15 Favorite Horror Movies: Nosferatu (1922)

When Jess suggested that the Filthy Horrors crew come up with our 15 favorite horror films, I thought of a couple of different ways of approaching it. I could of course try to figure out my actual, fifteen all-time favorite horror movies, ranked from most favorite to 15th favorite. But that sounded like a lot of work that would probably be inaccurate as soon as I started posting it. My favorites change all the time depending on the day and my mood.

So instead I've come up with a list of favorites from different decades. I've got at least one movie to represent each decade from the 1920s to the 2010s. Instead of ranking them by my personal preference, I'll just go through the list chronologically starting with 1922 and FW Murnau's unofficial Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu.

I've written about it before, but the gist is that while Nosferatu does have story problems (Professor Bulwer, the Van Helsing character, has no purpose in the movie, for example), the style of the film is so strong, and its vampire is so utterly horrifying (thanks both to Max Schreck's performance and the way Murnau filmed him), that nothing else matters. It's not only a great adaptation of Dracula, it's possibly the best vampire movie ever.

In addition to its style though, I love how the film handles Ellen, the Mina Harker character. Like in the novel, she's the one who figures out what's going on and understands how to defeat the vampire. But in the movie, she learns that the only way to do this is to willingly letting the Count feed on her until daybreak so that he's trapped and destroyed by the sun. It's a horrible, but emotional fate for her and I'm always moved by it no matter how many times I've seen the film.

She's such an interesting character: extremely sensitive and at first glance, irrationally paranoid. But her fears are always proved prophetic and I end up loving her insight and her sacrifice.

Countdown to Halloween 2020

It's October, so that means time once again to Countdown to Halloween. As usual, I'm participating in an official way with the Countdown to Halloween website, where you can find links to a bunch of cool Halloween enthusiasts who are committed to providing spooky content all month long.

I struggled with what I was going to do this year as a theme though. I wasn't feeling passionate about a particular, narrow topic to talk about like I've done in the past with werewolves, witches, gothic stories, etc. But I wanted to do something more unified than just Random Horror Movies I've Been Watching. 

What I've settled on is to do a couple of different smaller series of posts. First, I'm going to run through 15 of my favorite horror movies. This was an idea that Jessica Hickman had for the Filthy Horrors podcast. Since we record that podcast in person, Filthy Horrors is on indefinite hiatus during the pandemic. So Jess had the idea for us to have some Halloween content on our website by each host's creating a list of 15 favorite horror movies. They're just going to be lists though without any commentary, so I decided to expand on mine here for the next fifteen days.

After that, I'm going to finally watch and write about the Friday the 13th film series. I think I've only ever seen the first film, but I've always been curious about the saga. And since I had such a fun time catching up on the Halloween series (holy crap, it was thirteen years ago!), I'm going to finally do the same with Friday the 13th.

Somewhere in there I'll sprinkle in some Halloween-related podcast episodes and that'll get us to October 31st. It's going to be a weird Halloween this year without traditional Trick or Treating, so it's doubly important to celebrate the other aspects of the holiday as much as possible.

Dracula Adaptations | Count Dracula (1977)

Who's in it?: Louis Jourdan (Anne of the Indies, Octopussy), Frank Finlay (the George C Scott A Christmas Carol), and Judi Bowker (the 1981 Clash of the Titans)

What's it about?: The BBC makes a faithful mini-series.

How is it?: Seriously, it's the most faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel. Cinemassacre agrees. (Thanks, Erik, for sharing that with me.) It only makes two major changes and they're both fairly benign. Mina and Lucy are sisters rather than just good friends, and Arthur Holmwood has been combined with Quincey Morris to become Quincey Holmwood, an American diplomat from Texas. That last one's an especially weird change, but all it does is let Morris out of the story (he's a cool character in Stoker, but superfluous) while still paying homage to him. Otherwise, the adaptation is so faithful that it even shoots on location in Whitby for the parts of the story that take place there.

Jourdan is an impressively suave and smart Dracula. He feels dangerous not just because he's a superpowered monster, but also because he really seems to know what he's doing. He has a plan, as of course, Stoker's version does.

Finlay may be my favorite Van Helsing yet. It's hard to beat Peter Cushing's awesome, dangerous vampire hunter, but that's not really Stoker's character. Finlay plays the literary version with competence, but also humor and a fantastic bedside manner.

Bowker's Mina is pretty great, too. She's the one version I've seen that portrays both the character's gentle naivety and her intense intelligence. She never crosses into buttkicking hero territory, but she's brave and figures out what's going on ahead of most of the dudes around her.

My one complaint about this version has to do with the look of it due to its being shot on video tape and the limits of its special effects. I appreciate that it uses video effects to try to convey some things that were missing from earlier versions, but some of them look silly to today's eyes.

Rating: Four out of five Minas

Dracula Adaptations | Count Dracula (1970)

Who's in it?: Christopher Lee (Horror of Dracula, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave), Herbert Lom (Mysterious Island, A Shot in the Dark), Klaus Kinski (For a Few Dollars More, Nosferatu the Vampyre), Maria Rohm (The Blood of Fu Manchu, Ten Little Indians), and Soledad Miranda (100 Rifles, Vampyros Lesbos)

What's it about?: Spanish exploitation director Jesús Franco tries to create the most faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel to date.

How is it?: It was advertised to me as "the most faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel ever filmed" and the tagline on one poster was "Finally! The Original Version!" Neither of those statements is true.

It's cool that Franco brought in Christopher Lee to play Dracula. Lee was in Hammer's 1958 adaptation of course, and had made a couple of sequels by the time Franco hired him. And since he went on to make several more sequels for Hammer after this, he's one of the most iconic Draculas ever. So it's cool to see him in this non-Hammer version. (It's also cool that Renfield is played by Klaus Kinski, who's not just a great actor in general, but also went on to play Dracula in Werner Herzog's version at the end of the decade.)

One of the elements in this that's very faithful to Stoker is Lee's makeup. He begins the story as an elderly, mustached count who gets younger as the story progresses. I've never been able to imagine a mustached Dracula that seemed cool to me, but Lee pulls it off. Of course he does.

The opening scenes at Dracula's castle are pretty faithful to the novel, too, but it all falls apart when the story shifts to England. Rather than waking up in a Transylvanian convent after his ordeal, Harker regains consciousness in an English asylum run by Van Helsing (Lom), with Dr Seward merely an assistant there who never plays an important role in the story.

Harker is soon visited by his fiancée Mina (Rohm) and her close friend Lucy (Miranda), so their relationships are all the same as in Stoker. And as in the novel, the asylum is next door to the ruined abbey that Dracula has purchased, which is how the count discovers and begins persecuting the women: first Lucy; then Mina. But while Lucy is engaged to a British lord, his name is weirdly Quincey Morris (Lucy's American suitor in the novel); not Arthur Holmwood. There's a lot that's true to the book, but already the film makes some weird changes.

The biggest flaw though is how the script abridges the story in a way that makes Van Helsing seem like a fool. He ignores or disbelieves crucial information for dramatic reasons that are very unlike the literary professor. For example, he doesn't buy Harker's story of what happened at Dracula's castle, even though Harker has bite marks to prove it. And later, when it's more convenient to the abridgment, Van Helsing claims to recognize the marks as Dracula's work. So there's a lot of his being clueless and then later saying, "Ah! Just as I suspected!" Sure you did, Doc.

Maria Rohm is beautiful, but generally forgettable and disappointing as Mina. She's as much a helpless victim as Lucy; merely a second chance for the heroes to defeat the villain rather than being an asset or even really a full character. Like a lot else with the film, I appreciate the effort, but Franco's version is ultimately unsatisfying.

Rating: Three out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Horror of Dracula (1958)

Who's in it?: Christopher Lee (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Devil Rides Out, The Man with the Golden Gun, Sleepy Hollow, The Lord of the Rings, Attack of the Clones), Peter Cushing (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr. Who and the Daleks, Star Wars), Melissa Stribling, and Michael Gough (Konga, Batman, Sleepy Hollow)

What's it about?: Hammer makes a lurid, action-packed adaptation.

How is it?: Originally titled just Dracula in the UK, but renamed Horror of Dracula for US release, Hammer's version takes a lot of liberties with the novel, but it's so good. Christopher Lee perfectly captures both the menace and the sensuality of the Count. Peter Cushing is excellent as the super-competent Van Helsing who always knows what to do and just needs to find Dracula so he can do it. And even though it's a huge departure from the book, I love that Jonathan Harker is Van Helsing's agent sent to Dracula's castle not as a lawyer, but as an assassin to destroy the vampires.

It simplifies the supporting characters by having Mina (Stribling) be married to Arthur Holmwood (Gough) with Lucy (Carol Marsh) as his sister. When Lucy is killed by Dracula (as in the novel), Arthur and Mina assist Van Helsing in taking down the Count. There's a Dr Seward, but he's just the local physician and doesn't play a real role in the plot. There's no Renfield and frankly I don't miss him. There's certainly no Quincey Morris, whom I do miss, but he's been cut out of every adaptation so far and I understand why. From a plot standpoint, he's superfluous.

Mina has been young and innocent in every adaptation so far, but Stribling's version is an aristocratic matron with confidence and power. Her concern for Lucy feels like the duty of an older sibling, not the love of a dear friend. I like that she's so capable, but one of the things I love most about the literary Mina is the combination of her great intelligence with the flaw of self-doubt. That's missing in this version.

Rating: Four out of five Minas

Dracula Adaptations | Drácula (1931)

Who's in it?: Carlos Villarías and Lupita Tovar.

What's it about?: At the same time Tod Browning filmed his iconic adaptation with Bela Lugosi, Universal also produced this Spanish-language version from the same script and using the same sets, but with different actors and directors.

How is it?: For obvious reasons, it makes the same changes to the novel that Browning's version does, but I like it better in a lot of ways.

It doesn't have Bela Lugosi or Dwight Frye, which is a drawback, but Carlos Villarías makes his own, successful choices as Dracula and Pablo Álvarez Rubio is a perfectly good Renfield. Best of all, Lupita Tovar is a far superior, livelier Mina (renamed Eva) to Helen Chandler's stiff version and since that's always the character I'm most interested in, it lifts the whole production up for me.

There are also extended versions of some of the familiar scenes from the Browning version and even the scenes it has in common are often interpreted slightly differently. This is way more than just a curiosity for completists. It holds up on its own as well as provides a different lens to look at Browning's version through.

Rating: Four out of five Minas

Dracula Adaptations | Dracula (1931)

Who's in it?: Bela Lugosi (The Black Cat, Mark of the Vampire, Son of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Corpse Vanishes), Helen Chandler (pretty much just this), Edward Van Sloan (Frankenstein, The Mummy), Dwight Frye (Frankenstein), and David Manners (The Mummy, The Black Cat).

What's it about?: The classic and most iconic version of Dracula, though not super faithful to Stoker.

How is it?: Based on a play rather than Stoker's novel, Tod Browning's Dracula is sort of a copy of a copy. It keeps a lot of the book's plot, but shuffles around the characters. For instance, it's not Harker (Manners) who goes to Transylvania to meet Dracula (Lugosi), but Renfield (Frye). That means that he doesn't escape Dracula's castle, but accompanies the count back to England and becomes hospitalized because Dracula has driven him insane.

Like in the book, Renfield's case is overseen by Doctor Seward. But the doctor isn't in love with Lucy as in Stoker's novel. Instead, he's an older widower and the father of Mina (Chandler). There is a Lucy who succumbs to Dracula's menace and becomes a vampiric woman in white, but she's not really connected to any of the other characters except that she's Mina's friend. She has no Arthur Holmwood to avenge her, so that job falls to Van Helsing (Van Sloan) and Mina's fiancé, Harker. But they're not so much vindicating Lucy as just protecting Mina by that point. Dr Seward completely falls out of the story by the end, but that's just one of many problems with how the story wraps up in its hurry to finish.

It's tough not to compare it to Murnau's Nosferatu from nine years earlier. The ability to add sound to movies was a great reason to do a new version of Stoker's story (with all the proper rights, instead of sneakily changing the characters' names) and Browning's style is distinct and creepy and brings some beautiful atmosphere. But Murnau's version is actually scary and Browning's never is. Murnau's Count Orlok is a true monster, from his very appearance to the strange powers that Murnau so cleverly gives him through special effects. Browning's version - the character at least is truer to Stoker's novel - is meant to be creepily charming. You don't realize he's a threat until it's too late. Which is cool, but Browning uses so little effects that even when Dracula is supposed to be frightening, it's mostly suggested by the way other characters react to him.

That can be effective sometimes, especially in the case of Renfield, who's easily the most chilling character of the film. Edward Van Sloan also adds to Dracula's menace as Van Helsing. The Van Helsing analog is a giant weakness of Nosferatu, but I always have a lot of fun watching Van Sloan work in Dracula, trying to first figure out who the vampire is (and initially suspecting Renfield), then playing a game of wills against Bela Lugosi.

I wish that Helen Chandler was a better Mina, though. If I haven't said it already, Mina is the heart of any version of Dracula and it's important to get her right. Nosferatu gives her a tragically heroic role, but in Browning's movie, she's just the MacGuffin that the other characters are all fighting over. She's not written very well, but she's played even worse by Chandler who never eases into the character. She always reminds me that she's an actress playing a role.

The movie is also dreadfully slow, but in spite of that and my misgivings about Chandler, I always enjoy revisiting it for its mood and cultural impact and especially for Lugosi, Frye, and Van Sloan. I should also shout out to David Manners' John Harker, who's mostly nondescript, but has a great moment when he throws down his newspaper in disgust and leaves the room because of Van Helsing's crackpot ideas about shape-changing, immortal blood-suckers.

Rating: Four out of five Minas.

Dracula Adaptations | Nosferatu (1922)

Who's in it?: Max Schreck (Batman Returns), Greta Schröder (Der Golem)

What's it about?: This unauthorized German adaptation changes the names of the characters, the setting (England has become just another town in Eastern Europe), the ending, and even the metaphors.

How is it? (SPOILERS): I rarely judge film adaptations anymore on how faithful they are to their source material. And Nosferatu is a perfect example of why that is. It is very much not Bram Stoker's novel, but it's the most legitimately chilling, scary version of the story I've seen. It doesn't bother me that the monster is now an allegory for the plague instead of a metaphor for sexual seduction. And I don't even really mind the story problems created by messing around with some of the characters.

For example, Harker's boss from the novel is combined with Renfield to become a madman named Knock. In this version, Harker is named Hutter and his boss has not only been in contact with Orlok (Dracula), but apparently knows that he's sending Hutter to his doom when he goes to Transylvania. In the novel, Dracula doesn't begin to affect Renfield until Dracula arrives in England, but in Nosferatu, Orlok controls Knock from afar. The film never explains how this happens.

And then there's Professor Bulwer, the Van Helsing character, who has no purpose in the movie. Really, Van Helsing and Dr Seward almost don't exist in this version. Oddly, they're two separate characters (Van Helsing becomes Bulwer; Seward becomes a Professor Sievers), but they're generic, interchangeable characters with only minor lip service paid to Bulwer's having any experience in the supernatural. Bulwer certainly doesn't contribute to Orlok's defeat. That's 100% Ellen (the Mina character, played by Greta Schröder), who sends Hutter to find Bulwer just to get Hutter out of the house so that Ellen can do what she needs to do. Bulwer doesn't even directly interact with any other characters until that last scene and even then it's only to observe.

Some other changes are less of a problem. Hutter is mostly the same as Harker and his wife Ellen is an excellent version of Mina. Arthur Holmwood has become Harding, a wealthy ship owner who's a friend of Hutter/Harker. Hutter sends Ellen to Harding's to live while Hutter goes to Transylvania. Standing in for Lucy is Harding's sister (not his fiancée as in Stoker), Ruth.

Ruth/Lucy doesn't play as big a role in the movie as she does in the novel. Ellen/Mina is the main focus of Orlok's obsession. There's a hint that Ruth could be experiencing some weirdness, but Orlock is defeated before anything comes of that.

Like the novel, Ellen/Mina is the one who best figures out what's going on and understands how to defeat Orlok/Dracula. But in the film, Ellen learns that the only way to do this is to sacrifice herself, willingly letting the count feed on her until daybreak so that he's trapped and destroyed by the sun. It's a horrible, but emotional fate for her and I'm always moved by it no matter how many times I've seen the film. Ellen is such an interesting character: extremely sensitive and seemingly irrationally paranoid, but her fears are proved prophetic 100% of the time. She more than makes up for any issues I have with Knock and Bulwer.

And when I consider just how strong the visual style of Nosferatu is, I can't even see flaws anymore. Orlok is so utterly horrifying (thanks both to Max Schreck's performance and the way director FW Murnau shot him), that nothing else matters.

Rating: Five out of five Minas

Countdown to Halloween 2019: Dracula Adaptations

I sat out last year's Countdown to Halloween. At least here. I was all about Halloween on my Tumblr and will be (and already am) again this year as well, but I missed having a bunch of horror stuff here.

I'm still not at the place where I'm comfortable doing a big theme that requires a lot of research, but I've been watching a lot of adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula lately. Enough to write about one of them every couple of days and get us to Halloween. So, H'bleh, everyone.

Countdown to Halloween

I had planned to do a Countdown to Halloween series again this year, but looming deadlines (both writing and podcasting) are going to make that impossible. At least on this particular site.

If you want more Halloween goodness than you can handle though, follow my Tumblr, because it is a non-stop spook party over there.

The Raven (1963)

Who's In It: Vincent Price (The Fly, The Haunted Palace, The Tomb of Ligeia), Peter Lorre (M, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca), Boris Karloff (Bride of Frankenstein, How the Grinch Stole Christmas), and Jack Nicholson (The Shining, Wolf).

What It's About: A despondent wizard (Price), mourning the death of his wife, helps another sorcerer (Lorre) who was turned into a raven by third (Karloff), drawing them all into a contest for the leadership of the entire magic community.

How It Is: I needed to finally see some of the Roger Corman/Edgar Allen Poe/Vincent Price movies and this is the year. This was a weird one to start with though, because of the humor. It's a fun, lighthearted story about rival wizards and there's plenty of room for Price, Lorre, and Karloff to ham it up as Olive Sturgess (playing Price's daughter) and young Jack Nicholson (as Lorre's son) look on in horror. And there's even a plot twist or two to keep things moving.

It's slight, but delightful. Deslightful!

Rating: 3 out of 5 bawdy blackbirds.

The Birds (1963)

Who's In It: Rod Taylor (Long John Silver, The Time Machine, 101 Dalmatians), Jessica Tandy (Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, Fried Green Tomatoes), Suzanne Pleshette (Blackbeard's Ghost, Support Your Local Gunfighter, The Bob Newhart Show), and Tippi Hedren (Marnie).

What It's About: A woman (Hedren) plays the world's dumbest practical joke and finds herself in a small town during the onset of the Bird War.

How It Is: There are some good, dramatic moments in it, but I can't get into the plot, the main characters, or especially the ending. I went into detail about it on Mystery Movie Night.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 recreating ravens

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Who's In It: Bette Davis (Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Burnt Offerings, Return from Witch Mountain, The Watcher in the Woods), Joan Crawford (The Unknown, I Saw What You Did, Berserk, Trog), and Victor Buono (Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, The Wild Wild West, Batman, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Man from Atlantis).

What It's About: A former child star (Davis) attempts a comeback while also persecuting her housebound sister (Crawford).

How It Is: Wow. I was really disappointed in this classic. Davis gives a great, disturbing performance and there are some tense scenes, but there are also a dozen ways that Blanche (Crawford) could have gotten herself out of that situation.

It works as a character study of these two sisters. And the complicated, ambiguous relationship between Jane (Davis) and the man she hires as musical accompanist to her comeback (Buono) is fascinating. But it's an unconvincing thriller and not really a horror movie at all.

Rating: 2 out of 5 sadistic sisters

The City of the Dead (1960)

Who's In It: Christopher Lee (pretty much every Hammer horror film, Lord of the Rings, Attack of the Clones), Betta St John (Tarzan and the Lost Safari, Tarzan the Magnificent), Valentine Dyall (The Haunting), and Venetia Stevenson (Island of Lost Women)

What It's About: A young woman (Stevenson) investigates the history of witchcraft by visiting a remote village with a long, dark history. But practice of the occult may not all be in the town's past.

How It Is: Hard to talk about this one without SPOILERS, so beware.

The City of the Dead is a nicely atmospheric Satanic thriller with some cool performances. The structure threw me though, because I expected to follow Stevenson's character through the whole thing, but it turns out that she's basically Janet Leigh in Psycho. That was disappointing, partly because I liked her a lot, but also because the actual Final Girl (St John) is nowhere near as charming. In fact, she's downright dull.

The mystery of what's going on in the little village is predictable, but at least I was having fun watching Stevenson put the pieces together. Once she was out of the picture, I got impatient to wrap up.

Rating: 3 out of 5 midnight masses

The Alligator People (1959)

Who's In It: Beverly Garland (My Three Sons, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman), Bruce Bennett (The New Adventures of Tarzan), Lon Chaney Jr (The New Adventures of the Wolf Man; just kidding), George Macready (Tarzan's Peril), and Richard Crane (Rocky Jones: Space Ranger)

What It's About: A newlywed woman (Garland) searches for her husband (Crane) who disappeared on their honeymoon, tracking him to a gothic mansion in a remote swamp where terrible experiments are being performed.

How It Is: The Alligator People is a strong mystery in a cool setting. A lot of the acting and characters aren't especially memorable, but Garland is quite good as the tenacious woman relentlessly searching for her missing husband. And Lon Chaney Jr is effective as an unpredictable, gator-hating Cajun. The gator-people makeup is effective too and even sort of terrifying. I suspect that some will find the final transformation silly, but I like it a lot.

The only thing I don't care for in the film is the weird and unnecessary framing sequence in which Garland has repressed her memories of the swamp and even has a new name. That raises a lot of questions that the movie doesn't care to answer and also reduces the tension in the main story, because we know how her story ends. But I do like that the framing sequence features Bruce Bennett as one of the doctors examining Garland's character. As Herman Brix, he played one of my favorite film Tarzans.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 scaly spouses.

The Deadly Mantis (1957)

Who's In It: Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn), Alix Talton (The Man Who Knew Too Much), and William Hopper (Perry Mason).

What It's About: After we learn way more than we want to know about the Cold War DEW line, random seismic activity frees a giant, prehistoric insect from its icy prison.

How It Is: I was really pleased that the effects team actually created a giant mantis instead of just superimposing insect footage over human actors like I expected. The only character I like though is Talton's Lois Lane-like reporter and she doesn't get enough to do to carry the movie for me. Stevens and Hopper passive-aggressively fight over her and no one's really being all that smart about tracking and stopping the monster. There are a couple of memorable set pieces, but also a lot of nobody doing nothing.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 murderous mantodea

From Hell It Came (1957)

Who's In It:  Tod Andrews (Hang 'Em High, Beneath the Planet of the Apes) and Tina Carver (she was on an episode of the Thin Man TV series; I didn't know there was a Thin Man TV series).

What It's About: A Pacific Island man (Gregg Palmer) is executed for a crime he didn't commit, so his vengeful spirit is resurrected as a tree monster that threatens the rest of his village as well as a group of US scientists (including Andrews and Carver) conducting research on the island.

How It Is: I was worried that From Hell It Came would follow in the footsteps of Robot Monster: a cheesy, low-budget horror movie that I'd always wanted to see, only to be disappointed to find unwatchable. Robot Monster has one of the coolest monster designs of all time, but an incomprehensible, mind-numbingly boring plot. From Hell It Came also has a so-awful-it's-awesome monster and it's set on a tropical island, so I desperately wanted it to be at least something that I could sit all the way through. It is that, and more.

The plot is simple, but it (mostly) makes sense and I do love the setting. The acting's not good and the monster is ridiculous, but From Hell It Came is laughably bad and that means that I'm having a good time watching it. A really good time, as it turns out.

Rating: 4 out of 5 injurious Ents

Them! (1954)

Who's In It: James Whitmore (Planet of the Apes, The Shawshank Redemption), Edmund Gwenn (Miracle of 34th Street), Joan Weldon (Them!), and James Arness (The Thing from Another World, Gunsmoke). With Daniel Boone and Mr Spock in bit roles.

What It's About: Nuclear testing creates giant ants that threaten to destroy the world.

How It Is: I love '50s scifi movies, especially when they involve alien invasions and giant, mutated animals. Maybe because they speak so deeply to my Cold War Kid's heart, since I grew up in a time when we were terrified of communist invasion and atomic weapons.

But even with a fairly high baseline to star from, Them! is a step or two above the others in the genre. To start with, the performances are strong, which wasn't always the case with the genre. But what I really like is the way the story unfolds through a serious, procedural style. Whitmore is especially great as Sgt Peterson, the main character for most of the movie. He's one of the police officers who discovers the first of the ants' victims and his obsession with learning the truth and then eliminating the threat is what drives the film for a good long while.

Unfortunately, as more and more people get involved, like the scientists played by Gwenn and Weldon or Arness' FBI agent, the less character work the movie is able to do. In fact, by the time Whitmore's character reaches the conclusion of his story arc, it's barely commented on because so much else is going on. 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 enormous arthropods

La Belle et la Bête (1946)

Who's In It: Josette Day (pretty much this unless you're way more familiar with French cinema than I am) and Jean Marais (Fantomas, Stealing Beauty)

What It's About: Adapts the classic fairy tale in which a beautiful woman (Day) is held prisoner in the castle of a terrifying beast-man (Marais).

How It Is: I love that Jean Cocteau opens his adaptation with text that reveals his sincere love for the story and refuses to apologize for it. He basically says, "Get on board or don't watch." And then he presents a straightforward version of the story that's imaginatively designed (all those arms and living statuary!) and gorgeously shot. Calling it magical is not hyperbole.

Currently, Cocteau's is my favorite adaptation of the story, at least until I can revisit the George C Scott TV movie that I remember so fondly from childhood. I don't actually expect Scott's to dethrone this one, but I feel a deep need to compare.

Rating: 4 out of 5 noble man-monsters

Jane Eyre (1943)

Who’s In It: Joan Fontaine (Rebecca, Ivanhoe), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, The Muppet Movie), Margaret O'Brien (Little Women, The Secret Garden), Agnes Moorehead (Citizen Kane, Bewitched), and a very young Elizabeth Taylor.

What It’s About: After a childhood of abuse, a young woman (Fontaine) hopes for change as governess in a house with a brooding master (Welles) and dark secret.

How It Is: I don't know how I've missed this adaptation for so long, but it was cool to watch so closely after Rebecca, Fontaine's other big gothic romance. She's fantastic in it and Welles is awesome, too. They have chemistry and O'Brien is delightful as Rochester's (Welles) ward Adele. They make a nice family that I hate to see struggle with the weight of Rochester's baggage.

Agnes Moorehead is beautifully cold as Jane's cruel aunt who sends Jane's life into a dangerous spiral. And I get a kick out of 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor playing the only friend of young Jane, because she and Fontaine would go on to play romantic rivals nine years later in Ivanhoe.

The sets in Jane Eyre are magnificent and there's a ton of mood around the whole thing. It's a really cool production. My only complaint is that it rushes through the story a bit, so some of the emotional punches aren't as powerful as they could be, but it's an excellent introduction to the story. I'm eager to rewatch Cary Fukunaga's 2011 version now and compare.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 cantankerous cavaliers