Halloween Creature Features

Skip the multiplex and sink your teeth into some of these classic gothic horror gems instead.

My son’s taste in Halloween costumes hews closer to classic film monsters and less to the super hero du jour. Last year we conjured a mummy out of strips of cotton baton painstakingly glued to street clothes. And this year we are planning to have a pretty respectable bloodsucker wandering the streets of Arlington.

In honor of his ghoulish tastes, here are three movie recommendations for All Hollow’s Eve. The films are listed in no particular order of importance and I don’t pretend they represent “the best scary movies ever.” They are simply among some of my favorite gothic horror gems.

Nosferatu (1922)
This celluloid nightmare has to be the most frightening vampire movie — strike that — the most frightening film ever made. German director F.W. Murnau ladles on the visual trickery, leaving the viewer perpetually off-balance if not downright queasy. And the silent film’s titular vampire is an ugly, alien variant of its romanticized cousins. Max Shrek as Count Orlak is all fangs and claws; A bald, alien apparition that looks like it sprung from somewhere deep within the ID’s inner recesses. The elongated shadows of the creature’s claws playing against a wall is just one of many scenes that should set your heart pounding. If it doesn’t, you’re undead yourself.

Frankenstein (1931)
The template for the modern monster-movie. It’s all here: Director James Whalen’s laboratory set-pieces, the genre-defining make-up and Borris Karloff’s iconic turn as the creature. His performance is restrained and his monster so pitiable, that despite its homicidal impulses, I was rooting for the heavy-lidded one during the climatic showdown with the pitch-fork wielding peasantry. Noted stage actor Colin Clive hams it up as Dr. Frankenstein, but his manic exortations comport nicely with all the whirring and cackling of the anachronistic lab equipment.

Horror of Dracula (1958)
I have no use for the fey and frilly nightstalkers of the Anne Rice novels and films. And at the risk of alienating his legions of fans, I never could sink my teeth into a Bela Lugosi feature. No, I am a Christopher Lee man through and through and for me his Count Dracula is the most urgently visceral undead ever. And all thanks to Hammer Studios, which single-handedly made gothic horror monsters hip again, but whose latter offerings would unfortunately devolve into pure drek. Lee’s count is an aristocratic serial stalker who would just as soon rip your throat out as talk to you (and indeed, Lee utters no words this first of many times he dons a cape).

I am interested in hearing from you. What are some of your all-time horror favorites? And two rules: no city-stomping behemoths or killers in hockey masks. Let’s limit ourselves to various incarnations of the undead, ghouls, witches, ghosts, mummies, demons and man-made monsters.