For his fourth feature film, Robert Eggers exhumes what might be considered the urtext for all horror cinema, F.W. Murnau’s own 1922 rendition of Nosferatu, rendering it as an astonishing, meticulously crafted, and oddly touching parable about desire, disease, and death.

A Pre-Code sound take on George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, this eerie mystery stars John Barrymore as the titular music teacher, who controls (and ultimately destroys) the young women under his tutelage through his curious powers of suggestion.

Among world cinema’s greatest fairy tales, Cocteau’s timeless 1946 adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1757 story endures one of the medium’s most beloved and influential fantasies.

Perhaps the definitive film adaptation of Charles Dickens, David Lean’s classic 1946 rendition endures as one of the all-time great (and most faithful) transfigurations of literature into cinema.

Drawing from Alexander Pushkin’s short story of the same title, Thorold Dickinson’s stunning, baroque, 1806-set fantasy, about a military officer who seeks to make a Faustian bargain, conjures a sense of the supernatural that verges on the surreal.

Sergei Parajanov’s feature debut was this mesmerizing fairy tale adaptation, drawn from the work of Moldavan writer/poet Emilian Bukov, which follows a young shepherd boy who dreams of becoming a knight and receives an enchanted flute.

A seminal gothic chiller and a touchstone work examining the relationship between the paranormal and the psychological, Jack Clayton’s second feature (adapted from Henry James by William Archibald and Truman Capote) stars Deborah Kerr as a governess who starts to believe that the estate she is looking after is haunted by ghosts.

Loosely based on a story of the same title by Ukrainian writer Mykola Hohol, Yurii Illienko’s 1968 adaptation is a visually astonishing work on the borderline between cinematic narrative and pure poetry—and one of his richest films.

A consummate work of cinematic folk-horror, Đordje Kadijević’s 1973 feature follows a young man who takes a job as a miller in the rural village Zaroshje, home to an infamous vampire.