10 Recent Horror Films That Didn't Insult Your Intelligence

It's finally time to head Stateside and The Mortuary Collection is unashamedly American. After more than two hundred years, the world's biggest social experiment has finally accumulated enough collective identity to realise that it actually has a proud horror heritage of its own. Taking lessons from Lovecraft, Poe, Serling, Twain and fusing them with the pop sensibilities of Tobe Hooper, Roger Corman and Rob Zombie, this is a film that clearly revels in its own uniquely American Gothic.

An enormous spooky house, actually a funeral home run single handedly by Clancy Brown (now practically a parody of himself), resembling a cross between Herman Munster and Donald Trump (he's a big guy full of taller tales) is advertising for an assistant. Cue bright eyed and bushy tailed Villanelle wannabe Sam, the only applicant and the only person interested in Montgomery Dark's stories of ghouls and ghosts, who enthusiastically settles into a compilation of Tales From The Crypt.

Even the opening sequence is a nod to American gems, resembling the intro from The Goonies (it's actually filmed in the same location, Astoria, Oregon) yet the homages don't end there. John Carpenter, Tarantino, Sam Raimi, the whole gang's here and it shows.

With three stories of murder and mayhem, interwoven by lead Sam and a town under threat from an escaped lunatic, The Tooth Fairy Killer (straight from the pages of a Hannibal Lecter book), there's so much to enjoy here. The darker side of Americana has never looked brighter in this cleverly self aware VOD treat.