The Ward – or John Carpenter’s The Ward, to give it its full and proper title – is a film I’ve been pining to see for what must be the best part of a year, ever since I heard it had gone into production. Carpenter has long been one of my favourite directors. I’ve been enjoying his films since I was 14 years old, at the height of the home-video boom. Long before I even knew what a director did, Carpenter’s name in the opening credits of a movie assured me that I was in for a good time.

Fast-forward 27 years, and here I am, sitting on a train heading for London’s West End. Destination: the Empire, Leicester Square, where The Ward, Carpenter’s first theatrical release in a decade, is playing its opening weekend. I’ve avoided seeing any trailers, and I deliberately haven’t read any synopses or reviews. I want to have no expectations; I want the film to surprise me. When I’m at the cinema, I like to feel like I’m sitting in the front car of a white-knuckle ride. It’s more fun than climbing in the back and slipping on someone else’s vomit… er, so to speak.

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Wandering around Collectormania London recently, I saw on one of the stalls a copy of Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, John D Hancock’s cult chiller from 1971. This was a movie that had long been on my want-to-see list, thanks largely to the critic Kim Newman. In my late teens, I was a regular browser of Newman’s 1988 book Nightmare Movies, in which the author championed the film, describing it as “shamefully underrated” – though, really, the title of the movie alone was enough to convince me that I ought to see it if I ever got the chance (see also Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things).

The stallholder was asking the not-unreasonable sum of £4.99, so I paid up and took the disc home. When I sat down to watch it last Saturday night, a curious thing happened: the film’s title prevented me from enjoying it as fully as I should have. To understand why, you have to know something about Jessica’s narrative – and here be spoilers, so if you’d rather be blind to what happens in this movie, shut your eyes now. (Beware the trailer below, too.)

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Having missed it at FrightFest, where it was the closing film of the five-day festival, I took the opportunity while on holiday last week to see Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism.

Produced by Eli Roth – who also seems to have taken on a large chunk of the film’s PR, if the number of times he’s crossed my line of sight in the past month is anything to go by – this latest entry in the exorcism sub-genre was shot in a shakycam style, which cunningly draws comparisons away from the The Exorcist, the untoppable grandaddy, and towards recent first-person horrors such as REC and Diary Of The Dead.

The Last Exorcism’s story centres on a likable but troubled preacher called Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a man whose faith has been on the wane for some time – if it was ever there at all. Disgusted by reports of a boy being smothered to death during an exorcism, Marcus has decided to expose the mundane, conning secrets of the practice by hooking up with a small TV crew to make a documentary, so that, hopefully, people will be made aware that demonic possession is nothing more than a delusion.

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The nice lady in the chemist handed me a packet of travel sickness pills.

“These might make you drowsy. You’re not driving, are you?”

“No, I’m not driving.”

What I neglected to mention was that I wasn’t travelling at all – not in the physical sense, anyway. My plan was to pop a pill, sit in a darkened cinema and spend 90 minutes goggling George A Romero’s Diary Of The Dead – hopefully without puking at the handheld camera work that’s marred my enjoyment of recent, similarly styled films.

Romero’s fifth ‘Dead’ movie takes a year-zero approach to a worldwide zombie outbreak: it’s a reset for the series, rather than a continuation, and most of what’s on screen purports to be shot by the story’s characters. After the gloss of 2005’s Land Of The Dead, Diary is an attempt by Romero to return to his roots and make a truly independent, low-budget, interference-free zombie film.

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Yep, it’s the annual ‘look at my pumpkin’ blog. The pic is slightly out of focus, but you get the idea. I think he’s better than last year’s effort. He has more character and is definitely more evil-looking. I’m not going to chuck him out just yet – he’s glowing away on my desk as I write.

Tara and I kicked off last night’s celebrations with The Simpsons’ Treehouse Of Horror VIII on Channel 4, before firing up the DVD player for 1982 spookfest Poltergeist, a film I saw at least half a dozen times in my teens (it was one of the first movies that my family rented when we got a VCR, and it had a big impact on me).

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