Now this well precedes the Fifties, but I include it because I remember it was shown in the late afternoon on BBC Television in the early days of transmissions – and as a very young lad,  it scared me and my friends to such an extent that we hardly dared go to bed that night.

Forget Boris Karloff and  Bela Lugosi. Forget Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, even Vincent Price and Lon Chaney. Tod Slaughter is king of horror for one very important reason – he quite evidently enjoys his work.

The opening murder with the eerie wolf howl on the soundtracks sets the scene perfectly and then we are treated to an acting masterclass from the great man himself. . The special effects of the day for the appearance of the “face” are well done  and the whole film compares favourably with the Universal classics of that same period.

The production values are far higher than is normal for a British feature of the period.

However here ABOVE are two of his films and I think ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ may be his most well known one.

However looking further, ones that I should have remembered – we also had ‘Sweeney Todd – the Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ and ‘Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror’ – which also had Greta Gynt and David Farrar in the cast – these two were together again in 1948 for ‘Mr. Perrin and Mr Traill’ with Marius Goring – now this one is definitely up there among my own favourite films.