Lon Chaney's first great physical transformation — and one of his most punishing. Chaney plays Blizzard, a criminal mastermind whose legs were needlessly amputated by a bungling surgeon when he was a boy. Now grown into a fearsome underworld king who rules San Francisco's criminal empire from a wheelchair, Blizzard plots elaborate revenge against the doctor who mutilated him. Chaney actually strapped his legs behind him using a painful leather harness, walking on his knees for the entire production — a commitment to physical realism that astonished audiences and defined his approach to acting. The performance is extraordinary: beneath the rage and the grotesque physicality, Chaney reveals unexpected wells of vulnerability, particularly in scenes with a young woman who becomes his unlikely confidante. The film that announced Chaney as the most daring actor in Hollywood.
Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen's legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. But the film itself is far from serious-- instead it's a witches' brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.
Carl Behrend, son of a wealthy businessman, marries Pauli Arndt, daughter of a pacifist professor. When World War I breaks out, Carl is drafted. Pauli and her family and friends are left behind to experience the suffering which befell civilians during the war. Her luck worsens when her father is dismissed from his professorship for teaching that war is evil. Her father argues violently with Carl's father, and degradation and despair descend on Pauli and her family as they await Carl's return from the front.
Paul Leni's Hollywood debut — and the film that essentially invented the haunted house genre as we know it. Twenty years after the death of eccentric millionaire Cyrus West, his potential heirs gather in his crumbling mansion to hear his will read at…
