Continuing our monthlong celebration of Halloween with various scary movie and TV-related lists. Check out our online movie database at staytunedmag.com to see if any of these or other scary titles are on this month. (
SCARED SPEECHLESS:
TOP 5 SILENT HORROR FILMS
Don’t be scared off by the fact that these films are old, in black and white, and without sound. Instead, be very scared of their brilliantly horrific content:
5. The Golem (1920)
An inspiration for the look and feel of Frankenstein about a decade later, this film tells of Jews in 16th-century Prague who are facing persecution. A rabbi decides to create a golem (sort of a giant being) to protect them, but the creature instead goes on a deadly rampage. Another great example of German expressionism, which you’ll see a good deal of on this list:
4. The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
Lon Chaney’s masterpiece, which finds the “man of a thousand faces” tackling the role of Erik, the haunted and tragic (but scary) figure of Gaston Leroux’s novel. This may be the best-known version after Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical. Chaney went to incredible lengths to don the legendary makeup, even keeping his eyes in a bulged-out position with wires.
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
One of the most acclaimed of the German Expressionist films, it concerns a mad doctor who uses a sleepwalking crony to commit murders. Also one of the earliest twist endings in a horror film:
2. The Hands of Orlac (1924)
Those Germans are at it again in this Expressionist masterpiece, with Conrad Veidt (later to play Major Strasser in Casablanca) as a concert pianist who inconveniently loses his hands in an accident. He receives transplanted hands, which unfortunately turn out to have come from a murderer — whose impulses seem to be manifesting themselves in the pianist:
1. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
Unable to get the rights to film an adaptation of the novel Dracula, director F.W. Murnau and crew changed a few details to craft this frightening tale (which remained similar enough to Dracula, though, that author Bram Stoker’s widow sought reimbursement. The courts decided that all copies of the film should be destroyed, but like its immortal monster, the film lives on). Actor Max Schreck, as the sinister, rat-like vampire Count Orlok, remains one of the most influential and scariest blood-suckers in film history: