10 Perfect Horror Movies About Hollywood

Few filmmakers can produce works that are simultaneously so elegant and eerie as Peter Strickland. His 2012 sophomore film Berberian Sound Studio is a weird, precisely made picture about isolation and descent into darkness - and madness.

The great character actor Toby Jones finds a rare big screen lead role as Gilderoy, a reserved British sound engineer mysteriously hired to work on the post production of an Italian film. He turns up at the studio - a beautifully analogue 1970s setting - only to find himself presented with a bloody horror movie, way out of his nature film wheelhouse.

Jones is spectacular as a man adrift - he speaks not a word of Italian, and increasingly feels like he’s walking on eggshells, doing one thing wrong after another and irritating his macho colleagues. And it gets more sinister from there, with Gilderoy increasingly unsure where reality ends and the film begins.

Appropriately, so much of the tension is made by the soundscape, from the throbbing synth score to the foley effects of knives plunging into lettuce and bubbling pans. A beautiful but dangerous film that will stay with you.