Every film director has at least one horror flick to his credit, though it may be buried deep in the garden. And the Brooklyn Academy of Music does the digging to find them for its annual retrospective “Some Kind of Horror Show” (March 6 to 20). This year’s series celebrates scary movies in an eclectic mix that has fearsome creatures battling everything from Nazis to mob bosses to samurai warriors.

Michael Mann’s 1983 film, “The Keep” (March 7), tops the list for nuttiness – and may prevent you from taking him seriously again. His Nazis-versus-demons flick is a gripping story for about five minutes before it careens into a world of giddy nonsense that combines ancient demons, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellen’s accent, and the immortal warrior Scott Glenn.

Nicolas Roeg, the director of “Don’t Look Now,” teams up with the Jim Henson Company for “The Witches” (Tuesday, March 21). This is a bitter children’s movie about a boy and his grandmother battling a coven of witches led by Anjelica Huston. The boy is played by Jasen Fisher, an unappealing child actor who is thankfully transformed into a mouse shortly after the movie begins. The animatronic mice show off the Henson team at its finest. It comes as no surprise (and a great relief) that the kid elects to remain a mouse even when the movie ends.

John Landis’s “Innocent Blood” (March 16) pits vampires against the Mafia, and is far more fun than it should be. It’s preceded by “Thriller,” the video Mr. Landis shot for Michael Jackson, and it’s anchored by a scenery (and skin) chewing performance by Robert Loggia.

The rarely seen “Kuroneko” (March 13 to 14) is a Japanese horror-tragedy that serves as a reminder of a time when Japanese horror movies were scary. A pair of cat demons, whose preferred food is fresh samurai, stalk cavernous, pitch-black sets lit by flashlights in a movie that manages to make doomed marriages romantic.

No movie in this series is more moving than George Romero’s “Martin” (March 27), which should not be missed. Choreographer Mark Morris will be on hand to introduce Mr. Romero’s masterpiece about a lonely young man who might be a vampire. Martin, trapped in the Pennsylvania rust belt with an uncle who dreams of driving a stake through his heart, stalks young women with a razor blade and a hypodermic needle. It’s simultaneously pathetic and scary. The “Taxi Driver” of vampire movies, this low-budget hymn to loneliness is surprisingly moving and unexpectedly entertaining. It’s one of the lost classics of the 1970s, and indicative of the gems BAM manages to bring forth from the garden year after year.

Until March 20 (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).