Best Horror Movies of 1972

Five people find themselves in a tomb. The Crypt keeper explains why they are there through a series of frightening stories. Based on the classic comic book.

Mysterious and unearthly deaths start to occur while Professor Saxton is transporting the frozen remains of a primitive humanoid creature he found in Manchuria back to Europe.

Notorious Baltimore criminal and underground figure Divine goes up against Connie & Raymond Marble, a sleazy married couple who make a passionate attempt to humiliate her and seize her tabloid-given title as "The Filthiest Person Alive".

Two teenage girls try to buy marijuana in the city - where they get kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of psychotic convicts.

The vengeful Doctor rises again, seeking the Scrolls of Life in an attempt to resurrect his deceased wife.

A young psychiatrist applies for a job at a mental asylum, and must pass a test by interviewing four patients. He must figure out which of the patients, is in fact, the doctor that he would be replacing if hired.

Wisecracking reporter Carl Kolchak investigates a string of gruesome murders in Las Vegas. It seems that each victim has been bitten in the neck and drained of all their blood. Kolchak is sure that it is a vampire. He's hot on the trail, but nobody believes him. His editor thinks he's nuts and the police think he's a hindrance in the investigation, so Kolchak takes matters into his own hand.

Paxton, an amateur archeologist, travels to the town of Seaburgh and inadvertently stumbles across one of the lost crowns of Anglia, which, according to legend, protect the county from invasion. On digging the crown up, Paxton is stalked by its supernatural guardian.

Set in London in the early 1970's, supposedly for teen thrills, Johnny organises a black magic ceremony in a desolate churchyard. The culmination of the ritual, however, is the rejuvenation of Dracula from shrivelled remains. Johnny, Dracula' s disciple, lures victims to the deserted graveyard for his master's pleasure and one of the victims delivered is Jessica Van Helsing. Descended from the Van Helsing line of vampire hunters her grandfather, equipped with all the devices to snare and destroy the Count, confronts his arch enemy in the age-old battle between good and evil.

Cathryn is suffering from schizophrenia and is haunted by hallucinations of apparitions. Her husband has his mind on other things, while her mental state is deteriorating. She is unable to define whether the people around her, like visitors to their house, are real or imaginary.

Chilling and eerie, this supernatural tale of good versus evil coils around twin brothers living with their grandmother in a sleepy rural area during the summer of 1935. After his grandmother encourages Niles to develop what seem to be psychic gifts, Niles starts to suspect that his twin may be involved in recent fatal accidents.

An 18th century African prince is turned into a vampire while visiting Transylvania. Two centuries later, he rises from his coffin attacking various residents of Los Angeles and meets Tina, a woman who he believes is the reincarnation of his deceased wife.

At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned.

A shocking exposé of the deplorable conditions and abuses from the Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities.

A research team from an electronics company move into an old Victorian house to start work on finding a new recording medium. When team member Jill Greeley witnesses a ghost, team director Peter Brock decides not only to analyse the apparition, which he believes is a psychic impression trapped in a stone wall (dubbed a "stone tape"), but to exorcise it too - with terrifying results...

A demented widow lures unsuspecting children into her mansion in a bizarre "Hansel and Gretel" twist.

After a spate of murders, the villagers of Schtettel kill the depraved perpetrator, Count Mitterhouse. Fifteen years later the Circus of Nights appeared in the plague-ridden village and its performers include Mitterhouse's mistress, children and cousins. They have come to Schtettel to fulfil the Count's last words, an evil, vicious curse of death and destruction on those who participated in his impaling. The children of Schtettel become the targets for a brutal and devastating revenge as the Vampire Circus rehearses for its most deadly performance.

Teenage runaway Cheryl splits from Ohio and ends up in Los Angeles staying at an old rundown hotel full of weirdos. The weirdest of all is George and he has a crush on Cheryl.

At an exclusive boys' school, a new gym teacher is drawn into a feud between two older instructors, and he discovers that everything at the school is not quite as staid, tranquil and harmless as it seems.

After receiving word about a mysterious carcass/skeleton unearthed in the Arizona desert, a father and his daughter decide to remove it from the burial grounds for further study. Once they do so, they, as well as the town, are besieged by a colony of gargoyles living in some nearby caverns.

There's something pretty grisly going on under London in the Tube tunnels between Holborn and Russell Square. When a top civil servant becomes the latest to disappear down there Scotland Yard start to take the matter seriously. Helping them are a young couple who get nearer to the horrors underground than they would wish.

Prequel to the Henry James classic "Turn of the Screw" about the events leading up to the deaths of Peter Quint and Ms. Jessel, and the slow corruption of the children in their care.

A tragic celestial-western that explores Adam and Eve's paradise from a surreal point of view.

Four wealthy, middle-class friends (Clive Swift, Edward Petherbridge, Anna Cropper and Sylvia Kay) gather for a Christmas dinner in a country cottage only to find that the past will not rest while they feast.

Manhattan socialite begins to fear for her troubled younger brother when he starts behaving bizarrely and he seems to have been friends with a backstreet murderer.

A group of experienced archeologists are searching for an old and mystic Phoenician treasure when they are surprised by a series of mysterious murders...

A lonely boy becomes good friends with Ben, a rat. This rat is also the leader of a pack of vicious killer rats, killing lots of people.

A wealthy former mental patient goes home to her estate to rest and recuperate. While walking the grounds one day she hears the screams of a woman coming from underneath the ground. Her family, however, refuses to believe her story, and sees the incident as an opportunity to prove the woman's mind has snapped so they can take control of her money.

Joan Mitchell is an unhappy, middle-aged suburban housewife with an uncommunicative businessman husband and a distant 19 year old daughter on the verge of moving out of the house. Frustrated at her current situation, Joan seeks solace in witchcraft after visiting a local tarot reader and leader of a secret black arts wicca set, who inspires Joan to follow her own path. After dabbling in witchcraft and believing she has become a real witch, Joan withdraws into a fantasy world and sinks deeper and deeper into her new lifestyle until the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred.

A surreal look at the schizophrenia of a group of girls in a therapy session.

A pregnant Los Angeles widow journeys to her late husband's Minnesota hometown to finally meet his mother and family, but she quickly discovers they're a very strange--and homicidal--lot. Director Lamont Johnson's 1972 thriller stars Patty Duke, Rosemary Murphy, Richard Thomas and Sian Barbara Allen.

A vampire awakens from a long sleep to attack a couple making love in a graveyard. He then rapes the woman, who later gives birth to his son. The newborn infant will only drink blood from his mother's breast.

A documentary-style drama based on true accounts of the Fouke Monster in Arkansas, Boggy Creek focuses on the lives of back country people and their culture while chronicling sightings of the monster.

Baron von Sepper is an Austrian aristocrat noted for his blue-toned beard, and his appetite for beautiful wives. His latest spouse, an American beauty named Anne, discovers a vault in his castle that's filled with the frozen bodies of several beautiful women.

A ditsy reporter enlists the help of a sleazy private eye to solve a series of gory killings of female strippers at a Chicago nightclub.

Six actors go to a graveyard on a remote island to act out a necromantic ritual. The ritual works, and soon the dead are walking about and chowing down on human flesh.

A physician discovers that two children are being kept virtually imprisoned in their house by their father. He investigates, and discovers a web of sex, incest and satanic possession.

A young couple moves into a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. What they don't know is that there is an unseen presence in the house, and that it wants to take possession of the wife.

On Christmas Eve 1950, Wilfred Butler dies in a burning accident outside his mansion in East Willard, Massachusetts. The residence is bequeathed to his grandson, Jeffrey. Twenty years later, lawyer John Carter arrives in East Willard on Christmas Eve with his assistant and mistress Ingrid, having been charged by Jeffrey (now registered as a patient in a mental asylum) to sell the house. The house, the town, even Jeffrey himself — all hold dark secrets that will be brought to light.

Horror and suspense in the story of a psychotic maniac who literally "loves" women to death.

A group of wealthy but secretly very troubled people travel to an island resort. After experiencing a brush with death, they find themselves wondering about their existences.

A coven of witches gather in Vermont in a feminist collective’s transporting short that shakes off patriarchal scrutiny during the women’s ceremony, where they’re free to remake reality before our eyes. TRANSFORMATIONS creates an intoxicating alchemy from the witches’ interactions with nature: an attempt, as Hirschfeld remembers, to “use the act of filmmaking to heighten experience.”

A childless middle-age couple adopt a troubled youth they find living in their crawlspace and attempt to get him to rejoin society with tragic results.

After several locals are viciously murdered, a Louisiana sheriff starts to suspect he may be dealing with a werewolf.

A woman is trapped during a storm in a house with no electricity or phone. A killer has murdered her sister, stuffed the body in the basement, and is now after her.

Holmes and Dr. Watson tackle the case of a curse on the Baskerville bloodline in this ABC Movie of the Week adaptation.

The waters surrounding an island become contaminated by chemical dumping, and people who eat fish caught in those waters become deformed and violent.

John Carradine narrates the Washington Irving story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman.

A young woman recounts her claims that she was involved in a cult whose members were either murdered or committed suicide.