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IT’S ALWAYS nice to see a promising director come good. After a fitful series of horror films (the passable Creep, the awful Severance, the fascinating Triangle), young Christopher Smith delivers a real blood-drenched, sinew-snapping corker with this medieval shocker.

Following a cadre of ruthless Christian missionaries as they hack their way through Bergmanesque plague-lands, Black Deathtips its hat to a trio of British pictures from the 1970s. The pestilent mud seems to have been wiped from the boots of Witchfinder Generaland Blood on Satan’s Claw.The closing pagan rituals remind us of those from The Wicker Man. It has, however, been so long since this vein of period horror was in vogue that the film feels totally fresh (if anything so covered in boils can be thus described).