Classic Spooky Films
Classic horror films, silent and sound, in the public domain in the US and free to watch online. They’re horror films, so they suit older children and grown-ups best: Germany rates Caligari and Nosferatu 12+.
All 19 films, one after another, then back to the first. The silent films play without music (except The Man Who Laughs, with its 1928 recorded score); the sound films have their own soundtracks. The longest runs about 2 hours, so mind your data on a phone.
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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
At a fairground in the town of Holstenwall, Dr. Caligari shows off Cesare, a sleepwalker who can tell the future. It was advertised in 1920 as the first Expressionist film, with crooked, painted sets. This copy is the Murnau Foundation’s 2014 restoration.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
John Barrymore as the London doctor who finds a drug that splits off his evil side, Mr. Hyde, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 story. Barrymore insisted on working through a bad case of the flu, a trade paper reported at the time.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
Nosferatu
Wisborg, a north German port, 1838: the young estate agent Thomas Hutter leaves his wife Ellen to sell a house to Count Orlok in Transylvania, in spite of her worries and the warnings of the people he meets on the way. Based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This copy is the Murnau Foundation’s 2006 restoration.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Victor Hugo’s novel of 15th-century Paris, with Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, the cathedral’s bell-ringer, whose devotion to the dancer Esmeralda leads him into trouble. The New York Times called Chaney’s performance “remarkable.”
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Phantom of the Opera
Lon Chaney plays Erik, the phantom of the Paris Opera House, who becomes obsessed with the young singer Christine Daaé. Universal built a huge Paris Opera set for it, and Chaney did his own makeup and kept it secret from the cast and crew until filming. This copy is the 1929 reissue, with the masked ball in early Technicolor.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
Faust
From the folk legend and the plays of Marlowe and Goethe: Mephisto tempts the aging scholar Faust with youth and riches, Faust signs away his soul, and his love for Gretchen ruins her life, until their love defeats Mephisto’s plan. Murnau made it for Ufa, and it opened in Germany on October 14, 1926.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Cat and the Canary
A “spook yarn,” as Film Daily called it in 1927, from John Willard’s stage play: Laura La Plante is “the beautiful victim of a fanatic’s will,” in a mystery full of shadows, flickering lights and new camera angles.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe’s tale as a short avant-garde film, strikingly stylized in its sets and costumes, with inventive editing, lighting and camerawork. It’s on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
Watch free on the National Film Preservation Foundation -
The Man Who Laughs
From Victor Hugo’s novel: on a king’s orders, Gwynplaine (Conrad Veidt) had his face fixed into a permanent grin as a child, and grows up a famous clown who loves the blind girl Dea (Mary Philbin). Universal made it a year after The Cat and the Canary, also with Paul Leni.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Last Warning
A leading man is murdered during a play and the theatre is shut. Five years later a producer reopens it with the same play and some of the same cast, and strange things start happening, including the dead actor’s ghost. It was Paul Leni’s last film; he died later that year.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Bat Whispers
Roland West’s sound film of The Bat, the 1920 stage mystery by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, from Rinehart’s novel The Circular Staircase, with Chester Morris and Una Merkel. It was shot twice, once in an early 65mm widescreen process called Magnifilm; this copy is the widescreen one.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
White Zombie
Newlyweds arrive in Haiti, where “Murder” Legendre (Bela Lugosi), whose sugar mill is worked by zombies, gives a jealous rival a potion to win the bride. An independent film, made for about $50,000 and shot at RKO Pathé and Universal.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Vampire Bat
In the village of Kleinschloss a run of deaths is blamed on vampire bats, and suspicion falls on an odd man who keeps them, while the doctor (Lionel Atwill) knows more than he says. With Fay Wray and Melvyn Douglas; the cave scenes were shot in Beachwood Canyon, Los Angeles.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Devil Bat
Bela Lugosi as a village doctor who believes his employers grew rich on his formulas, and takes revenge with giant bats drawn to a scent he has made. A reporter and a photographer come to look into the deaths.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
House on Haunted Hill
A rich man (Vincent Price) offers five strangers $10,000 each to spend the night in a haunted mansion, and nothing in the house, or about its guests, is quite what it seems. At some first showings a skeleton, which Castle called “Emergo,” flew over the audience on wires.
Watch free on the Internet Archive -
The Bat
A mystery writer (Agnes Moorehead) rents a big country house for the summer while a masked killer is at large, with Vincent Price as the doctor. Another film of the 1920 play behind The Bat Whispers.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Little Shop of Horrors
A comedy: a nervous clerk at a struggling florist’s on Los Angeles’s skid row raises a strange plant with a taste for blood, and business booms. Roger Corman shot it in two days for about $22,500, and a young Jack Nicholson plays a dentist’s patient.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
Carnival of Souls
After surviving a car that plunges off a bridge, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) becomes a church organist and is haunted by a pale man and visions of dancing ghouls, which draw her to a deserted pavilion. Herk Harvey made it for about $30,000 in Kansas and Utah, and played the pale man himself.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons -
The Last Man on Earth
Vincent Price as Robert Morgan, immune to a plague that has turned the world’s survivors into vampires: by day he hunts them, by night he holds out against them. The first film of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend.
Watch free on Wikimedia Commons
Coming soon
In the US, a film enters the public domain 95 years after it came out, on New Year’s Day. These two classics from 1931 join the list on January 1, 2027 (72 days to go). Only the films themselves go free; Universal’s trademarks, and newer restorations and music, don’t.
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Dracula
Universal’s Dracula, with Bela Lugosi as the Count, the part he had played on Broadway in 1927. Browning drew on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel and its stage plays, and with cinematographer Karl Freund and art director Charles D. Hall gave it an eerie gothic look. Dwight Frye plays Renfield.
Free to watch from 01/01/2027
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Frankenstein
Universal’s Frankenstein, made less than a year after Dracula: Mary Shelley’s tragedy of a doctor (Colin Clive) obsessed with restoring life and the creature (Boris Karloff) he unleashes, with a touch of German Expressionism. Jack Pierce designed the makeup.
Free to watch from 01/01/2027
Sources
Film details are from these sources, and the copies’ histories from their Wikimedia Commons and Internet Archive records.
- National Film Registry: Dracula (2000) and Frankenstein (1991), Library of Congress
- “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari”, kinofenster.de (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung), 2014
- “Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens”, Filmbildung, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung
- Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Il Cinema Ritrovato (Cineteca di Bologna)
- National Film Registry: The Phantom of the Opera (1998) and The Fall of the House of Usher (2000), Library of Congress
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), AFI Catalog (American Film Institute)
- “The Cat and the Canary”, The Film Daily, May 15, 1927, via the Media History Digital Library
- The Last Warning (1929), AFI Catalog (American Film Institute)
- The Bat Whispers (1930), AFI Catalog
- White Zombie (1932), AFI Catalog
- House on Haunted Hill (1958), AFI Catalog
- Carnival of Souls (1962), AFI Catalog
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), AFI Catalog
- Faust (1926), Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation
- The Man Who Laughs (1928), AFI Catalog
- The Vampire Bat (1933), AFI Catalog
- Devil Bat (1940), AFI Catalog
- The Bat (1959), AFI Catalog
- The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), AFI Catalog
- The Last Man on Earth (1964), AFI Catalog