Based on the immensely popular stage play by John Willard, THE CAT AND THE CANARY was German expatriate Paul Leni's American feature debut. Following the archetypal "old dark house" plot, a fractious family gathers in a spooky mansion at midnight for the reading of their reclusive relative's last will and testament. Naturally, frightening and unexplained occurrences ensue. Leni gives full rein to his expressionist impulses, deploying chiaroscuro lighting, distorted sets and subjective visual effects to sustain suspense and fuel the exquisitely ominous atmosphere. Universal emulated this dark, distinctive chiller in its run of successful horror titles throughout the 1930s.

Universal. Based on the play by John Willard. Scenario: Robert F. Hill, Alfred A. Cohn. Cinematographer: Gilbert Warrenton. Editor: Martin G. Cohn. Cast: Laura La Plante, Creighton Hale, Tully Marshall, Forrest Stanley. 35mm, silent, 82 min.

This fantastical portmanteau film contains three tales inspired by the imagination of a young writer (Wilhelm Dieterle) riffing on the notorious wax figures in a carnival sideshow. His troubled reveries morph into a narrative triptych revolving around an Arabian caliph (Emil Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt) and Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss). Boasting an all-star cast of Weimar actors, WAXWORKS incorporates swatches of Griffith-style historical spectacle into its moody expressionistic dreamscape. The film paved the way for director Paul Leni's move to Hollywood, where he completed a handful of haunting late silents before his premature death from blood poisoning in 1929.

Producer: Alexander Kwartiroff. Scenario: Henrik Galeen. Cinematographer: Helmar Lerski. Cast: Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, Wilhelm Dieterle. with German subtitles. 35mm, silent, 83 min.

Avant-garde theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein devised this melancholy adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's disturbing Gothic tale. Epstein preserved the core of the original plot—the dilapidated castle where a visionary artist tends to an ailing sister (in the film, his wife)—while layering in expressive motifs borrowed from other key Poe works. The result is truly poetic horror, an oneiric evocation of distress and decay rendered through elliptical editing, slow motion and other in-camera effects, tableaux vivants and suffocating set design. Epstein's assistant director, Luis Buñuel, allegedly quit the film during production, embraced Surrealism and concocted a riposte to his erstwhile mentor in the form of UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929).

Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Producer: Jean Epstein. Scenario: Luis Buñuel, Jean Epstein. Cinematographer: Georges Lucas, Jean Lucas. Cast: Jean Debucourt, Marguerite Gance, Charles Lamy, Fournez-Goffard . with French subtitles. 35mm, silent, 63 min.

John Barrymore stars in this famous silent version of Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal novella about the dual nature of man. The familiar tale concerns the upstanding Victorian physician Dr. Jekyll, deviser of a drug that unleashes his nefarious alter ego, Mr. Hyde. Barrymore literally embodies the ensuing struggle between good and evil: his startling transformation from civilized gentleman to malefic ogre is only minimally abetted by props and make-up. Creepy and atmospheric, John S. Robertson's film remains relatively faithful to its source, which stands among the most imitated and frequently adapted stories in the horror canon.

Based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Producer: Adolph Zukor. Scenario: Clara S. Beranger. Cinematographer: Roy Overbaugh. Cast: John Barrymore, Martha Mansfield, Brandon Hurst, Charles Lane. 35mm, silent, 67 min.

Groundbreaking Danish director Carl Dreyer followed his silent masterpiece THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1927) with this exercise in the uncanny, an early talkie that incorporates intertitles into its spare but suggestive sound design. The enigmatic, fragmented plot, adapted loosely from stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, traces an occult researcher's strange journey to a remote village victimized by an aging vampiress. Deliberate, disjunctive and subtly unsettling, Dreyer's meditative horror film stretches the boundaries of cinematic technique and creates its lugubrious mood largely via visual style rather than narrative development. The hazy, hypnotic mise-en-scène—aided by the lighting schemes of cinematographer Rudolph Maté—moved Truffaut to eulogize Dreyer's inimitably expressive "whiteness."

Based on on In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu. Producer: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Julian West. Screenwriter: Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer. Cinematographer: Rudolph Maté, Louis Nee. Editor: Paul Falkenberg. Cast: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille Schmitz. Presented in German dialogue with German subtitles. 35mm, 75 min.

The wellspring of German expressionist cinema, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI combines macabre melodrama with a violently skewed visual style to conjure a mood of ineluctable dread. The nightmarish story pivots around the titular mad hypnotist and the murderous sleepwalker under his control. Suspenseful, ambiguously subjective and punctuated by a wicked final twist, the scenario is a masterpiece of sinister suggestion. Robert Wiene's off-kilter mise-en-scène—distorted camera perspectives, symbolic costumes, mannered acting, and, especially, the jagged, cock-eyed set design—crystallizes the film's darkly bizarre vision. Both a popular success and an avant-garde provocation, CALIGARI proved a landmark in the art of silent film.

Producer: Rudolf Meinert, Erich Pommer. Scenario: Carl Mayer, Hans Janowitz. Cinematographer: Willy Hameister. Cast: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover. 35mm, silent, (18 fps), approx. 90 min.

Paul Wegener co-directs and plays the title role in THE GOLEM, his third silent to treat the legend of the giant clay automaton brought to life by the dark powers of Jewish mysticism. Chief rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) divines imminent disaster for the Jews of 16th-century Prague, so he magically summons the stone Golem to protect his embattled ghetto community. Once loosed on the unsuspecting anti-Semitic city, the creature—a proto-Frankenstein's monster—cannot be so easily contained. Less aggressively expressionistic than CALIGARI or the fantastic films of Murnau and Lang, THE GOLEM is nevertheless a significant early entry in the horror-inflected cinema of Weimar Germany.

Producer: Paul Davidson. Scenario: Paul Wegener, Henrik Galeen. Cinematographer: Karl Freund. Cast: Paul Wegener, Albert Steinrück, Ernst Deutsch, Lyda Salmonova. with German subtitles. 35mm, silent, (20 fps), approx. 85 min.

Based on Le Fantôme de L'Opéra, a 1910 novel by Gaston Leroux, this PHANTOM is the definitive version of all phantoms before or since. Lon Chaney is magnificent as a disfigured maniac composer who covertly guides a Paris Opera understudy to stardom by unleashing a series of terrors that force the leading soprano to step down. When the Phantom begins to collect on his Faustian bargain by forcing the beautiful young singer to give up her fiancé, she rebels, and the Phantom absconds with her to his underground chambers. In the grand finale a raging mob pursues him through the streets of Paris. This cinema classic had an inauspicious beginning when a preview audience panned it. It was withheld from release for two years, reworked into a swashbuckling comedy, then reconverted to horror melodrama. Ultimately, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA pulled in huge box office for Universal Pictures and launched Lon Chaney into superstardom.

Universal. Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux. Producer: Carl Laemmle. Scenario: Ramond Schrock, Elliot J. Clawson. Cinematographer: Virgil Miller. Editor: Maurice Pivar. Cast: Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry, Snitz Edwards. 35mm, silent, approx. 90 min.