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1974 remains a banner year for horror movies. This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas, as well as smaller films like Abby, The Perfume of the Lady in Black, and Sugar Hill. Buried in that year’s releases, Frightmare stands as a unique relic, a gloriously bloody proto-slasher transmitting a macabre tale about cannibalism. Once described as a “morally repellent British horror film, without an ounce of humour” by The Times critic Philip French, the Pete Walker-directed cult classic carries the essence of 1963’s Blood Feast with its own curiously deranged skin. With the holidays in full swing, it’s time to give thanks for one of the most underrated ‘70s slashers with more going for it than meets the eye.

The film, written by David McGillivray (Satan’s Slave), tells the tale of Edmund (Rupert Davies) and his murderous wife Dorothy (Sheila Keith...

by Nick Schager

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the Jessica Chastain-headlined scary- mother thriller Mama.]

Psychosis is inherited in Frightmare, as is a hunger for human flesh. Pete Walker's under-sung 1974 gem (also known as Cover Up) is a Hammer Horror-ish like- mother/like-daughter tale of madness and murder, detailing the strange case of Edmund (Rupert Davies) and Dorothy Yates (Sheila Keith), a couple who in 1957 London is sentenced by a judge to a mental hospital for six killings. The ruling is that they shall remain locked up until they're fit to re-enter society—which they supposedly are fifteen years later, thanks to a mental health system that appears to have absolutely no ability to differentiate sanity from insanity. Free to roam again, they hole up in a remote cottage, where they're regularly visited by grown daughter Jackie (Deborah Fairfax), who brings Dorothy strange parcels that leak on the table, and who covertly discusses with Edmund whether mother has caught onto the...