with your host, Kount Dmetri Kakmi.

I love horror movies. I have been a fan since I saw Night of the Living Dead when I was nine years old. The love affair was solidified in my teens when I fell in lust with The Creature from the Black Lagoon. He’s hot in his tight rubber suit, no? And don’t get me started on the cute killer toddler in It’s Alive!

For this motley selection, I relied on fond memory and lasting influence. It’s not a best of list. Nor is it conclusive; some classics are missing. That’s because this is a personal assessment of efforts that left a mark on me. If I have a soft spot for it, it’s here. If I don’t, it’s not.

I have also mixed film and television, as well as sci-fi horror. Some works that might be categorised as fantasy and psychological thriller get a look in as well. I also have a preference for the ghost story or supernatural tale. 

We begin in the Pleistocene age of cinema and work up to the Anthropocene.

The text contains spoilers. So don’t come kvetching to me because I told you how a film you haven’t seen ends. There’s rudimentary plot summary. What you get is me riffing on thoughts and ideas provoked by what I have seen.

The most painful part was whittling the list to one hundred and one films. The number is arbitrary, based on my love of One Thousand and One Nights, otherwise known as The Arabian Nights.

My motto is a horror movie a day keeps the private demons away. I hope my cogitations give you cause to see yourself in a mirror darkly. 

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
1922, Germany
Director: F. W. Murnau
Cast: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Alexander Granach

The vampire movie to end all vampire movies. Not even Tod Browning’s beautifully art directed Dracula (1931) comes close to this gritty masterpiece of German expressionism.

Max Schreck as rat-like predator Count Orlok steals the show and makes other vampires look camp and hammy. Orlok is a pre-pagan skulking horror, as potent a symbol of death as has been created for cinema. Full of sharp angles, bulging eyes, crooked teeth, pointed ears and talons he is inhuman and alarming, causing viewers to shrink away from him as his shadow looms against a wall, claw-like hand reaching for a doorknob. 

The man behind this new way of seeing is Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, one of the great German silent era directors. Murnau was a homosexual visionary who channelled much of his subtly coded existence as a sexual renegade into a cinematic legacy that includes classics like Sunrise (1927) and Tabu (1931). (I bring up Murnau’s sexuality because, as we will see in later instalments, gay directors had enormous influence on the horror genre.)

Nosferatu is also an example of limitation being the mother of invention. When Murnau could not obtain the rights to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, he and script writer Henrik Galeen were forced to reinvent the wheel to get around the plagiarism. That didn’t stop Stoker’s widow from suing and demanding all prints of the film be destroyed. Thankfully, some survived. Dracula became Orlok. Mina became Ellen. Harker became Hutter. Renfield becomes a brilliantly demented Knock. London became the port city of Wisborg and so on. Thankfully, there is no righteously despicable Van Helsing figure to sully the eye. 

The main difference was the way the vampire is depicted. Out went the loquacious aristocrat Count Dracula and in came Count Orlok — a wordless apex predator straight out of nightmares. Yet the audience is expected to believe he signs his own death warrant by sucking on a ‘sinless maiden’s’ neck until he’s caught out by sunrise. Please! 

This is something I’ve never understood about the vampire mythos. If you’ve been around a couple of hundred years, surely you’d be well aware of your weak spots and do everything you can to avoid them. Yet vampire after vampire succumbs, stretching credulity and patience to the limits. 

Orlok would have ripped Ellen’s pretty little head off the shoulders and absconded to his coffin. There to admire her frozen beauty to his cold heart’s content.

The film’s subtitle ‘A Symphony of Horror’ is expertly chosen. The effect of unease is achieved by balancing realism and expressionism, an artistic style that privileges the inner world of feeling and emotion, rather than the outer world. Filmed largely in Germany and other parts of eastern Europe, the cinematography contrasts naturalistic locations with skew-whiff interiors to great effect, suggesting that the phenomenal world is a veneer that hides a darker reality. 

This is perhaps best realised in the sequence where Hutter walks over a bridge into the Borgo Pass – from real world into uncanny valley. The tonal shifts between realistic landscape and the jerky movements of a speeded up horse carriage come to fetch him are truly unnerving. And that’s before we even see the carriage driver. If the world seems awry in open country, it becomes positively destabilising when Hutter arrives at the count’s remote eyrie and is greeted by a lean figure in a frock coat, stove pipe pants and curious hat perched atop an elongated bald head. 

‘Long after Greta Schröder’s hope-filled face fades from memory, Max Schreck’s goggle eyed entity remains. His legacy is seen in Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot (1979) and E. Elias Merhige’s The Shadow of the Vampire (2000). What is truly astounding is that one hundred years on, we are still watching Murnau’s supreme effort on iPhone and Blu-ray. Orlok is truly immortal.

Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic novel The Woman in the Wellwill be published in 2025. He is currently working on a psychological crime novel called The Perfect Room.