Strange creatures are lurking in the shadows...

The monsters that the legendary Peplum hero Maciste confronts in "Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules" were already extravagant in the 1960s, but nowadays, they bring about the biggest of sneers. They belong to the kitschy folklore and imaginative universe of the Peplum, the forefather of all the subsequent Italian genre films. There's this fascination with the body that we would find again in the Giallo or the erotic films, the love of monsters and the fantastic reminiscent of future zombie movies, and the extravagant appropriation of Italian-Greco antiquity that would later be reused in the Western all'italiana.

Neil Marshall's "The descent" is a British, claustrophobic horror movie in which a group of young women comes face to face with bloodthirsty monsters hiding out in a dark cave. The movie stood out thanks to its 100% female cast, which proved how rare heroines were in horror cinema, and its dark undertones, both onscreen and off.