Vincent Price and Christopher Lee star together for the first time in American International Pictures’ tasty, effective 1969 gothic shocker officially based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial, but also combining ideas taken from the Burke and Hare, Jack the Ripper and Phantom of the Opera stories.

Price plays guilt-ridden Julian Markham, a 1865 Victorian aristocrat who incarcerates his brother Sir Edward (Alister Williamson), disfigured in an African voodoo ceremony, locked in his room in a tower of his house. Sir Edward plots to escape by faking his own death, drugged in a deathlike trance.

Julian finds his ‘dead’ brother, puts him in a coffin (the oblong box) and has Sir Edward buried alive. Julian then marries his young fiancée, Elizabeth (Hilary Dwyer).

Sir Edward is dug ...

‘There’s no such thing as a perfect murder. That’s just a parlour game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That’s different.’

Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant, nail-biting 1974 bestselling thriller Ripley’s Game (the third book in her Tom Ripley sequence) becomes an impressively slick and dark-toned movie, The American Friend [Der Amerikanische Freund] (1977),  under German writer-director Wim Wenders, maker of Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas.

Dennis Hopper stars as the talented Mr Tom Ripley, a refined art forging dealer and serial killer who detests murder. He prefers someone else to do his dirty work, if possible.

He is asked by his lowlife criminal underworld buddy Raoul Minot (Reeves Minot in the book) to help him out with a coup...