With a little ingenuity and a lot of time on your hands, you can find almost anything on YouTube—from avant-garde cat videos to women whispering in Spanish while holding a variety of household goods.
But fortunately for movie lovers, you don’t have to look quite as hard to check out the platform’s amazing array of options in the public domain. When a movie’s license expires or the work ceases to be owned by a corporation or a private individual, it’s essentially a public good and is freely distributable. Thus, while you can always briefly find studio classics like All About Eve, The Palm Beach Story, or Rebecca on the site, posters are often breaking copyright laws to do so, and the films are likely to be removed as quickly as they went up.
Luckily though, you don’t have to commit a crime to watch good movies for free—and maybe get a bit of a film history lesson in the process. All you need to know is what to watch and where to watch it.
1) Carnival of Souls
James Wan’s 2011 horror sleeper hit Insidious was famously inspired by this low-budget effort from prolific short-film director Herk Harvey. Filmed for just $20,000, Carnival of Souls has proven a major influence on directors George Romero and David Lynch, who seemed to draw on the film for his hypnotic 1997 effort, Lost Highway. The film—about a woman who finds herself haunted by an inescapable evil following a tragic car accident—is odd and hard to pin down, but that’s precisely part of its ineffable appeal. Its surreal atmospheric pleasures should be catnip for fans of better-known movies from the period—like Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor or Kiss Me Deadly (another Lynch favorite).
2) Detour
While the low-budget film noir was well-reviewed upon its 1945 release, Detour has only grown in critical acclaim in the years since. Filmed in just six days, it’s hard to believe that this dark tale of blackmail gone wrong survived the harsh censorship of the Hays Code era. Playing a particularly devilish femme fatale, Ann Savage (much later seen in Guy Maddin’s masterful My Winnipeg) became a cult icon. Savage’s Vera hitches a ride with Al (Tom Neal), whom she comes to believe has murdered a bookie. And in the grand tradition of film noir, she plans to use that to take everything—or almost—everything he’s got. As Vera would put it, “I don't wanna be a hog!”
3) The General
Like many future landmarks, Buster Keaton’s The General was a financial flop and received poor reviews from critics after it initially debuted in theaters. However, The General went on to be known as the finest work in its director’s distinguished career, and Citizen Kane director Orson Welles emphatically claimed it was the greatest movie ever made. It’s easy to see why: The General offers some of cinema’s most nimble physical comedy (Keaton did all of his iconic stunts for the film, which include jogging on top of a moving train), as well as its star’s trademark deadpan charm. If you you’re a fan of Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers, you can’t miss it.
4) His Girl Friday
One of the funniest, fastest movies ever made, His Girl Friday is to dialogue what Gravity was to special effects—an utter miracle. If you’re a fan of the fast-talking dames on Gilmore Girls, test yourself by trying to keep up with the motor-mouthed wit of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, playing star-crossed news reporters. Speaking in the movie’s trademark overlapping dialogue, the two share some of the sharpest barbs ever written. Take this exchange: Hildy (Russell) is explaining to Walter (Grant) why she’s marrying another man. She says, “He treats me like a woman.” Walter Burns: “Oh, he does, does he? How did I treat you? Like a water buffalo?”
When they say they don’t make ’em like this anymore, His Girl Friday is what they mean.
5) House on Haunted Hill
Between movies like House of Wax (not the Paris Hilton one), The Fly (not the Geena Davis one), and House on Haunted Hill (not the Chris Kattan one), Vincent Price carved out a niche for himself as the maestro of macabre horror. Price’s eerie yet alluring screen presence is unmatched in cinema, and this film—about a millionaire who pays a group of people to stay overnight in his spooky old house—is the perfect blend of retro horror and vintage camp. Those looking for more gems in Price’s massive filmography would be advised to check out his playing-it-straight roles in The Song of Bernadette and Laura, which gave Price a chance to show the fine actor underneath the steely kitsch.
6) Little Shop of HorrorsThe later Frank Oz–directed musical is the rare adaptation that improves on the original—buoyed by Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene’s nebbish charms—but the original also stands on its own two… vines? Boasting one of Jack Nicholson’s first screen appearances, the 1960 Little Shop of Horrors is more straightforwardly comic than other entries in the Roger Corman catalog. However, the film’s off-kilter, dark humor is well-suited to the tale of a bumbling florist who unwittingly creates a carnivorous plant, and Little Shop quickly gained cult popularity through regular television broadcasts in the 1960s and ’70s. For those with a taste for the absurd, it remains a delight five decades later.
7) Manos: The Hands of Fate
Manos: The Hands of Fate had the rare distinction of being—for a brief, beautiful time—the worst movie ever made. Manos formerly topped (?) IMDb’s Bottom 100 list, a user-reviewed ranking of film’s lowest of the low. (The current “champ” is something called Code Name: K.O.Z.) Like fellow IMDb honoree Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Manos has to be mocked to enjoy because—and I cannot stress this enough—parts of it are excruciatingly boring. One scene features seven nearly unbroken minutes of the characters driving. But there’s a reason it’s become an MST3K favorite: It introduced the world to Torgo, a twitchy satyr who works as the groundskeeper for a polygamist cult, and the Master, whose bizarre wardrobe reminds me that it’s never too early to pick out my Halloween costume for next year.
8) Metropolis
Saying watching Metropolis is a requirement for any serious lover of film makes it sound like medicine. But there’s a reason that Fritz Lang’s masterpiece has inspired everyone from Madonna—who paid homage to Lang’s work in the video for “Express Yourself”—to Janelle Monae and St. Vincent. Hailed as one of the silent movies ever made, Metropolis remains a visual and technical marvel, inspired by Art Deco and German expressionism, and these same influences could be seen in Robert Wiene’s likewise unmissable The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Fans of the director should also check out M, his other German tour de force, as well as his later works in America—such as the underrated noirs Fury and The Big Heat.
9) My Man Godfrey
If you had to put a gun to my head and ask me what my favorite comedy is, this is probably what I would blurt out first. The inimitable Carole Lombard is daffy perfection as Irene Bullock, a spoiled socialite who adopts a hapless homeless man (William Powell) as her pet projection—and hires him as the family butler. There’s a certain Wodehousesque weightlessness to the whole thing, as if the movie could float away at any time, but don’t let that distract you from how dense this movie is—with mad screwball humor, with fully realized characters, and with life itself.
10) Night of the Living Dead
While Victor Halperin’s White Zombie is widely credited as the first zombie movie, Walking Dead fans have George Romero to thank for starting the modern zombie craze with this landmark 1968 horror film. The low-budget indie was filmed for just $114,000 and grossed $12 million in the U.S., making it one of the most profitable movies ever made, nevermind an enduringly influential cult classic. Night of the Living Dead was a critique of discourses of race and social taboos, as well one of few movies in the era to cast a black actor in a lead role. While Romero’s film would launch a successful film franchise for the director (last seen in 2009’s Survival of the Dead), this will forever be remembered as the maestro’s finest hour.
11) Nosferatu
Nosferatu is, for my money, still the most chilling horror film to grace the big screen. For F.W. Murnau’s considerable gifts as a director—he also filmed Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the first movie to ever win Best Picture—the movie lives and dies on Max Schreck’s utterly incredible performance as the titular bloodsucker. Here’s the ultimate indication of just how good Schreck is here: Shadow of the Vampire, a 2000 film starring Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich, suggested that Max Schreck was an actual vampire. That film is, of course, a work of fiction, but let’s just say this: I would never have wanted to be alone in a dark alley with Schreck to find out.
12) Of Human Bondage
The best adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel onscreen, 1934’s Of Human Bondage is a must for fans of Bette Davis (read: Kim Carnes listeners, gay men, old ladies). This was Davis’s breakout role and her very first Oscar nomination (prior to her consecutive wins for Dangerous and Jezebel) for a performance that has nothing to do with S&M—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Davis plays Mildred, the manipulative, low-class object of Philip Carey’s (Leslie Howard) affections, and owns every scene she’s in—especially in a bedroom confrontation where she destroys all of Philip’s things and storms out. Even when she’s playing basically the worst person on Earth, Bette Davis makes it look good.
13) Plan 9 From Outer Space
This might be an unpopular opinion, but for as “bad” as Ed Wood Jr.’s movies are—he’s often hailed as the worst director in film history—there’s a certain demented brilliance to them. For the mind-numbing mundanity of Glen or Glenda, the film features an unforgettably bizarre segment of Bela Lugosi (who is God, maybe?) pulling the strings of humanity. Plan 9 From Outer Space features a now iconic image of poorly made spaceships—that are made out of pie plates or hubcaps, depending on who you ask—hovering languidly over Los Angeles. Not a single scene or plot development in this movie makes any sense—and the dialogue is famously atrocious—but it appears to unfold over its weird dream logic.
Photo via Kolin Toney/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed