The Man Who Could Cheat Death

There's a scene in Terence Fisher's Hammer Horror classic in which Dr Bonner (Diffring) shows someone a photo of himself from decades ago and they gasp at the identical faces of the man staring up from the sepia-toned photograph and the one holding it. Watching the late, great Christopher Lee, iconic in his old age, as a young man has an opposite effect that's almost as unsettling.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death is a horror film of a different era in every way. The special effects are lo-fi to a degree that's kind of charming now and they're also used incredibly sparingly – the film contains just a handful of brief action sequences with minimal gore. Instead it places a number of highly intelligent characters together with a dark secret sitting between them, and we watch as they play cat and mouse, relishing the quiet build-up of tension as much as the bloody pay-off. [Ross McIndoe]