It's a decade since FrightFest became part of the August bank holiday movie scene and this year's Film4-sponsored event sees it installed in the Empire, Leicester Square. Yet, despite the plush new surroundings, the programme has returned to its cult roots, with plenty of indie offerings from Britain, the United States and Australia, as well as a solid selection of world horror. There will even be a chance to meet Tobe Hooper, who will be introducing special screenings of his little-seen 1969 debut, Eggshells, and the picture that made his name, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

The chillers of yesteryear come under further scrutiny in the world premiere of Jake West's documentary, Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, which will be followed by a panel discussion about screen violence and accompanied by Steven R. Monroe's remake of the notorious 1979 shocker, I Spit on Your Grave. Doubtless the discussion will get round to the manner in which Paul Andrew Williams handles the more sordid moments in Cherry Tree Lane ((which will be discussed in more detail when it goes on general release next week).

With Meir Zarchi serving as executive producer, this is clearly a conscious attempt to re-examine the issues raised by the subject matter and the reception of the original film. However, the proficiency of Monroe's direction pushes this much closer to torturtainment than a sickening assault on the viewer's sensibilities that forces them to confront the extent to which they become a complicit voyeur in watching both the rape sequences and the revenge killings.

Arriving in the backwoods to work on her new novel in an isolated cabin, Sarah Butler misses her turn and falls foul of gas jockey Jeff Branson after accidentally humiliating him in front of guffawing buddies Daniel Franzese and Rodney Eastman. So, a couple of days after Butler gives autistic plumber Chad Lindberg a grateful peck on the cheek for unblocking her toilet, Branson arrives in the dead of night to teach the city snob a lesson. Butler manages to escape into the woods after Lindberg has been bullied into raping her and she stumbles across sheriff Andrew Howard. He escorts her home. But, rather than being her saviour, Howard proves to be as sadistic as her attackers and what follows is brutal and harrowing and Franzese records it all on a camcorder, in case anyone misses the action's accusatory self-reflexivity.

The twist comes when Butler jumps off a bridge into the river before the rednecks can finish her off and they convince themselves that her body has disappeared and that they have gotten away with their crime. But Butler returns to use the shack she noticed while out jogging for a series of pitiless killings involving a noose, some quicklime, two fishing hooks and a strategically placed rifle. Neil Lisk's photography and Jason Collins's effects make-up are highly creditable and Monroe not only builds the situation astutely, but he also shifts the emphasis away from the deed and on to the aftermath. However, Butler singularly fails to convince as a successful writer and, more damningly, struggles to suggest the necessary extremes of emotion, either during her cruel torment or her flint-hearted retribution. Conversely, the perpetrators veer between pantomimic and pathetic, with their both their savagery and their suffering feeling more contrived than sickening.

The old questions will be asked about the necessity of showing the violation and the slaughter in so much detail and about whether this is a cynical piece of exploitation or an exercise in female empowerment. But what most needs answering is why American horror has become so stuck in a tedious cycle of torture porn and dubious remakes that exposes its moral abnegation and its creative bankruptcy.

Franck Richard takes torture porn into more macabrely amusing territory in The Pack, which boasts a splendidly scene-stealing deadpan turn from Yolande Moreau, as the owner of a roadhouse off the beaten track in northern France. Shuffling and scowling, she barely manages to summon up some civility, let alone hospitality as she serves feisty motorist Émilie Dequenne and hitcher Benjamin Biolay and borders on the downright rude in dealing with retired lawman, Philippe Nahon. But it soon becomes clear that Moreau is pretty much detached from reality and rather than being the victim of a sinister disappearance, Biolay is her partner in gruesome crime.

Waking up in a cage after sneaking back at night to investigate a false washroom wall, Dequenne finds herself chained alongside Chinese cowboy Jan Fonteyn and being prepared for some sort of sacrifice. An attempt to reach her mobile phone succeeds in alerting Nahon that something sinister is happening in the roadhouse cellar, but Dequenne has to ensure a ghastly night at an abandoned pit head - that sees Fonteyn devoured by zombie miners who emerge from the ground that claimed them - before she can be returned to the comparative safety of captivity.

Naturally, Nahon's bid to rescue Dequenne ends in decapitated failure. But Biolay has taken a shine to her and he agrees to help her exterminate the undead. However, the pair prove to be powerless against the ravenous horde and not even the support of a trio of burly bikers can allay the inevitable.

Shrewdly laying the ground for a possible sequel, this is a consistently teasing piece of genre savvyism that avoids dwelling on plot detail to focus on ambience and imbalance, as the demented Moreau lures victims for her late lamented sons. Her curses and cackles are matched by Dequenne's spirited fury and Nahon's knowing eccentricity, while Laurent Barès earthy imagery is similarly complemented by the cramped decrepitude of Florence Vercheval's sets and the serviceable ghoulishness of Olivier Afonso and Frédéric Lainé's make-up effects. The face-off in the blazing hut is a touch anti-climactic, but Richard slips in a mischievous reverie before delivering a resoundingly bleak ending.

The debuting Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo closes After.Life in an equally sombre manner. However, a convoluted storyline and some unconvincing metaphysical musing undermine the brooding atmosphere established by mortician Liam Neeson and cadaver Christina Ricci, who refuses to believe that she perished in a car crash after arguing with boyfriend Justin Long. Neeson attempts to convince the commitaphobe that she is more afraid of life than death. But a desperate phone call arouses Long's suspicion that all is not well inside Neeson's remote manor house and this concern is shared by Chandler Canterbury, a boy in teacher Ricci's class, who is slowly reaching the eerie conclusion that he can see dead people.

Despite subplots involving Ricci's wheelchair-bound mother Celia Weston and Long's cop pal Josh Charles, the emphasis here is firmly on Neeson's relationship with Ricci, which he insists derives from the fact that he has the dubious gift of being able to communicate with the deceased and not that she is actually alive and being detained against her will. Wojtowicz-Vosloo twice uses a mirror to challenge Neeson's story, which is further thrown into doubt by his frequent use of an incapacitating (and wholly fictitious) hydronium bromide muscle relaxant. But she seems more intent on finding new angles from which to photograph the often naked Ricci than adhering to any consistent plot logic.

Cinematographer Anastas N. Michos ably contrasts the dingy elegance of Neeson's office with the antiseptic chill of his mortuary. But, while Neeson is the epitome of reverentially enigmatic creepiness, Ricci and Long fall victim to indifferent characterisation, with the result that while each makes periodic bids to fathom the mystery, neither has the gumption or the persistence to see it through. Thus, while this occasionally intrigues, it's too calculatingly vague to engross and its ambiguity winds up frustrating as much as fascinating.

The need to survive drives three Mexican siblings to extremes in Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are, which bears a passing resemblance to both Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In (2008) and Giorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth (2009). Essentially, this puts a fresh spin on the old maxim that the family that slays together stays together. But Grau is as much interested in the pressures facing juveniles to assume adult responsibility as in providing gory jolts.

No one seems unduly concerned when Humberto Yáñez collapses and dies in a Mexico City shopping mall. Even the discovery of a woman's fingernail in his stomach during the autopsy raises no eyebrows and he is deemed so insignificant that nobody bothers to delve into his past. However, Yáñez not only leaves widow Carmen Beato to rear their three kids, but he also forces Francisco Barreiro, Paulina Gaitan and Alan Chávez to decide which of them is going to ensnare the victim for their next ritualistic cannibal feast.

None of the trio has any experience of life outside the home where they repair watches to make ends meet. Moreover, Barreiro is having a sexual crisis to rival his hunger for fresh flesh. Eventually, the brothers go in search of prey and resort to a prostitute when street kids prove too elusive. Beato, who suspected Yáñez of cavorting with hookers, refuses to perform the customary candlelight rite and the chastened boys quickly develop an audacious hunting instinct that enables them to seize bypassers with impunity and even prompts Barreiro to take his chances in a gay disco. However, their spree doesn't go unnoticed and even dull-witted detective Jorge Zárate manages to pick up their trail.

By focusing on the domestic dynamic, Grau achieves a claustrophobic intensity that is superbly reinforced by cinematographer Santiago Sanchez's blend of long, static takes and gliding tracks, and Enrico Chapel's oppressive score. But the need to introduce some horror alleviates the tension and Zárate's dogged investigation and the more graphic scenes of feasting often feel like intrusive sideshows to Beato's ravings, Chávez's edgy outbursts and Gaitan's possibly incestuous relationship with Barreiro. However, the debuting Grau directs steadily and laces proceedings with small moments of jet-black wit.

If We Are What We Are chimes in with the current vogue for cross-generic horror, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Amer pays slavish homage to Italian giallo. But while cinematographer Manuel Dacosse and production designer Alina Santos make disturbingly sumptuous use of colour, space and texture, this pseudo-Freudian melodrama succeeds only in capturing the visual allure of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, while mostly missing their fiendish complexity and psychosexual intrigue.

What little story there is follows a female protagonist through three phases of her life. As a young girl, Cassandra Forêt witnesses her parents having sex as she struggles to come to terms with her grandfather's death and her grandmother's eccentric behaviour in the room adjoining her own. Wearing the shortest of mini skirts, the adolescent Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud has an epiphany of her own, as she encounters a group of male models posing as bikers while out shopping with her mother. Finally, the adult Marie Bos, returns to the overgrown Côte d'Azur scene of her childhood traumas and perishes in one of the most sensually sickening blade incidents since Simone Mareuil's eyeball appeared to be sliced by Luis Buñuel's razor in Un Chien andalou (1928).

There's no questioning Cattet and Forzani's technical surety or their eye for a striking image. Moreover, the use of split-screens, zooms, jump cuts and coloured filters recreates the giallo aura as expertly as the voyeuristic camera angles and Daniel Bruylandt's inclusion of motifs by Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani and Adriano Celentano in his sound mix. But while this makes for ravishing viewing, the emphasis on surface emotion fails to disguise the lack of depth that could have made this enticing hybrid of rite of passage and pernicious fantasy all the more compelling.

Carlos Brooks also makes decent use of the labyrinthine spaces devised by Mark Garner, but that's about the only thing to be said in favour of Burning Bright, an asinine creature feature that sees safari park owner Garret Dillahunt attempt to scoop an insurance payment by barricading stepkids Briana Evigan and Charlie Tahan into his old dark house during a storm, along with a ravenous tiger named Lucifer.

Evigan works hard as the resourceful twentysomething desperate to keep her autistic brother safe. But the dismal tone is set during the opening exchange between Dillahunt and circus owner Meatloaf, as they haggle at the side of the road over the tiger's value. It gets no better, as Evigan argues with Dillahunt over the theft of the savings she was going to use to pay for Tahan's care while she took up a student scholarship. But even after the reliance on hackneyed dialogue has passed, things scarcely improve as Evigan strives to stay one step ahead of the prowling predator, who seems intent on letting her off the hook at every available opportunity.

The beast is ferociously handsome and Miklos Wright's camera roves the narrow corridors to menacing effect. But the matte work is mediocre and, as is so often the case in modern horror movies, the combination of jerky camera movements and rapid editing reduces the critical action to an incoherent blur that is more infuriating than visceral. And the same problem recurs in Seiji Chiba's Alien vs Ninja, Josh Reed's Primal and Jonathan Glendening's 13 Hrs.

Set during one of Japan's many periods of civil unrest, Alien vs Ninja is knowing to the point of being parodic. But it's still sufficiently genre aware to pay its dues to the `man in the suit' style of Nipponese fantasy and set up a sequel. Fight co-ordinator Yuji Shimomura's set-pieces are emasculated by Chiba's fragmenting of Tetsuya Kudô and Ryô Uematsu's already shaky visuals. But, for once, this is almost excusable, as Sôichi Umezawa's make-up effects are so undistinguished as to almost undermine the self-conscious bargain basement cultishness.

While out on patrol, ninjas Masanori Mimoto, Shuuji Kashiwabara and the buffoonish Donpei Tsuchihira are too preoccupied with their clan enemies to notice a ball of flame crashing from the sky into the nearby woods. However, they are sent to investigate next day and bump into another recce party led by the pugnacious Mika Hijii. No sooner have they exchanged greetings than the black-clad warriors are fighting for their lives against extra-terrestrials who are more than capable of withstanding a few slashes with a chambara. Despite sustaining heavy casualties, the ninjas win the day and offer sanctuary to teenager Yûki Ogoe, who describes how his village was overrun by the other-worldly critters.

One alien has survived, however, and it not only proves to be a durable foe, but it also discovers that it can use dead ninjas to incubate its young. Kashiwabara finds himself playing unwitting host to some gestating goo after the cowardly Tsuchihira meets a grizzly end. But Mimoto and Hijii hit upon a gag-making method of removing the spawn and they return home in triumph after vanquishing the monster in a cave showdown. What they don't know, however, is that one of their number is a quisling and that one baby alien has survived.

Played with tongues firmly in cheeks by a sporting cast, this is fun, but nothing more. The score by The Reboot is hugely resistible, while the production values are lamentably cheap. There is also an entirely extraneous digression involving Tsuchihira and the village bully, who turns out to be sleeping with his henchmen. But in a darkened room after midnight with lots of other B aficionados determined to enjoy themselves, this will undoubtedly pass muster. Primal also makes effective use of its forest setting, as six Australian twentysomethings venture into the backwoods in order to find some cave paintings that haven't been seen in 120 years. Wil Traval is hoping to base his thesis on deciphering the images. But, as we've already seen the prehistoric artist who drew them being savaged by an unseen presence, it's inevitable that we are entering Final Girl country and that claustrophobic Zoe Tuckwell-Smith - who is making the trip after recently being freed from a sadistic boyfriend's basement - has born survivor written all over her.

Again playing the genre game with polished efficiency, writer-director Josh Reed sends the frisky Krew Boylan skinny-dipping by moonlight and uses the leeches that cling to her body to inflict a fever that transforms her into a slavvering carnivore that beau Lindsay Farris is determined to protect, even after it chomps into Traval and hauls joker Damien Freeleagus and earnest photographer Rebekah Foord into the bushes for a snack. But once Boylan and Traval begin rutting, Farris's patience snaps and he charges into the breach with a machete, leaving Tuckwell-Smith to cope with the seething Boylan.

Despite being capably photographed by John Biggins, this has its share of technical blips, most notably during the faster cut special effects sequences. The tentacled monster is something of a disappointment, too. But the performances are above average for a kids in peril flick, with Boylan impressively switching from flirtatious to fangorious, Farris irksomely refusing to face facts until it's far too late and Tuckwell-Smith pluckily confronting her fear of confined spaces to pass through a narrow tunnel to safety and deliver the most signposted last word in recent screen history.

Jonathan Glendening's 13 Hrs is essentially the same movie, despite being set within a rambling mansion in the English countryside. Prodigal daughter Isabella Calthorpe returns home to find stepfather Simon MacCorkindale fretting over the bills and the urgent need to complete some maintenance work. But when he turns in for an early night, she goes to the barn in search of her brothers and friends. Old faithful Tom Felton is delighted to see her, but she receives a frostier reception from stepbrother Peter Gadiot and best friend Gemma Atkinson, who has started dating Gadiot since dumping Calthorpe's ex-boyfriend, Joshua Bowman.

A thaw sets in after a few drinks and they head back to the house for more booze. But, on entering, they find that MacCorkindale and the family dog have been torn to shreds and they only just manage to scamper from a rapidly gaining creature. Trapped in the eaves, and with Calthorpe's younger brother, Anthony De Liseo, still dozing on hay bales in the barn, the group decide that Calthorpe should act as a decoy while sibling Gabriel Thomson calls for help from their parents' bedroom. He gets through and trapper John Lynch braves the stormy night with local copper, Cornelius Clarke. But his quarry isn't any old animal, but a werewolf intent on wiping out the whole family within 13 hours.

Guarding its secrets reasonably well, this is an accomplished outing from the producers of Dog Soldiers (2002). Crisply photographed by Jordan Cushing and edited by Adrian Murray, the action is strewn with clichés and caricatures. But Glendening and his young cast make the most of them, as the body count rises and the awful truth slowly begins to emerge. With the lycanthrope wisely consigned to the shadows for much of the time and the carnage kept to a minimum, this is admirably brisk and brusque.

The same can also be said of Steven Lawson's Dead Cert, even though the plot device that sets up this vampiric venture into London gangland is hackneyed in the extreme. Many will dismiss this as a Mockney variation on Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez's From Dawn Till Dusk (1996) and it certainly can't compete in terms of star power, wit or polish. Nevertheless, this has been artfully designed by Matthew Button and the performances are laudably earnest.

Onetime bare-knuckle boxer and reformed thug Craig Fairbrass has realised a lifelong dream by opening his own pole-dancing club. However, he could do without wife Lisa McAllister nagging him about having a baby and urging him to be nicer to her shady brother, Dexter Fletcher. So, when Fletcher asks him to help cut a deal with Romanian drug baron Billy Murray, Fairbrass reluctantly agrees. But, in a fit of pique, Fairbrass agrees to wager his new premises on the result of a fight between local champion Dennis Midwinter and Murray's muscular minder, Dave Legeno. Consequently, not only does Fairbrass get to repent his pal's death at leisure, but he also has to hear the news from pestering vampire hunter Steven Berkoff that Murray is a 17th-century nosferatu named The Wolf, who has returned to reclaim the land that used to be his lair.

Having decided to storm the joint with some tooled-up mates, Fairbrass rapidly finds himself barricaded into the basement with Berkoff and a motley crew of employees, including the ever-willing Perry Benson. But, while the ensuing battle for supremacy is competently staged, the frantic editing and the identikit look of both heroes and villains often makes it difficult to know or care who is winning. The ending is a bit of a cop-out, too, even though it does feature a cameo from Danny Dyer, who is joined on the guest list by Jason Flemyng in a wholly extraneous sub-subplot.

Failing to achieve the gravitas to which it aspires, this takes an eternity to shift from ponderous BritCrime saga to Tigon/Amicus wannabe. But the horror is neither original, stylish or thrilling. The performances are also frustratingly inconsistent, with Murray's deadpan menace, Fairbrass's inanimate machismo, Berkoff's eccentric expertise and Fletcher's matey duplicity all feeling over-familiar and overdone.