When we decided on "Foreign Horror" as the overall theme for our Shocktober review marathon this year, we made a conscious decision to leave out Italy for the most part, despite it having the second-highest horror output for a non-English-speaking country (after Japan). The fact is, we have plenty of Italian horror covered on the site, and we devoted two and a half weeks of last year's Shocktober to two of the country's best-known horror directors, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava.

Unfortunately, we're not able to get to every single part of the world in the limited amount of time alotted to us in a thirty-one day month. For our final celebration of foreign horror, we've thrown it open, looking at films from five different countries, each one dealing with popular horror subjects like death, vampires, and zombies in their own way.

As we head into our fourth celebration of international horror, we head to the Pacific coast of Asia. To be honest, it's probably unfair of us to lump Asian horror together into one big pot. Each country involved has its own unique identity and its own approach to horror. Japan has a long tradition of ghost stories that, in recent years, have melded with their increased dependence on technology to create such horrors as Ring and Pulse. Meanwhile, South Korea -- a deeply Christian country -- draws on religious themes of guilt and redemption for its cinematic tales of terror.

For our third tribute to international horror, we set our reviewers on Germany. Arguably the country that lifted cinematic horror from the realm of melodrama, Germany's contributions to the genre extend from Expressionism to the krimi (in many ways a predecessor to Italy's giallo) and beyond. Here we look at two silent German horror, a krimi, a Gothic Poe semi-adaptation, and a remake of one of the greatest vampire films of all time.

For our tribute to Spanish horror, we're focusing on the works of three of the country's best-known directors (Jesus Franco, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, and Paul Naschy) as well as two newer talents, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.

Each week in October this year, as part of our Shocktober Classics event, we'll be spotlighting different regions of the world that have significantly contributed to the horror genre, with new reviews for that region's films from Monday to Friday of that week