Horror That Escaped Copyright

Horror is the public domain's favourite genre for two reasons: the silent classics are old enough to have fallen out of copyright everywhere in the United States, and the drive-in films of the 1950s and 60s were so cheaply made that nobody kept track of their paperwork. This Reel runs from 1896 to 1968.

Georges Méliès's The Haunted Castle (1896) is usually cited as the first horror film. The German expressionists follow: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) and F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), the unauthorised Dracula that a court ordered destroyed and that survived anyway. Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (1922), a Swedish-Danish essay on witchcraft, is included in its tinted version.

American silent horror is represented by John Barrymore's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) and by Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), whose unmasking scene still works. Roland West's The Bat (1926) brought the masked-killer-in-a-mansion plot to the screen, and the avant-garde Fall of the House of Usher (1928) by Watson and Webber shows what Poe looked like to the American experimental film.

White Zombie (1932) with Bela Lugosi is the first zombie feature. The fifties bring William Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1959) and the Vincent Price remake of The Bat (1959), The Killer Shrews (1959), and Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), which is included as history rather than as a recommendation. Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), shot in two days, and The Terror (1963), with Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson, precede Francis Ford Coppola's debut Dementia 13 (1963), which Corman produced.

The independents close the Reel: The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962), Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), made in Lawrence, Kansas for $33,000, The Last Man on Earth (1964), the first adaptation of I Am Legend, and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), which lost its copyright when the distributor changed the title card and forgot to add the notice. It has been on the National Film Registry since 1999.