Alison's Birthday (1981) – Ian Coughlin.

'It can't hurt you, everybody does it!'

Reluctantly coming home to celebrate her 19^th birthday, Alison (Joanne Samuel) is drawn into the malefic machinations of a Celtic devil cult in Aussie occult horror gem Alison's Birthday. I think it's fair to say that horror films produced down under have a singular kink that separates them from the mainstream, Thirst, and Body Melt provide excellent examples of Australian's unique take on horror cinema, with Ian Coughlin's Folk Horror creeper, arguably one of its more neglected antipodean classics. The arcane blarney of The Occult has ably provided enough nightmare fuel to power many great, and not so great fright-flicks, with Coughlin's eerie pagan shocker being one of the more memorable examples of suburbanised deviltry. While the text is of the common or garden variety pulp, the cast's performances, and atmospheric soundtrack are especially fine, with Alison providing for a sweetly sympathetic protagonist, and I still have a penchant for vintage, sinisterly Stone-Henged chillers. Alison's Birthday often has a TV movie-of-the-week aesthetic, but it remains hugely entertaining, especially with its white bread coven of dotty celebrants, looking spiffy in their natty ritualistic robes of obeisance. While Alison's Birthday is not one of your expressly lurid, sexy Satan shag-fests, it nonetheless provides a suitably macabre, Dennis Wheatley'd climax.