12 Classic Horror Movies You Can Watch Free This Halloween

F. W. Murnau could not get the rights to Dracula, so he renamed everyone and made it anyway. Bram Stoker’s widow sued and won, and a court ordered every print destroyed; the film survived because copies had already spread. Max Schreck’s Count Orlok is less a seducer than a plague in human shape, and the image of his shadow creeping up a staircase has been quoted by filmmakers ever since.

A carnival hypnotist exhibits a sleepwalker who can see the future, and people start dying. Robert Wiene’s film was shot almost entirely on painted sets where the streets lean, the windows are triangles and the shadows are painted on. It is the purest example of German Expressionism, and its famous framing twist is still disorienting on a first watch.

Benjamin Christensen’s Swedish-Danish film is part lecture, part nightmare: a history of witchcraft and the witch trials, told through re-enacted scenes of demons, sabbaths and inquisitors that were shocking enough to be censored in several countries. Its argument — that the “witches” of history were mostly the sick, the poor and the unlucky — is surprisingly modern.

Lon Chaney designed his own make-up for the Phantom and kept it secret from the press, so the moment Mary Philbin pulls away his mask was a genuine shock to audiences. The masked-ball sequence was shot in early two-colour Technicolor, and the enormous opera house set stood on the Universal backlot for decades afterwards.

A year after Dracula, Bela Lugosi played a Haitian sugar-mill owner who works his plantation with the walking dead and offers his services to a jealous suitor. It is often described as the first feature-length zombie film, and its zombies are the older, folkloric kind — enslaved, not hungry. Dreamlike, slow and genuinely eerie.

An eccentric millionaire offers five strangers a fortune to survive one night in a haunted house, and hands them each a pistol for the evening. Producer-director William Castle was a showman first, and in some cinemas he rigged a plastic skeleton to fly over the audience on a wire at the climax. Without the skeleton it is still a terrific haunted-house film, and the perfect Halloween-party movie.

A mystery writer renting an old mansion discovers that a masked killer known as the Bat is hunting for a fortune hidden somewhere in the house. Agnes Moorehead leads, Vincent Price is the doctor who may know more than he says, and the source is a hit stage play from 1920. Old-dark-house fun, with a solid whodunit underneath.

The original of the stage musical: a hapless florist’s assistant grows a plant that needs human blood to thrive, and it keeps asking for more. Corman shot it at astonishing speed, and it plays like a black-comic sketch that got out of hand. A very young Jack Nicholson steals one scene as a dental patient who loves pain.

Corman reportedly made this on sets left standing from another of his period horrors, which explains its lavish look on a tiny budget. Boris Karloff plays a baron with a secret, Jack Nicholson is the French officer following a ghostly woman along the coast, and the plot is best not examined too closely. The atmosphere is the point.

A surgeon keeps his fiancée’s severed head alive in a tray after a car crash and goes shopping for a new body, while something he has locked in the cupboard grows restless. It is gleefully lurid, very much a product of its drive-in moment, and far more entertaining than a film this cheap has any right to be.

Vincent Price plays the sole survivor of a plague that has turned everyone else into something like vampires. By day he hunts them; by night he barricades his house and listens to them call his name. Shot in Rome, it is the first film of Matheson’s novel, and its image of a lone man in an empty city has been copied by every apocalypse movie since.

George A. Romero took his cue from Matheson’s story of a besieged survivor, turned the monsters into flesh-eating corpses, and made the most influential horror film of his generation. Seven people hold out in a farmhouse; the tension comes as much from their fighting each other as from what is outside. It still feels raw, and its final minutes have not lost any of their force.