Nosferatu

F.W. Murnau, one of the half-dozen greatest directors of silent films, did this unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Murnau’s vampire is not the courtly campy count that Bela Lugosi played in the 1931 Hollywood version or the demon lover of later vampire movies. As incarnated here by Max Schreck, he is a foul creature, more rodentoid than human, and his bite is not a kiss. This first great feature-length horror movie casts a long, angular shadow over film history. Klaus Kinski brought a pestilential presence to the role in Werner Herzog’s wonderful remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and Willem Dafoe played the mysterious Schreck in Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a fantasy on the making of Murnau’s creepy classic.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

“They’re here already!” The ’50s was chocked with mutants — giant bugs and amphibians, revived dinosaurs and pterodactyls, men who grew to Colossi or incredibly shrank to nothing — but what if the monsters looked just like us? What if they were aliens, hatched from sea pods, who could imitate everything human, except emotion? And what if the only way to retain your humanity was … not to sleep? That’s the premise of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers and the Don Siegel film version, which rises slowly, surely, from suburban realism to end-of-the-world hysteria. Kevin McCarthy is the doctor who suspects an otherworldly plot, Dana Wynter his imperiled ladylove. The film has been remade three times (this year as The Invasion with Nicole Kidman), but the Siegel version is the simplest, smartest and scariest.
More Best & Worst Lists
View AgainHorror Movies
- Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
- The Fly
- The Exorcist
- Night of the Living Dead
- Freaks
- Blood Feast
- Carrie
- Men Behind the Sun
- Paranormal Activity
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
- Thirst
- Braindead/Dead Alive
- Jaws
- Bambi
- Audition
- The Phantom of the Opera
- Trilogy of Terror
- Peeping Tom
- Halloween
- Frankenstein
- Nosferatu
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers
- Alien
- Psycho












