6. Beyond The Darkness (1979)
Joe D'Amato was no stranger in the department of low budget horror movie making by the time he came to make Beyond the Darkness. This film is probably D'Amato's crowning achievement and it remains notorious as a nasty, nasty film which will give you the creeps. Frank - a taxidermist- has a seriously ill girlfriend called Anna in the hospital. His jealous housekeeper throws a few voodoo moves and Anna dies. Deranged with grief, Frank digs up Anna's body and mummifies it in some pretty ghastly to watch scenes. Frank keeps meeting women who are pretty and sweet, but no one compares to Anna so he kills them - in a gruesome fashion. His housekeeper feels that she should marry Frank and that he should be grateful for her complicity in covering up his crimes. She invites a whole bunch of her relatives to Frank's mansion in anticipation of being proposed to. Frank spurns her advances and it is meat cleaver time! Never the world's best director, and consciously aware of the limits of what he could achieve, D'Amato goes the whole nine yards in this film. The embalming scene is incredibly gross to watch, as are all of the murder scenes (and subsequent disposal of the corpses), the housekeeper is one freaky lady and Frank himself... the words deranged and demented come to mind. D'Amato created a transgressive horror masterpiece on a low budget whose nastiness and scumminess has rarely been exceeded. If any of you gorehounds out there have not watched this movie, I urge you to watch it on the basis that it delivers thrills, chills and ultraviolence to boot.