are right.
Neither side finds much room for doubt, let alone compromise.
And that certainty takes the story somewhere truly disturbing.
It’s a remarkable film, with a conclusion that stays with you.
On Thursday, BBC Four is showing Carrie, Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.
Sissy Spacek plays Carrie White, an isolated schoolgirl bullied by her classmates and terrorised at home by her fanatically religious mother.
She also possesses telekinetic powers, but those powers aren’t where the horror really begins.
It’s in the humiliation, the everyday cruelty, and the appalling lack of kindness shown towards somebody already vulnerable.
De Palma’s direction is extravagant and often dazzling. The famous school prom is still a masterclass in mounting tension.
Yet Carrie remains painfully sympathetic even as the consequences become terrifying.
That’s the film’s real achievement.
It reminds us that some monsters don’t have supernatural powers.
They’re perfectly ordinary people, behaving with extraordinary cruelty.
Immediately afterwards, Mark Lawson talks to Stephen King about his writing and career.
King’s enormous popularity has sometimes made literary critics rather sniffy about him.
I think that’s a mistake.
Few contemporary writers are better at portraying ordinary communities in which something is deeply wrong.
The supernatural often provides the occasion for the story, but the real subject is human weakness, fear or cruelty.
And he’s hardly confined to horror.
Think of Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption.
King understands people, which is why his stories survive beyond the initial shock.
For something gentler, although still wonderfully Gothic, ITV2 has Edward Scissorhands on Saturday afternoon.
Johnny Depp plays an artificial young man left unfinished by his inventor, with scissors where his hands ought to be.
A suburban neighbourhood welcomes him as a curiosity, then gradually turns against him when novelty gives way to suspicion.
Tim Burton creates a beautiful contrast between Edward’s strange appearance and the colourful conformity of the people around him.
Danny Elfman’s score makes it especially moving.
Beneath the fantasy is a rather sad truth: being different can make you an easy target, even when you’ve done nothing wrong.
Sky Documentaries has Boorman and the Devil at eight on Saturday, examining John Boorman’s notorious Exorcist sequel.
Now, Boorman was no incompetent.
He made Point Blank, Deliverance and Excalibur.
So how did such a talented filmmaker become involved in one of horror cinema’s most spectacular misjudgements?
I rather enjoy documentaries about artistic disasters.
They show how ambition, money and strong personalities can produce results nobody intended.
A failed film can be almost as revealing as a masterpiece, sometimes more so.
There is a radio treat, too.
At eight on Halloween night, Magic Classical presents Soundtracking: Horror with Ayanna Witter-Johnson.
Consider how much of the terror in Psycho, Halloween or The Exorcist comes from what we hear rather than what we see.
A few notes can warn us that something dreadful is coming, or lull us into a false sense of security.
Music plays with expectation, often more effectively than elaborate special effects.
Sometimes the scariest part of a film is the soundtrack.
On Friday, Talking Pictures TV has Brian De Palma’s Body Double.
It’s a lurid thriller about a struggling actor whose habit of spying on a woman leads him into a murder mystery.
De Palma plays with voyeurism and the uneasy relationship between looking and knowing.
The film is deliberately provocative, and its treatment of women remains controversial.
But as an exercise in manipulating the audience, it’s certainly distinctive.
Not subtle, perhaps, but never dull.
And on Paramount+, Dexter: Resurrection continues the story of television’s most unsettling vigilante killer.
Michael C. Hall remains compelling as Dexter Morgan, a man whose crimes we’re repeatedly invited to excuse because some of his victims are worse than he is.
It’s a clever moral trap.
How much violence will audiences tolerate when they believe the target deserves it?
After so many years, that uncomfortable question still gives the character much of his fascination.
So that’s our Halloween selection: ghosts, Gothic monsters, human cruelty, dark humour and a few genuine cinematic classics.
What the best horror films share is the power to make us think as well as shiver.
Until next time, happy Halloween, and pleasant nightmares.
