Although it was hailed as a masterly horror film, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In is more a first love story with bite. Adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own bestseller, it owes as much to the proud Scandinavian tradition of kidpix as the writings of Anne Rice or Stephenie Meyer. But what sets it apart, in this cursed age of torture porn, is the restraint of Alfredson's direction and the tragi-chilling performances of Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, as the lonely souls united by their ostracisation.

When not shuttling between parents who don't really have time for him, 12 year-old Hedebrant is being bullied by classmate Patrik Rydmark and his cowardly cohorts. So, when new neighbour Leandersson sees him issuing death threats to the tree he's stabbing in their snow-covered tenement courtyard, she recognises a potential kindred spirit. However, her guardian, Per Ragnar, is hurt by her new friendship, as he daily risks his neck to procure the fresh blood she needs to survive.

Ragnar's recurring failures prompt Leandersson to stalk local drunkard Mikael Rahm. But while her crime is witnessed by reclusive cat lover Karl-Robert Lindgren, he is too timid to inform the Stockholm cops. Consequently, Leandersson (who cannot enter a room unless she is invited) is free to feast on his friends Ika Nord and Peter Carlsberg, with the now cognisant Hedebrant acquiescing in her savagery because she gave him the nerve to stand up to Rydmark during a school skating trip to the pond where Rahm's corpse had been dumped.

Set-pieces like Rahm's discovery and Leandersson's nocturnal visits to an acid-scarred Ragnar in hospital and to a lovesick Hedebrant in his bedroom are atmospherically executed, with Hoyte van Hoytema's camera skulking around Eva Norén's 1980s interiors. However, the special effects are less convincing during the cat attack on Nord and the climactic massacre at the swimming pool.

Nevertheless, this is still a superior exercise in screen vampirism, with Leandersson's self-loathing melancholy being sensitively balanced by Hedebrant's asexual acceptance of someone who shares his confusion and pain. The moments when they try to make contact beyond their platonic liaison are genuinely poignant. But Alfredson and Lindqvist eschew sentiment in depicting a society in which appearances are invariably deceptive, innocence is permanently imperilled and good and evil are in a constant state of flux.

Sinister vulnerability is also the theme of Rolf de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby, which is a welcome addition to the Eureka catalogue, having won four Australian Film Institute Awards and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1993. Despite its occasional moments of misanthropy, this is a grotesquely gripping black comedy that is dominated by a stupendous performance by Nicholas Hope, as the man-child with a unique gift for mimicry.

Hope has spent all 35 years of his life in a squalid, windowless, two-room apartment in Port Adelaide with controlling, incestuous mother, Claire Benito, who has convinced him that the outside world is a hideous place where gas masks are essential to breathe the poisonous air. Thus, Hope's entitled to feel a touch rejected when he is turfed out on the return of long-lost father Ralph Cotterill, in the guise of a preacher to seduce the depravedly religious Benito. However, suffocating them with cling film seems a little extreme...

Forced to fend for himself, Hope embarks on a series of misadventures that includes encounters with the Salvation Army, a rock group that wants him for its lead singer, a disapproving coterie of feminists, some predatory prisoners and obese caregiver Carmel Johnson, who is recovering from an abusive middle-class childhood by doting on kids with cerebral palsy. But this Aussie Candide is also something of a Zelig and his ability to conform while remaining an outsider makes him endlessly fascinating.

But it's not just Hope's bravura performance that merits praise. De Heer shot the action in sequence to bring a cockeyed authenticity to Hope's rite of passage, while he also hired 32 different cinematographers under the supervision of Ian Jones to give each new sensation that Hope experiences a novel look. Some complained on its initial release about the cruelty meted out to Benito's cat, the tendency towards misogyny and the jaundiced views on organised religion expressed by scientist Norman Kaye. But while the story rather stalls in its closing stages, this is a sharply satirical snapshot of the genesis of our current obsessions with image, possessions and transient celebrity.

An enclosed space is also key to Jonathan Liebesman's The Killing Room. But, despite allusions to MK-ULTRA (the top-secret CIA-sponsored psychological experiment that was started in the early days of the Cold War and was conducted on unsuspecting Americans well into the Nixon presidency), this fails to work as either a conspiracy thriller or a calculating study in mental and emotional deterioration.

Timothy Hutton, Nick Cannon, Shea Whigham and Clea DuVall are the latest guinea pigs to be selected by baleful boffin Peter Stormare and they are horrified when he murders one of them in cold blood and leaves conscience-stricken assistant Chloë Sevigny to monitor their reactions, as their left to tackle a series of brainteasers on which their very survival depends. What follows will be familiar to anyone who has seen Cube, Saw or Fermat's Room. But, despite some solid performances and cinematographer Lukas Ettlin's claustrophobic use of Charisse Cardenas's laboratorial sets, this lacks the originality or edge of any part of this slick triptych. Moreover, it's saddled with a misfiring denouement that will infuriate those feeling cheated by such a cynically manipulative piece of legerdemain.

Aficionados will be much better disposed towards a trio of Italian horror gems from Arrow: Lamberto Bava's Macabre (1980); Lucio Fulci's The House By the Cemetery (1981) and Dario Argento's Sleepless (2001). Only the latter is a giallo in the true sense of the word. But these still make for cracking late-night entertainment.

Having apprenticed under his father Mario, Lamberto Bava debuted with a monumental slice of Southern Gothic that features a deliciously excessive performance by Bernice Stegers, as the New Orleans matron who emerges from a spell in an asylum only to lock herself away in a seedy guest house with the severed head of Roberto Posse, the lover she accidentally killed in a car crash while rushing home to mourn the son who had just been drowned by his envious sister. With Veronica Zinny taking perverse pleasure in taunting her mother and blind landlord Stanko Molnar desperate to persuade Stegers to reciprocate his chaste crush and jettison the skull she keeps in the refrigerator between raucous love-making sessions, this is Grand Guignol of the hoariest kind.

Yet, by keeping the bleak Psycho humour the right side of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane camp, Bava is able to play knowing generic games, while also pastiching domestic melodrama. Some may find the pacing a little slow in the opening hour, while others will bridle at the contrivances required for the cartoonish twist. But the secret is not to take any of this gleeful romp too seriously. After all, this supposedly fact-based story was originally conceived as a joke and Pupi Avati and his fellow scenarists, cinematographer Franco Delli Colli, editor Piera Gabutti, composer Ubaldo Continiello and the spirited cast were all clearly on the same wavelength.

A former assistant to both Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, Lucio Fulci had already been directing for two decades by the time films like Zombie (1979), The Gates of Hell (1980) and The Beyond (1981) earned him a new audience of video geeks. The House By the Cemetery isn't perhaps on a par with these three, but it's still a textbook piece of Frankensteinian film-making, with tropes being gleaned from other box-office successes and stitched together into a serviceable new beast.

When his colleague kills himself before finishing some important research, Paolo Malco agrees to leave Boston and complete it for him. However, wife Catriona MacColl prevaricates for so long - especially after young son Giovanni Frezza is warned off the move by a girl inside a painting - that the only accommodation available is not only the scene of the suicide, but also the brutal murder of a couple of hapless teens. Undeterred either by the fact that the basement door is barred shut or by the discovery in an upstairs room of a gravestone belonging to a mad scientist who used to conduct illegal human experiments on the premises, the family begins to make itself at home. But by the time their estate agent is gruesomely slaughtered and MacColl begins to realise that babysitter Ania Pieroni is decidedly strange, it's too late to avoid a showdown with knife-wielding zombie, Dr Jacob A. Freudstein!!!

Fulci was always a technically accomplished director and Sergio Salvati's camerawork, Massimo Lentini's production design and Vincenzo Tomassi's editing are top drawer. Thus, he's able to generate an atmosphere of unease that carries the audience over the frequent storytelling mis-steps. Moreover, the lengthy expository passages make the shocks all the more startling when they come, while sequences with the innocent child in the picture and her confrontation with a blood-gushing shop mannequin are deeply unsettling. So, while this may be flawed, it refuses to trivialise the pitiless terror of untrammelled brutality and forces viewers to reassess their own attitudes to screen violence.

If Fulci was content to magpie from others, Dario Argento shamelessly references his own oeuvre in Sleepless, which borrows from such acclaimed efforts as Deep Red (1975), Suspiria (1977) and Tenebrae (1982), while also reuniting the director with cinematographer Ronnie Taylor, SFX guru Sergio Stivaletti and prog rock band Goblin, who scored several of his greatest hits.

The action opens in Turin in 1983, as Francesca Vettori is found dead with a musical instrument rammed into her mouth and cop Max von Sydow promises her teenage son that he will not rest until the perpetrator is caught. But, two decades later, it takes a copycat killing for the now-retired Von Sydow to team with the now-grown Stefano Dionisi and his buddy Roberto Zibetti to crack the case. Although their initial suspect is Luca Fagioli, a giallo writer who was long thought to have died, the trail leads them down several increasingly bizarre avenues and takes Dionisi into the bed of the alluring Chiara Caselli. The revelation is something of an anti-climax, but what matters is the trademark build-up to the various slaughters and the unflinching depiction of human frailty in the face of barbaric wickedness.

With the plot being driven largely by a nursery rhyme entitled `The Death Farm' (composed by Argento's daughter, Asia), this isn't the subtlest of whodunits. The killings are signposted, while secondary characters like Caselli's jilted boyfriend and Zibetti's lawyer father (with his missing gold pen) are clumsily inserted. But Von Sydow is always a compelling presence and the railway murder of prostitute Barbara Lerici is meticulously staged, with her desperate bid to get aboard her train before her sadistic client discovers she's stumbled upon his stash of razor-sharp weapons culminating first in the realisation that she has accidentally appropriated a folder packed with information about the so-called Dwarf Killings and then with the receipt of an ominous phone call...

Giallo is something of an acquired taste, but the films of José Mojica Marins have too often been dismissed as cut-price cinematic junk food. However, it soon becomes clear from watching the nine features in The Coffin Joe Collection and Marins's latest offering, The Embodiment of Evil, that a subversive intelligence is at work behind the boogeyman antics of Zé do Caixão, the caped, top-hatted undertaker with the freakishly long fingernails, whose dismissal of morality and organised religion as a `comfort for the weak' is as scathing an indictment of the corruption, superstition and violence of Brazilian society as any realist drama about teenage gangsters in the favelas above its major cities.

The `Coffin Joe trilogy' comprises At Midnight I Will Take your Soul (1964), This Night I Will Enter Your Corpse (1967) and Embodiment of Evil (2008).

The first sees Marins scandalise the Catholic clerics by eating lamb on a Friday and denying the existence of demons and ghosts, let alone God. His neighbours are convinced he's in league with Satan, especially when he announces that he will find the perfect woman to bear the child that will continue his superior bloodline. However, Magda Mei is the closest friend of his wife, Valeria Vasquez, and she would rather kill herself than bear a rape baby. This tragedy, as much as Marins's sacrilegious denunciation of Christianity, prompts the villagers to invoke the spirits of the dead, who exact their terrible revenge in the local cemetery.

With cinematographer Giorgio Attili and art director José Vedovato achieving an aesthetic mix of Expressionist menace and giallo gore, this is surprisingly graphic for its time. But it's the unrepentant iconoclasm that would have most shocked contemporary audiences and it's hardly surprising that the junta censors demanded several changes. Yet Marins was able to produce a sequel, in which he was nursed back to manic health by hunchback Jose Lobo.

Having subjected the region's womenfolk to a pitiless trial by phobia in his castle laboratory, Marins selects wealthy widow Nadia Freitas to be the mother of his heir. She seems strangely willing to do his bidding, but she is quickly jilted when he espies dignitary's daughter Tina Wohlers. With the corpses again piling high, the locals take it upon themselves to rescue the pregnant Wohlers from her fate. But it's a vision of Hell and the curse from beyond the grave of a deceased mother-to-be that prove Marins's undoing and he is presumed drowned after a desperate pursuit through a swamp.

The undoubted highlight of this Gothic saga is the surreal sojourn in the Underworld, which is psychedelically designed by José Vedovato and photographed in garish Eastmancolor by Giorgio Attili. Yet, this is consistently compelling and often bleakly amusing. It's as though the Universal horror tradition had been re-imagined by Alejandro Jodorowsky. But 41 years would elapse before Marins got round to completing the triptych.

With the backstory filled in courtesy of flashbacks featuring Raymond Castile as Coffin Joe, the action opens with the septuagenarian Marins being released from a brutal prison and heading into São Paulo to continue his search for a suitable woman to propagate his genes. He's assisted once more by his crookbacked sidekick (now played by Rui Resende), who has found him a slum lair from which to operate and a new quartet of slavish acolytes. But monocular cop Jece Valadão is on his tail, as Marins not only caused him to lose an eye, but he also seduced his lawyer wife, Cristina Aché, into securing his release.

Doctor Cleo de Paris is also drawn to Marins, as she hopes he can aid her with her blood research. But she is discarded in favour of Nara Sakaré, the niece of a pair of blind gypsy fortune tellers, who pay with their lives for trying to prevent the sordid union. But, no sooner has Marins finished copulating beside the mutilated corpses than he is taken on a bizarre journey through Sakaré's innards by the mysterious José Celso Martinez Corrêa. Besides such a deeply offensive odyssey, the sight of a monk electrocuting his nipples and a woman being basted with melted cheese seem somewhat tame. But Marins remains a potently iconic force of chauvinist evil and the sight of him being tormented by the monochrome spectres of his past victims is eerily effective. Considering Marins had to rework the plot to after Valadão died in mid-shoot - hence the chase being continued by his bother, Adriano Stuart - this is a surprisingly coherent and disconcerting exercise. Some may find the use of scurrying rats, fish hooks and oozing entrails gruesomely old-fashioned, while others will object to the crucifixion parody and the casual misogyny. But Marins has remained true to his twisted philosophical logic and, once again, the cinematography of José Roberto Eliezer and production design of Cássio Amarante give this shoestring schlocker the dystopic lyricism that elevates this unholy trinity above anything else in Marins's filmography.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968) is a Tales from the Crypt-style anthology comprising `The Doll Maker', `Obsession' and `Ideology'. The first chronicles an ageing craftsman's grizzly revenge on the youths who assaulted his virginal daughters, while the second relies on sound effects and a discordant score to enhance a balloon vendor's relentless stalking of a beautiful woman, both before and after her demise. The last stars Marins himself, as an eccentric scientist, who invites a couple to dinner and subjects them to hideous torments in order to prove his theory that there's no such thing as the power of love. With its grotesque scenes of cannibalism, this vignette has often been cited as a major influence on the video nasty era, but it's also interesting to note that Marins was clearly not immune to regenerating the notion himself for Embodiment of Evil.

Awakening of the Beast (1970) is a scathing denunciation of establishment hypocrisy framed as a mondo mockumentary. Once again, the approach is as scattergun as it's scatological, with sequences depicting a woman defecating for the benefit of some perverted admirers, a girl on a drug trip being impaled with his staff by a Moses lookalike and a gaggle of junkies being taken on a luridly coloured trip through their worst nightmares that includes a São Paulo discothèque, a performance of Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities and a matinee screening of This Night I Will EnterYour Corpse. But the real purpose of this patchy and often salacious investigation into depravity is to provide Marins with a chat show soapbox, from which to condemns hallucinogenics while mocking the complacent voyeurism of exploitation addicts.

Forbidden by the authorities from making any further Coffin Joe pictures, Marins lampooned the Gospel story in End of Man (1971), in which he plays a messianic figure who emerges naked from the sea and proceeds to perform a series of surreal miracles that includes curing the sick, healing the lame and raising the dead. Naturally, his exploits make him a celebrity and incur the wrath of those threatened by his popularity. But Marins proves himself to be as nonconformist as Luis Buñuel by tempting his holy man with nymphomaniac Andreia Bryan, as well as nubile Magdalene, Teresa Sodré, and scheming betrayer, Rosângela Maldonado.

By contrast with this provocative parable, The Hostel of Naked Pleasures (1976) is a kinky romp in the Kenneth Anger mould. Awash with scantily clad women gyrating to the pulsating rhythms of indigenous drummers, this has much in common with the cannibalist-tropicalist phase of cinema nôvo, which had been transforming Brazilian arthouse for the previous decade. However, Marins is as much concerned with flesh, fetishes and debauchery as he is with the moral state of the nation that spawned such excess. Nevertheless, he gets to deliver an existential rant in the guise of Coffin Joe, as he watches the various voodoo rituals, nefarious orgies and illicit couplings that are played out against such generic backdrop staples as funerals and thunderstorms.

Hellish Flesh (1977) marks yet another change of direction into territory usually occupied by such European directors as Jean Rollin and José Bénazéraf. Marins again headlines as a workaholic scientist, whose obsessions have driven wife Luely Figueiró into the arms of his louche friend, Oswaldo De Souza. However, their attempt to kill Marins by throwing acid in his face and torching his laboratory backfires, as he survives the attack and is cared for after months in hospital by the devoted Lirio Bertelli. Moreover, De Souza quickly fritters Figueiró's inheritance and she is left alone when he is murdered by one of his many lovers. But while Marins is unwilling to let her starve, it's never wholly clear whether his motives are philanthropic or dastardly.

Although the action being repeatedly punctuated by cutaways to Helena Ramos in various states of undress, the curio value of this atypical feature lies in the linearity and restraint of Marins's approach. As ever, Giorgio Attili's shadowy cinematography is key to setting the mood. But the backroom star on this occasion is Nilcemar Leyart, who produces some innovative make-up effects, in addition to providing the nimble editing and a truly disorienting sound mix.

Centring on doctor Jorge Peres's recurring vision that Coffin Joe is trying to kidnap his wife (Magna Miller), Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (1978) is even more of an oddity, as it's largely made up of episodes that Marins was forced to excise from his previous pictures. However, it also has an intriguing postmodern aspect, as Marins appears as himself to help cure Peres of his delusions.

And completing the set is André Barcinski and Ivan Finotti's documentary, The Strange World of Mojica Marins (2001), which affectionately profiles the son of São Paulan parents who eked a living by bullfighting, travelling with the circus and running a fleapit movie theatre. Although much of the running time is taken up with clips from the other films in the collection, there are still intriguing references to the now-lost amateur flicks that Marins made before debuting with The Adventurer's Fate (1959) and the impact that the military coup had on his decision to create Brazil's very own bogeyman.

Details of a colourful private life that includes seven wives and 23 children are disappointingly at a premium. But compensation comes in the form of the anecdotes about Marins's acting school, where he would force students to embrace their deepest fears by confronting them with tarantulas and snakes. He may not be the most censored director in screen history, as he likes to claim, but Marins is anything but the amoral, atheistic purveyor of shock and smut that he has been labelled by the more prudish mainstream critics.