Free Horror Movies — Watch Classic Horror Films Online

Horror's public-domain shelf runs from the genre's silent origins straight through to the low-budget scares that defined the drive-in era, and it includes some of the most influential titles the genre ever produced. F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) is still the template for cinematic vampirism, an unlicensed "Dracula" adaptation whose angular shadows outlived the court order meant to destroy it. George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) is the hinge point: a distributor's missing copyright notice accidentally released the film that invented the modern zombie into public ownership on day one, and it has been one of the most-screened horror films in the world ever since. Between those landmarks sits a run of atmosphere-over-budget B-pictures: William Castle's "House on Haunted Hill" (1959), in which Vincent Price offers five strangers ten thousand dollars each to survive a night in a house that has already killed seven people, all showmanship and creaking doors; and "Carnival of Souls" (1962), Herk Harvey's low-budget ghost story about a car-crash survivor pulled back toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion, shot for pocket change by an industrial-film director and stranger than its budget had any right to allow. Expect black-and-white dread over jump scares, practical effects and showman's tricks standing in for CGI, and a direct line from German Expressionist lighting to the slasher films these titles quietly made possible.