A full moon looms, a synthesizer gulps and – dun dun duuuuuun – it's all aboard Horror Europa With Mark Gatiss (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC4) for a trundle through the bloodied annals of continental terror. A one-off sequel to 2010's sterling A History of Horror, it finds Gatiss in endearingly tweedy tour guide mode, bringing relish and twinkle to a cross-continental tale of beleaguered mavericks, visionary hacks, broiling political subtexts and no-budget eviscerations.

First stop: Ostend. "What is commercial? Commercial is violence, blood, sex, horror," rumbles director Harry Kümel, a voluminously bearded pensioner in a sensible jumper who discusses murderous lesbians and ritualistic disembowelment with the polite weariness of a vicar extracting cress from a BHS egg bap. He's right, of course, but it's the history and the curios that most interest Gatiss, with an examination of German expressionism bleeding into a look at postwar France's cinematic self-reflection and beyond. A trip to Italy finds Dario Argento's joyously discombobulating Suspiria ("a cinematic fever-dream!") and Mario Bava's 1964 proto-slasher odyssey Blood And Black Lace, in which conga lines of generously cleavaged Donatellas flee from badly dubbed bastards through garish sets until – ruh-roh – ze game ees up and ze killing commences in full-on Exploitavision™, si? "We quickly forget them as characters. We just remember how they die," sighs Gatiss in a rare moment of dissent, thus nailing the MO of 96% of all horror films ever since.

But this is no requiem for the death of the genre's innocence. Nor, perhaps surprisingly, does Gatiss deign to put the boot into Hollywood, even though it took Europe's ideas and effectively shook them by the ankles till the soul fell out. What emerges instead is a fond tribute to a clutch of eccentrics who managed to eke emotional resonance from the unlikeliest of sources, with each – from FW "Nosferatu" Murnau in 1922 to gothic melancholist Guillermo "Pan's Labyrinth" del Toro – serving up the blimey with a generous dollop of boo-hoo. Not that it's all high art, mind. It's difficult to get one's Review Show bloomers in a twist over, say, The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue, a Spanish "eco-zombie" boggler in which swarthy extras lumber, plank–armed, through the Peak District while dressed like Jethro Tull after an industrial farming tragedy (sample line: "I'm mad about apples!"). "This is very much how I remember the 1970s," says Gatiss to director Jorge Grau over footage of a corpse in a greatcoat staggering past a Ford Anglia. "Apart from the living dead."

The plot thickens and the entrails mount. There's a bit on the pulpy flamboyance of Italy's giallo thrillers, a segment on Argento's peerlessly tasteless memorabilia shop ("Is that a torso?") and a look at how Franco's death in 1975 freed the Spanish film industry to explore the impact of the country's civil war. Guillermo del Toro pops his big, bearded head round the corner to opine on the necessity of individuality: "The best films have always come from outsiders. You have to remain an outsider. If you are truly welcome you lose your mojo."

It's all enormously cheering, with Gatiss once again succeeding in crocheting the macabre into something you could place a cupcake on. "Yes," you think, as you watch his brogues clacking along another forlorn cobbled boulevard to the strains of a throttled theramin. "This sort of leisurely boffinry is just the ticket in these days of X Factor arsery and Made In Chelsea and whatnot." Ultimately, no amount of dubbed disembowelings can drown out one's sobs of gratitude that there's still a place where this sort of thing – understated, considered, insightful, not crap – is allowed to exist. Three screams for BBC4, then; itself a prodigiously brained outsider in a world of bewildered zombies and mojoless arse. Don't have nightmares.