Whatever happened to the Saturday afternoon Creature Features? Those mid-afternoon forays into the dark, films with questionable merit and, usually, a frighteningly bad local host. Maybe in your town it was aired late at night, or maybe you never got the chance to experience some of these old films at all. That's a shame. For every horror fan, there is a chronology of movies that led them to the genre. It's important to push back even further, to peel away the decades and examine the roots of horror, not just for appreciation, but for the wild joys of discovering some terrifying and satisfying films.

There are many self-professed movie fans who know minutiae for every film of the past twenty years. But, quiz them on the '60s or '70s, from which the films of today drew their influence, and you can watch their eyes glaze over. That's just plain ignorant. I don't propose a film by film chronology, but let's look at some of the biggies.

Nosferatu is F.W. Murnau's hallucinatory version of the Bram Stoker classic, Dracula. Most noteworthy here is the fantastic make-up and creepy performance by Max Schreck as Count Orlok, and even bigger ups to the moment where he rises from his coffin in dramatic, unmoving fashion. If you haven't seen this one, don't you dare speak of the Tobe Hooper 'Salem's Lot. Hooper got his best moves from this one. Sure, it's silent, but so is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dreyer's Vampyr, both excellent examples of expressionist film. More significantly, these movies play like the nightmares they are, less cerebral than visceral and completely chilling. If that one gets you, check out another silent Murnau classic, M, with Peter Lorre as a serial killer hunted by the town he terrorizes.

You'd rather watch a talkie? Wuss. Sit down and watch Todd Browning's Freaks, then, and enjoy the pleasant strains of "One of us! One of us!" People like to sound politically correct by smiling in a superior fashion and smugly asserting, "They could never make a movie like that in today's enlightened age." We are the worse for it. Browning depicted honest-to-goodness pinheads and circus folk as the heroes of the film, and left us with a singular allegory about where beauty lies. It's powerful stuff, and brave filmmaking by any standard. Never seen it? Rent it now. You'll never forget the last scene.

Finally, things came full circle as the decade of the '60s drew to a close, when most monster movies were on the upswing, taking advantage of the Technicolor pallette. The smart and sophisticated was being replaced by the garish and gothic as Hammer Films asserted itself as the premiere genre studio. But good old black & white had some tricks up her sleeve, thanks to Papa Bear and his Night of the Living Dead. Romero single-handedly created the modern zombie genre, made it okay for horror films to be allegorical again, and set the stage for a number of low-budget productions to come out and grab us by the boo-boo. To deny that Romero paved the way for Hooper, Craven and Carpenter is to demean his impact. Also, thanks to budgetary concerns, NOTLD was one of the last horror films seen on the big screen in the black & white format, and it used every trick of shadow and light, many cobbled from Val Lewton's films, to drain the color from the faces of its audiences even as a similarly pale hue flickered before them.

I was never big on the Universal classics, but if monsters are your thing, you can't go wrong with Chaney's turn as The Wolfman, or Karloff in the superior The Bride of Frankenstein. I even have a lot of goofy fun with The Creature from the Black Lagoon, especially looking for the not-so-hidden air tank. Though I have seldom been frightened by the obvious monster, these are films crafted with love, and the gorgeous set pieces and tremendous scores propel these films into more than simple genre status. These are the classic monsters of film, but I prefer skipping ahead to the '60s when the horror scene exploded with quality.

Sure, there were the Corman films that traded quality for concept or alluring title (come on, have you ever really watched his Little Shop of Horrors?), but there were also the classics that served as a bridge between the somewhat-schlocky scares of '50s atomic mutants (Them! is the best of these by far, and don't even argue with me on that one) and the archetypes of the '30s Universal horrors. Sit down with the lights turned low and watch Robert Wise's The Haunting, and peel away the layers of psychological isolation and belonging, regardless of cost. It's smart and spooky fun. Similarly, The Innocents, released two years prior to The Haunting, offered up a resonant take on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Both of these films shed the direct horrors of the monster flicks before them and operated on a deeper intellectual level. These were the direct descendents of Tourneur's Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, both fine films in their own right, but without the sophistication of the '60s offerings. These were the movies that laid the groundwork for tales like Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, where character was greater than story and the film was the more frightening for it.

intellectual level. These were the direct descendents of Tourneur's Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, both fine films in their own right, but without the sophistication of the '60s offerings. These were the movies that laid the groundwork for tales like Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, where character was greater than story and the film was the more frightening for it.

This is, of course, a crash course, movies you simply must see to know the roots of our genre. There are a thousand other classics, horrifying films that you may have missed thanks to the all-too-frequent prejudice against anything older than we are. What have you missed? Curse of the Demon? Dracula? Psycho? There are dark corners in our cinematic past yet to explore for all of us. The next time you're sifting through the Netflix queue, or wandering the aisles of the local video store, find the classics, see where the present was born. And, not surprisingly, you may just find a shudder or two waiting for you in those monochromatic halls.