2. The Black Cat (1934)

This Pre-Code movie has dreadfully little to do with black cats, but what it lacks in feline screen time it makes up for tenfold in tension. At a tight 65 minutes, it makes your heart race in the best way. Follow recently released POW Vitus Werdegast (Béla Lugosi) to post-WWI Hungary to settle a score with his old rival and war buddy, Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) while a befuddled married couple tags along. Lugosi plays a rare sympathetic role in this film, and his pathos is tangible as you watch the unspoken concern he has for the young people who arrived with him. Karloff is at his most despicable in this role, exuding a weighty menace in his body language and shifting smoothly and abruptly from giving Lugosi monstrous looks to playing the gracious host for his intended victims. Be aware that this movie has implied themes of necrophilia, sexual assault, and pseudo-incest, so proceed with caution. Most of these things occur offscreen in the characters' past, but they are alluded to.

3. The House of the Long Shadows (1983)

The best part of this movie is beyond a doubt the actors. Horror giants Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Sheila Keith, and John Carradine really just have a grand old time, and that's all I was really there for. Part comedy and part slasher, this movie is set in a mansion in Wales--presumed to be unoccupied by the unfortunate writer who goes there to win a bet. He discovers a strange and antisocial family living there, and they harbor a dark secret. One by one more people crowd into this derelict house while the writer struggles to finish a book in one night, and one by one people are picked off by an unseen killer.

Now, the ending of this movie makes it absolutely dogshit, and none of the characters appeal to me beyond the ones played by the actors mentioned above, but the fun that everybody is clearly having makes it so worth it. Plus, you get to hear Vincent Price call Christopher Lee a bitch. I watch it every year.

4. Hammer Frankenstein (1957-1974)

No, this isn't a series of movies about Frankenstein getting railed, though I assure you many fans and nearly all of his assistants sure want to! We follow Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) from his youth into old age in these six movies as his experiments grow more and more deranged and his morals slip even further than ever before. Unfortunately about as inaccurate to the book as it gets, try to approach these movies as independent of Mary Shelley's work. After the first movie things derail VERY quickly. Cushing exudes authority and even-keeled madness in these movies, which he later channeled into his portrayal of Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: Episode IV. If you like mad scientists, long-suffering monsters, and dandies, this is the movie for you. Christopher Lee is in the first installment as the creature, for all you Lee enjoyers out there.

5. The Old Dark House (1932)

An oddly tender little movie set in an old mansion in Wales where an odd family keeps vigil about a relative they have locked upstairs (wait, where have we heard this before?) A much better film than Long Shadows both in the script and in the pacing, director James Whale of Universal Frankenstein fame traps a group of bedraggled travelers in an old dark house with the Femm family (💅) and their butler, Morgan. Like most of Whale's Pre-Code films, queer subtext abounds in Morgan and every member of the Femm family. Give it a watch if you like a bit of realistically delivered dialogue, wet shoes, and repressed elderly lesbians.

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