1896 – Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle), directed by Georges Méliès. Cinema pioneer Méliès probably saw himself more as a magician than a filmmaker. His silent shorts seem like more staged vaudeville tricks than true stories, but back when "moving pictures" were something most folks had only read about, you could honestly dazzle a paying audience with little more than jump cuts, smoke pots and overlapping negatives. Clocking in at just over 3 minutes, Le Manoir du Diable dishes up what seems like a naive little kid's idea of horror: a flapping bat that turns into a man, a dark corridor, a bubbling cauldron, a prop skeleton. It's charmingly innocent by today's standards, but it's also, in a way, one of film's earliest thrillers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPmKaz3Quzo

1903 – Le Cake-Walk Infernal (The Infernal Cake Walk), directed by Georges Méliès. Just a handful of years later and Méliès' bag of cinematic tricks had gotten much more sophisticated, with elaborate moving painted sets, lavish costumes and dancing fireballs being just a few of the "wonders" on display. It's still pretty much just a stage act with no real story, but you can see that a rudimentary sense of atmosphere and spectacle has already started to make its way into what we'd eventually call "the movies": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5YhbY0OUiU

1910 – Frankenstein, directed by J. Searle Dawley. Historically important as both the first filmed version of Mary Shelley's classic novel and as a legendary lost film that has since been rediscovered. This "Frankenstein" manages to boil the entire story down into 12 or so minutes and jettisons pretty much all of the plot, turning the fable of a mad scientist who creates a monster into a simple "good versus evil" morality tale that nevertheless hinges on some interesting metaphysical concepts. Director Dawley makes imaginative visual use of a mirror to nail home the idea of the monster and the scientist being one and the same, and there are also a few moments of genuine horror (particularly in a sequence depicting the creature's steaming flesh creeping back up onto its skeletal bones, as well as his first ghastly, twisted appearance from behind some bedroom curtains): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcLxsOJK9bs

1922 – Häxan (Witchcraft Through the Ages), directed by Benjamin Christensen. Swedish filmmaker Christensen conceived of this epic exploration of witchcraft (as it's been historically imagined to be, anyway) as a feature-length condemnation of superstition and the dangers of rejecting reason in the face of hysteria. That said, he knew full well that spectacle was was the best way to get attention, so he put his considerable skill (not to mention a huge-for-its-time budget) into recreating scene after scene of lavish black masses, Satanic orgies and, in later sequences, heartbreakingly cruel witch hunts that destroy the innocent under the guise of moral purity. It's a rollicking trip through the world of the supernatural that ultimately argues in favor of reason: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq2_jVmJ6wA

1932 – Freaks, directed by Tod Browning. Though it was made nearly 80 years ago, few horror films have ever been as viscerally disturbing as the notorious Freaks. While it could be argued that the film's treatment of human "monstrosities" is exploitative (director Browning's choice to cast real live circus performers was both a masterstroke and career suicide), there's also no denying that the story's real sympathies lie with its downtrodden pinheads, bearded ladies and Siamese twins. The gruesome climax, in which an enraged mob of malformed "freaks" crawls relentlessly through the rain and mud toward their righteous vengeance, is unsettling in ways that few modern films would even try to pull off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJVXTKkjsxA&feature=related

1945 – Isle of the Dead, directed by Mark Robson. Legendary producer Val Lewton made a string of horror classics in the 1940s, often at the behest of studio heads who literally picked lurid-sounding titles out of a hat. Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Bedlam and The Body Snatcher were cranked out as b-movie filler, but Lewton took great delight in subverting the formula at every turn (his 1943 flick The Ghost Ship has only metaphorical ghosts in it, which must have ticked off the folks at RKO Pictures something fierce). Isle took its inspiration from a painting, setting its story on a remote Greek island during the Balkan War. As a quarantined group of people begin to die of the plague, the superstitious survivors start blaming the deaths on a young woman. What could have been a cheap melodrama is, in Lewton protégé Robson's capable hands, a grim, gloomy meditation on death that, towards the end, dishes up one of the scariest moments in movie history: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI4D8KokkWg

1958-59 – Quatermass and the Pit (Television Series), directed Rudolph Cartier. Professor Quatermass is a sort of proto-Doctor Who, a clever British scientist who uses his wits to fight alien menace. Created by writer Nigel Kneale, Quatermass appeared in several television series and films, a stoic but generally good-natured man whose human strengths and foibles are every bit as helpful in defeating monsters as any ray gun. The Quatermass series undoubtedly reached its pinnacle in Quatermass and the Pit, an ambitious story about an ancient artifact uncovered in London that begins to exert a strange and menacing influence on the people around it. As its secrets come to light, terrifying truths are revealed that may change the world forever. Both a crackerjack sci-fi mystery and a legitimate high-water mark in television history, Pit paved the way for everything from Doctor Who to The X-Files: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i7JxVWxXuw

1968 – Witchfinder General, directed by Michael Reeves. You’d expect a horror flick about 17th century witchcraft, starring Vincent Price as a megalomaniacal “witch hunter” cutting a bloody swath of terror through the English countryside, to be an overbaked slab of ham, but Reeves’ dark, cruel picture is deadly serious. Dialing back his usual corny brand of creepiness to play the titular power-hungry sadist, Price delivers one of his most chilling performances, but it’s the grim, gory, and ultimately sad message that lingers – power corrupts, innocence suffers, and in the end even vengeance is meaningless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh5b-2WeY7k&feature=related

1970 – I Drink Your Blood, directed by David E. Durston. A bunch of vile Satan-worshipping hippies drive into a small mountain town in their filthy love-wagon and proceed to rape and murder their way through the local populace. In retribution, a young kid injects a batch of meat pies with blood from a rabid dog and gives it to them, not realizing that the ensuing madness will result in gory dismemberment and psychotic carnage. It was only 1970, just a few months after the Rolling Stones’ tragic Altamont concert, but to many folks it was already apparent that the “peace and love” movement was not only dead, but rotting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-vdVgiytEo

1985 – Return of the Living Dead, directed by Dan O’Bannon. Anyone who’s ever imitated a zombie by going “Braiiiiins…” has this raucous, punk-rock horror movie to thank for their catchphrase. In O’Bannon’s lunatic re-invention of Night of the Living Dead the resurrected don’t want body parts so much as living brains, the only drug that will quiet the eternal “pain of being dead.” With its giddy black comedy, day-glo mohawk & leather studded fashion, and anarchic “we’re all screwed, so let’s party” attitude, no other fright flick so perfectly encapsulates the turmoil of the Reagan era: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wylpeAXYcBQ

1992 – Man Bites Dog, directed by Rémy Belvaux. A film crew working on a shoestring budget decides to follow a serial killer on his gruesome rounds in this horrifying pitch-black satire of the media and celebrity culture. Actor Benoît Poelvoorde so convincingly inhabits the role of the manic, fame-conscious murderer that you’ll wonder why he wasn’t arrested after the premier, while director Belvaux nails (and bloodily skewers) our “anything to be famous” ethos about thirteen years before Youtube and Failblog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcPhaieTg4o

2007 – The Mist, directed by Frank Darabont. Adapting a bleak Stephen King novella from 1980 about the end of the world, writer/director Darabont if anything made the film version even more dark and hopeless by setting it in the post 9-11 world. Pitting a tiny pocket of rational heroes against both a slew of grisly inter-dimensional creepy crawlies and, even worse, a batch of psychotic nuts right out of the Westborough Baptist Church’s “you’re ALL going to hell” playbook, The Mist manages to be an entertaining monster movie and a grim condemnation of where the world seems to be headed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vwWJ0c-J4