Frankenstein
1910 · Silent · Horror
Frankenstein (1910), the Edison company's fifteen-minute first film of Mary Shelley, shot in three days. Watch the earliest surviving Frankenstein free.
The first Frankenstein ever filmed runs about fifteen minutes and was written and shot in three days by J. Searle Dawley at Edison's studio in the Bronx. Charles Ogle plays the creature with a heap of wild hair and a face that looks assembled by hand.
The creation scene is the reason to watch it. They built a papier-mache dummy, set it on fire, filmed it burning, then ran the film backwards, so the monster appears to gather itself out of smoke and ash inside the vat. A hundred and sixteen years later it is still a genuinely unpleasant piece of trick photography.
It was written off as lost for decades while a private collector quietly had a print the whole time.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
More like this: Free horror movies, Free silent films.