Sir Howard Elston (DOA) reports on the demise of a horror movie giant.

Wes Craven, mastermind behind dozens of famous political horror shows, has died.

His movies, almost always located in the House of the Haunted Commons, had the means to get audiences screaming and hiding behind sofas and movie seats if not howling with dread anticipation of the inevitable issue-based gore fest.

His shock left-wing political horror classics included Nightmare on Polling Day; Last Majority House on the Left; and, his biopic tribute to hopeful Labour leader Yvette Cooper and her family – The Night of the Living Ed.

Many of his biggest hits barely scraped by the censors because of their bloody horror and nasty depictions of violence and political hackery.

Freddie Blair seen on location during a Craven shoot

Most notable was The Life and Times of Freddie Blair, which portrayed a stark raving lunatic armed with sharpened teeth and fingers of knives who terrorised a whole country for ten years. Another box office winner was The Politicians Under the Stairs, which imagined a race of centrist Labour Party leader bosses trapped underneath a house in Norwich.

Star of Night of the Living Ed

But the filmmaker, who died this week aged 76, had a softer touch too. My Name is Corbo was an endearing portrait of an old leftie who wanted to nationalise the atmosphere and replace Trident with a crack unit of light cavalry troops.

And there was Move Over Leftie, starring Doris Day and Andy Burnham, a lovely domestic romp about a tired Blairite devoid of ideas or the ability to speak intelligibly who is helped along by the friendly ghost of John Belushi to win back Downing Street.

But it was horror that made Craven’s name. And it came no better than The  Beasts that Ate Westminster which pictured gargantuan pols Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown as hugely overweight monsters emerging from the Thames and devouring large swathes of MPs while claiming ludicrous amounts of expenses.