There are so many titles on this list that I’ve gone back to time and time again… and quite a few that I appear on the extras of… but here are my five go-to choices, films I could watch any given gloomy Sunday afternoon.

Quatermass and the Pit

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Dead of Night

Kind Hearts and Coronets

Peeping Tom

Of these, I only saw The Man Who Fell to Earth on its original release – it’s one of the few films I went back to several times during its first run, because Nicolas Roeg’s science fiction experience so all-enveloping and mesmeric. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom was almost a suppressed film when I was getting into movies – but I saw it at a film society (sacreligiously in a black and white print) and then in its vibrant lurid Eastman color glory at the Scala. It’s at once horrifying and playful, intelligent and lurid, tender and cruel – and it’s about a lifelong obsession with cinema, acknowledging a downside (if not serial murder) but also the portal to wonders.

The other three were television staples in the 1970s.

I first saw Roy Ward Baker’s Quatermass and the Pit – which I can’t help but think of as Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit – on Christmas Day, 1974 – in the middle of the oil crisis, the three-day week and rolling power cuts, television shut down at 10.30, except on Christmas as a treat the BBC stayed on air extra late just to screen a Hammer Film about ancient Martian evil influences nearly bringing about the end of the world. I don’t quite know how that became comfort viewing, but it’s a film I’ve been back to many times – I wrote a BFI Classics monograph about it, and I’m wittering on in a feature on the Blu-Ray – and find endlessly fascinating. The two Ealing films are deceptively cosy, with a sting… a quiet, conversational, still-chilling collection of ghost stories (‘room for one more inside, sir!’… the haunted mirror… the ventriloquist’s dummy… the recurring nightmare) and a literate, barbed tour de force of black comedy that still has a lot to say about Britain. Dead of Night and Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, made in the 1940s, were already canon when I saw them, like so many other great films on this list, but I remember the thrill of connecting with them, when they were already old and yet still about the Britain I was growing up in – the comedy still funny (wit lasts better than slapstick), the terrors still vivid (Michael Redgrave’s voice as the dummy is one of the creepiest things in cinema).