In 'Play Misty For Me', its inexplicably assertive knife-woman nearly manages the impossible task of slaughtering Clint Eastwood.

Typical horror movies of the 1930s were often given a period setting in what looked like a kind of stylized 19th century... the sense of 'elsewhen', of distance, lent to many of these movies by their settings. They exist, as it were, in a 19th century of the mind.

Contemporary audiences, other than those making a deliberate historical leap, would find, say, the 1931 'Dracula' impossibly slow.

In a Western or a thriller there is often room for reflection upon the coercive necessities even, occasionally, some attempt to pose other possibilities. In the horror movies there is finally a Hobbesian state of nature: 'continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.

Occasional observers of horror movies have a nasty habit of asking why it is that there is always some poor misguided soul who opens the door to the cellar or to the attic or to the crypt when it's quite clear that no sane person would even consider it.