Tape Territory › Genres

Free films by genre

Everything here plays in full, free, with no account and no subscription. The shelves below are the ones with enough on them to be worth a page; they grow as the catalog does.

59 films across 9 shelves.

• Free horror movies

  15 films — Horror is the reason this site exists. The films here run from the silent era to the drive-in decades: gothic chillers, poverty-row creature pictures, regional…

• Free science fiction movies

  8 films — Science fiction on a small budget is where the ideas went before the money arrived. What is collected here is mostly 1950s and 60s — flying saucers, atomic anxiety, men…

• Free film noir

  5 films — Noir is the American crime picture of the 1940s and 50s, and the ones that ended up free are rarely the famous ones. They are the second features: sixty-eight minutes…

• Free thrillers and suspense films

  7 films — Suspense is the cheapest thing a small production can do well: it needs a situation, a clock, and somewhere to point the camera. What is here ranges from tightly made…

• Free mystery and crime films

  10 films — The detective series were the bread and butter of the studio B unit: a recurring sleuth, a country house, seventy minutes, four of them a year. They were made to fill…

• Free westerns

  7 films — For thirty years the western was the most reliably produced thing in American cinema, and most of what was produced was not the famous stuff. It was the sixty-minute…

• Free comedy films

  19 films — Comedy dates faster than anything else and then, past a certain distance, stops dating at all. The silent shorts here still work exactly as built, because a man falling…

• Free drama films

  18 films — The dramas that survive on the margins are the ones the studios stopped thinking about: social problem pictures, melodramas, wartime features made to a deadline and a…

• Free silent films

  6 films — Most silent film is gone. What survives does so because somebody kept a print in a shed, or a collector struck a copy, or an archive reached a nitrate reel before it…

• Films with audio description

  The films that carry a description track written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow them by ear.