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There’s been a bit of discourse lately on X/Twitter around the idea that very old movies can’t possibly compete with modern movies. Old movies lack color and often appear grainy and generally… not of this era. But what about horror, specifically? Comedy doesn’t always age well, even when we can recognize the skill involved, and thrillers can go the same way: The things that scared us collectively back in the day don’t necessarily continue to resonate, and sometimes the sheer repetition of themes, visuals, and tropes dulls their impact over years and decades. Nevertheless, there are plenty of old-timey (I’m placing the cutoff at 1980 here) horror movies that work at least as well today as they ever did.
Nosferatu (1922)
Let’s do Dracula, thought silent-film director F. W. Murnau, but let’s avoid royalties by calling him “Nosferatu” instead. It wasn’t the greatest idea, in that it was nearly lost forever in court battles that followed, but the movie survives, and it’s a triumph. Nosferatu introduced much of what we think we know about vampires, including plenty that was never in the source material (including the idea that vamps are killed by sunlight) but, even as there’s much here that’s familiar, the performance of Max Schreck as Count Orlok remains striking (and problematic, given his resemblance to Jewish stereotypes, intentional or not). This isn’t suave Count Dracula, but instead a feral, ugly monster, played with such conviction that it’s often hard to believe that there’s a human being beneath all of the makeup—the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire re-imagines the making of Nosferatu with the idea that Shreck was an actual vampire. There are elements here that are unlikely to really frighten modern audiences, but that performance will absolutely live with you.
Where to stream: Prime Video, Tubi, Shudder, Crackle
Freaks (1932)
From the wildly successful Dracula in 1931 to what was almost certainly the biggest box-office disappointment of his career, director Tod Browning took on Freaks as something of a passion project that irreparably damaged his reputation. Freaks finds a scheming trapeze artist joining up with a carnival sideshow and then plotting to seduce and murder one of the show’s little person performers in order to gain his inheritance. Browning’s desire for verisimilitude leads him to hire disabled actors to play the parts of the carnival “freaks,” an innovation then and for many decades after, even if the movie feels frequently exploitative. The disabled characters have been wronged, but their revenge (however well-deserved) is gruesome—a castration scene, among other bits, saw people walking out of test screenings. The memorable climax, with its refrain “one of us!” is one of the most disturbing climaxes in horror movie history.
Where to stream: Tubi, digital rental
The Black Cat (1934 film)
Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff, who shepherded in an age of horror-movie blockbusters (with Dracula and Frankenstein, respectively), memorably teamed up here in this sometimes-forgotten chiller that was also one of the top hits of its year. Lugosi plays Dr. Vitus Werdegast, who picks up a couple of stranded honeymooners in Hungary on his way to the home of old “friend” Hjalmar Poelzig, who lives nearby in a stunningly stylish expressionist mansion. Poelzig, it turns out, betrayed Dr. Werdegast’s unit to the Russians during World War I, and took his wife and daughter: This isn’t a social call, it’s about revenge. The rest involves demonology, preserved corpses, attempted cat murder, and some of pre-Code cinema’s most disturbing imagery. The skinning, while alive, of one character might not be done as explicitly as it would be today, but it’s every bit as stomach-churning.
Where to stream: digital rental
Dead of Night (1945)
This British anthology movie includes four chilling tales, framed around a traveller arriving as a guest in a country cottage. He immediacy feels a vague unease, but, no matter, each guest has a tale to tell. The stories are all more than sufficiently chilling, but the standout is almost certainly the final vignette involving ventriloquist Maxwell Frere and his dummy, Hugo. It’s the template for every creepy doll story that followed, and does it better than a great many of them. Once the stories conclude, the film includes a memorable final twist that pushes it, very nearly, into the realm of science fiction.
Where to stream: Kanopy, Plex
Isle of the Dead (1945)
Another with Boris Karloff, Isle of the Dead is a creepy but incredibly timely story of disease and death on a remote island. Karloff is General Nikolas Pherides, taking leave from the Balkan War to visit the grave of his wife on the small Greek island with an American reporter, only to find himself trapped when plague breaks out. The brutal, efficient (but very correct) general charges himself with maintaining the quarantine, but comes up against locals who either want to escape for their own benefit, or whose superstitious fears lead them to persecute those who don’t quite fit in. Is the nurse who oversaw the deaths of the locals actually an undead vorvolaka? That’s what a charismatic housekeeper comes to believe, and she becomes more convincing as the bodies pile up.
Where to stream: digital rental
The Spiral Staircase (1946)
One of the progenitors of the slasher genre, this one finds a serial killer hunting women with disabilities in a small town in Vermont in the early 20th century. Dorothy McGuire is great in the lead as Helen, a mute woman stalked by the mysterious killer over the course of a single night. With its contained environment and timespan, it is tense and effective; it’s also easy to see how a genre (slowly) grew out of it: The female-lead cast, camerawork that places us in the perspective of the killer, and even some jump scares make it feel, in some ways, rather modern.
Where to stream: Flix (you can also find it on YouTube)
Night of the Hunter (1955)
Actor Charles Laughton directed exactly one movie, and this classic was it. Robert Mitchum plays the Revered Harry Powell, a genuine religious fanatic who targets and murders women who have the audacity to arouse him—the movie was way, way ahead of its time in its themes. He gets away with everything because his sermonizing is so convincing, his latest target being the widow Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) and her rather skeptical young son. The Rev. Powell is an all-time great movie creep (inspiring decades worth of cinematic devils), and Night of the Hunter is as chilling as it is tense; it also boasts visuals that are among thriller cinema’s most beautiful and disturbing.
Where to stream: MGM+, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
The Fly (1958)
As we learned when it was remade in 1986, a silly-sounding premise can generate actual horror. The Fly opens with the wife of a scientist confessing to killing him by smashing his head to pulp in a hydraulic press. We learn in flashback that the scientist was working on a matter transporter, one which he first tests on an ill-fated cat before trying it on himself…something one ought not do unless one is absolutely sure that there isn’t a fly caught in the matrix. There are shades of 1950s monster features here, but this is also body horror before that was a thing, full of chilling moments and an absolutely haunting final act.
Where to stream: digital rental
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Wanting to dodge problems with European and local censors, French director Georges Franju was cautioned away from including all the blood and gore that the story might have otherwise called for. It’s just as well. Following his daughter’s disfiguring accident, a plastic surgeon is determined to provide her with a face transplant that will restore her to his idea of beauty. The problem, as you can imagine, is where to get the face (hint: it involves murder). The tone here is sly and suggestive (we might call it elevated in modern horror-movie parlance) with effective flashes of gore, but suggestions of violence that are even more effective.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Peeping Tom (1960)
A formative film in the slasher/serial killer sub-genres, many now-familiar tropes show up here for the first time. Director Michael Powell, who alongside Emeric Pressburger directed some of the most stunningly intelligent and beautiful films from Britain’s golden age, is hardly known for schlock, so audiences were shocked in 1960 when he nearly threw away his career with this beautiful, but graphic, shocker. The story, about a serial killer who is obsessed with the dying expressions of his victims, and films them with a point-of-view camera, has many of the dark thrills that we’ve come to expect from slasher movies—but it also works as a commentary on our own voyeuristic interest in death and murder. It’s that visual perspective, though, that remains effective, creating the feeling, if only for a moment, that you’re the one getting killed.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, Tubi, digital rental
The Haunting (1963)
Based on the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, the movie starts out with a fairly stock premise: A scientist invites a disparate group of visitors to spend the night in the reputedly haunted Hill House, a beautiful but oddly designed structure mansion (The House on Haunted Hill has a similar setup, but wildly different execution). As in Jackson’s novel, director Robert Wise creates character drama out of a terrifying night, exploring each character in turn but focusing on sheepish and awkward Eleanor, who spent most of her adult life caring for her mother. Now that mom’s dead, Eleanor is feeling freedom for the first time in a long time, but has no idea how to get along in the real world. The tone is consistently chilling and melancholy, while throwing in a couple of the most heart-pounding sequences in horror history. It evolves into a movie about two lost souls who unexpectedly find each other, with no plans to ever be parted again.
Where to stream: Tubi, MGM+, digital rental
Kuroneko (1968)
A horrific and eerie story sees two women, a mother and her daughter-in-law, sexually assaulted, and then murdered by a troop of samurai, only to rise from the dead (with the help of a black cat, naturally) with the goal of taking brutal revenge on any samurai foolish enough to be taken in by their charms. Catching on, a young warrior is assigned the task of destroying the spirits—a man who, as fate would have it, is the son and husband of the two murdered women. It’s, perhaps, the original rape-and-revenge movie—that’s one of horror’s more distasteful sub-genres, but it’s done with appropriately disturbing style here. The vengeance of the two women is genuinely terrifying, and all the more disturbing in being justified.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Dario Argento (Suspiria) remains, probably, the top name in Italian giallo, but Lucio Fulci is right up there in a triumvirate that also includes Mario Bava. Where Argento’s 1970s films play more like stylish murder mysteries, Fulci was already doing full-on—and very gory—horror. Don’t Torture a Duckling is one of his earliest and best, set in a narrow-minded and insular Italian village where a serial killer is murdering children. The very religious villagers begin pointing fingers at anyone who doesn’t really fit in, and the result is a morally grey film with a fair bit to say about the Catholic Church, but one that also includes some tense and incredibly brutal scenes of violence.
Where to stream: Tubi, The Criterion Channel, digital rental
Black Christmas (1974)
An early slasher triumph, and the best use of the “call is coming from inside the house!” trope—When a Stranger Calls would do it pretty well a few years later, but that’s a far more uneven movie. This one finds a bunch of sorority sisters (lead by Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder) getting some obscene phone calls at the house just as winter break is beginning. The movie’s isolated and lonely setting is incredibly effective (campus is nearly deserted), and the killer isn’t shy in his methods. Even better, and like Halloween a few years later, the movie (directed by A Christmas Story‘s Bob Clark) invests in its mostly female cast, even the drunk party girls, so that when the murders begin, there are very real stakes.
Where to stream: Prime Video, Peacock, Tubi, Shudder, Crackle
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
It’s not wildly graphic by today’s standards, but it feels visceral, even if you’re not seeing nearly as much as you think you’re seeing. Even after decades of slasher movies and the full-on advent of torture horror, TCM remains deeply unsettling when it’s not genuinely thrilling. For audiences who want to talk about the visual advantages of modern digital filmmaking, here’s a great example of a movie whose old-school film stock graininess and budgetary limitations are strengths, not weaknesses; the finished product can feel at times like a snuff film. It’s the grandaddy of a certain type of gritty horror, and remains effective even as it’s been duplicated over and over again.
Where to stream: Prime Video, Tubi, Peacock