[j. d. worthington]

I'll agree with Ravenus on this; the Japanese horror films we've been seeing the last decade or so prove the point pretty well... they manage to produce an excellent atmosphere of menace and the otherworldly in color at least as well as black-and-white. The same can be said for Del Toro in such films as Pan' Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone, or Amenábar in The Others (or, for that matter, the film The Other (1972), from Tom Tryon's excellent novel). I'd also mention some of Fulci's films, especially The Beyond and The House of Clocks, which are both brutally graphic and highly atmospheric in their approach, and use the color palette very well to achieve a wide range of effects from the grotesquely comic to the horrifying to the eerie.

Which is not to say that black-and-white isn't an excellent choice for horror films -- some of my favorites, for instance, being Val Lewton's films, which certainly relied more on suggestion and adumbration rather than explicit statement... and sometimes simply on sound (think, for instance, of the chill delivered by that final moment of The 7th Victim); or Tourneur's film mentioned above (though I could have done without the actual visual of the demon at the end of the American version -- so, I understand, could Tourneur), which is a very good -- if somewhat loose in spots -- adaptation of M. R. James's "Casting the Runes"... or the original teleplay of Quatermass and the Pit, which is highly atmospheric.

In the end, as Ravenus says, it depends on the visual ideas the director and scenarist have; some do require black-and-white, others require color for full effect....