Greta Schroder

An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, made without securing the rights. The names were changed but the Stoker estate sued anyway and won, ordering all copies destroyed. A few survived, which is why we can watch it today. Count Orlok, the rat-faced vampire, buys a house in the fictional town of Wisborg and brings plague with him from Transylvania. Max Schreck's performance is still unsettling a century later. The film is a landmark of German Expressionist cinema and one of the earliest feature-length horror films.

Horror · Silent

The surviving masterpiece of German expressionist horror. In 16th century Prague, Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) sculpts a giant of clay and brings it to life with a magic word to defend the ghetto from an imperial decree of expulsion — but the Golem (Paul Wegener, who co-directed with Carl Boese) will not remain a servant. The staggered Expressionist sets, built like crooked clay houses, and the creation sequence's Kabbalistic ritual became templates for Frankenstein and every creature feature after. This was Wegener's third Golem film and the only one to survive substantially intact. A century on, it remains genuinely uncanny. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Horror · Fantasy · Silent