WATCHknownA Chinese Ghost Story
1987 · HK · 92m
A tax collector shelters in a haunted temple and falls in love with a ghost enslaved by a tree demon with a very long tongue.
1931 onward · 53 films
Gothic
Castles, candelabra and inherited guilt. The oldest room in the house.
Gothic horror predates cinema by 150 years, and the films inherited the furniture more or less intact: a decaying great house, a family with something buried in it, a woman who arrives from outside and works out what.
Universal builds the vocabulary
The 1931 to 1935 Universal cycle fixed the images everybody still uses. Dracula is stagey and slow, but Karloff's Frankenstein monster and the sets built for it established that horror could look expensive. Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the one that holds up: James Whale is openly funny in it, Ernest Thesiger's Pretorius is the first camp villain in horror, and the film is sympathetic to the monster in a way the novel is not.
Hammer repaints it
By the mid-1950s the Universal formula was exhausted. Hammer restarted it in colour, with blood that looked like blood, and with Christopher Lee playing Dracula as a physical threat rather than a foreign aristocrat with a cape problem. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) made money in a way that reorganised British film production for a decade.
Italy does it better looking
Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) is the high-water mark for gothic photography. Shot in black and white because Bava could not afford colour, it looks more expensive than anything Hammer made, and Barbara Steele's face became the genre's single most recognisable image.
The quiet strand
Running alongside the castles is a subtler line that trusts suggestion: The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963), Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966). These are the gothics that still frighten people, largely because they never show you the thing.
Now
Gothic never went away, it just stopped being the default. Del Toro works almost exclusively in it. Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse is gothic with the castle replaced by a rock. Anything with an inheritance, a locked room and a family secret is drawing on this.
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The whole shelf
Filter these →WATCHknown
WATCHknownA Tale of Two Sisters
2003 · South Korea · 110m
The highest-grossing Korean horror film ever, and it is really a family drama with a haunting in it.
WATCHcultAt Midnight I'll Take Your Soul
1964 · BR · 84m
Brazil's first horror film, made by a man who invented himself as a character and played him for fifty years.
WATCHknownBlack Sabbath
1963 · Italy/France · 92m
Three Bava stories introduced by Boris Karloff, and the middle one is the most frightening thing Bava shot.
WATCHobscureBlood Rites
1968 · USA
Andy Milligan shooting in Staten Island with a hand-held Auricon. An acquired taste nobody acquires.
WATCHknownCreepshow
1982 · USA · 120m
Romero and King doing EC Comics, with panel borders, primary lighting and a story about a cake.
WATCHcultDaughters of Darkness
1971 · France/Germany · 100m
Elizabeth Báthory in an empty Ostend hotel out of season, and it is the most elegant vampire film ever made.
WATCHknownDead of Night
1945 · UK · 103m
The British portmanteau that every anthology since has copied, and the ventriloquist episode has never been bettered.
WATCHcanonDon't Look Now
1973 · UK/Italy · 110m
Grief, Venice, and an edit that keeps showing you the ending before you can read it.
WATCHcanonDracula
1931 · USA · 75m
Stagey, slow, and it has no score at all. Lugosi's face is the entire reason it survives.
WATCHcanonEyes Without a Face
1960 · France/Italy · 90m
A surgeon steals faces for his disfigured daughter. Filmed with a tenderness that makes it far worse.
WATCHknownFlesh for Frankenstein
1973 · France/USA · 94m
Shot in 3D with Udo Kier and a spleen. Warhol's name on it, Paul Morrissey's film.
WATCHcanonFrankenstein
1931 · USA · 71m
Karloff in Jack Pierce's makeup, and the flat head is a copyrighted design rather than anything from the novel.
WATCHcanonFreaks
1932 · USA · 64m
Tod Browning cast real sideshow performers, MGM cut a third of it, and it ended his career.
WATCHcanonFright Night
1985 · USA · 103m
A teenager works out his new neighbour is a vampire and no adult will believe him, so he hires a washed-up TV host.
WATCHcanonHorror of Dracula
1958 · UK · 85m
Christopher Lee plays Dracula as a physical threat rather than a foreign gentleman, and it is over in 82 minutes.
WATCHknownImmaculate
2024 · USA/Italy · 89m
Nunsploitation with a real budget. The last shot is a single unbroken take and it is the reason to watch.
WATCHknownIn Fabric
2018 · UK · 118m
A haunted red dress moves from customer to customer through a nightmarish department store.
WATCHknownI Walked with a Zombie
1943 · USA · 68m
Jane Eyre relocated to a Caribbean sugar plantation, and it is the most beautiful film in this category.
WATCHcultKill, Baby... Kill!
1966 · Italy · 85m
A Carpathian village, a dead girl with a white ball, and Fellini borrowed the image wholesale.
WATCHknownKwaidan
1964 · Japan · 183m
Four ghost stories on hand-painted sound stages, three hours long, and among the most beautiful films ever made.
WATCHknownLa Llorona
2019 · GT/France · 97m
A Guatemalan dictator on trial for genocide is haunted in his own home. The weeping woman as historical reckoning.
WATCHcultLisa and the Devil
1973 · Germany/Italy · 95m
Bava given complete freedom, and the film is a dream nobody can escape, including the producer.
WATCHcanonNosferatu
2024 · USA · 143m
Eggers going back to Murnau rather than to Stoker. Filthy, plague-ridden, and Orlok has a moustache.
WATCHcanonNosferatu
1922 · Germany · 94m
An illegal Dracula that survived a court order to burn it. Still the best-looking vampire film.
WATCHknownPhantasm
1979 · USA · 88m
A tall undertaker, a flying silver sphere, and a film that runs entirely on dream logic. Don Coscarelli was 23.
WATCHcanonRenfield
2023 · USA · 93m
Nicolas Cage plays Dracula as a toxic boss, and his familiar wants to leave the relationship. A horror comedy about codependency.
WATCHcultTales from the Crypt
1972 · UK/USA · 92m
Amicus adapting the EC Comics, with Joan Collins menaced by a killer Santa and Peter Cushing as a wronged dustman.
knownThe Abominable Dr. Phibes
1971 · UK/Australia · 94m
Vincent Price murders the surgeons who let his wife die, each death based on the plagues of Egypt. A gorgeous, deranged art deco comedy.
WATCHknownTheatre of Blood
1973 · UK · 104m
Vincent Price as a hammy actor murdering the critics who denied him an award, each death staged from Shakespeare.
WATCHknownThe Curse of Frankenstein
1957 · UK · 82m
The film that made Hammer, made in colour, with blood that looks like blood.
WATCHknownThe Curse of the Werewolf
1961 · UK · 90m
Hammer's only werewolf film, Oliver Reed's first lead, and the transformation is largely his face.
WATCHknownThe Devil's Backbone
2001 · Spain/Mexico · 106m
Del Toro's other Spanish Civil War film, and he has called it the companion to Pan's Labyrinth.
WATCHcultThe Front Room
2024 · USA · 94m
A pregnant woman is forced to care for her husband's monstrous, dying, evangelical stepmother.
WATCHknownThe House That Dripped Blood
1971 · UK · 102m
Four stories tied to one house, written by Robert Bloch, with Christopher Lee and a very young Jon Pertwee joke.
WATCHcanonThe Lighthouse
2019 · USA/Canada · 109m
Shot on black and white 35mm in a 1.19:1 box. Two men, a rock, and a great deal of drinking.
WATCHcanonThe Lost Boys
1987 · USA · 97m
Joel Schumacher's MTV vampires in a California beach town, and it made the genre cool for a decade.
WATCHknownThe Old Dark House
1932 · USA · 70m
James Whale between the two Frankensteins, having a wonderful time, and Karloff is the least of it.
WATCHcanonThe Orphanage
2007 · Spain/Mexico · 101m
Produced by del Toro, and it is a film about a mother rather than a house.
WATCHcanonThe Others
2001 · USA/Spain · 101m
A twist that survives a second viewing, which is rarer than it sounds.
WATCHknownThe Sentinel
1977 · USA · 92m
A model moves into a Brooklyn brownstone that turns out to be the gateway to Hell, guarded by a blind priest.
WATCHcultThe Uninvited
1944 · USA · 99m
The first Hollywood ghost film to play it entirely straight. Almost nothing has aged.
WATCHcanonThe Wolf Man
1941 · USA · 70m
Most werewolf folklore you think is ancient was invented for this script in 1941.
WATCHcultTigers Are Not Afraid
2017 · Mexico · 83m
Children orphaned by the Mexican drug war, three wishes, and the dead following them through the streets.
WATCHknownTumbbad
2018 · IN · 104m
An Indian folk horror about greed, a hidden god, and a womb in the earth, spanning three generations.
WATCHknownValerie and Her Week of Wonders
1970 · CS · 73m
A Czech surrealist film about a thirteen-year-old girl, vampires and menstruation, and it is not what that sounds like.
WATCHknownVampire Circus
1972 · UK · 87m
A plague-quarantined village visited by a travelling circus, and it is the strangest film Hammer made.
WATCHknownWhite Zombie
1932 · USA · 69m
The first zombie film, made independently, with Lugosi controlling the dead on a Haitian sugar plantation.