First up in this double bill of silent melodramas, Priscilla Dean and Lon Chaney star as a pair of scuzzy pickpockets at odds over a stolen pearl necklace in The Wicked Darling. Next is Dollar Down, a partially lost morality tale pertaining to a different kind of horror: that of a middle-class family living beyond their means and falling prey to moneylenders.

Criminal leader Silent Madden (Ralph Lewis) and his daughter, Molly (Priscilla Dean), are striving to lead a reformed life in San Francisco’s Chinatown—until the menacing gangster Black Mike Sylva (Lon Chaney) frames Silent for murder. Seeking vengeance and restitution, Molly becomes embroiled in a cat-and-mouse battle of wits involving a risky jewel heist and layers of deception and double-crossing. Screening with The Exquisite Thief.

In his penultimate collaboration with Priscilla Dean, Browning weaves an intricate crime drama set against the backdrop of the Shanghai opium trade that also features a pivotal supporting performance from 18-year-old Anna May Wong, here in one of her first film roles.

Marking the first of their eight film collaborations at MGM, Browning and Lon Chaney teamed up for this singularly unsettling melodrama following a trio of swindlers and former sideshow castmates who impersonate a respectable family of shopkeepers, the better to scam and burgle their wealthy customers.

A disquieting tale of illusion versus reality, this evident precursor to The Unknown stars Lon Chaney in dual roles: the titular criminal, who vies for the affections of a music hall puppeteer, and his palsied twin brother, known as the Bishop, who covers up his own crimes by using a charity operation and faked disability as elaborate fronts.

A Freudian pile-up of repressed desires, castration anxiety, and Oedipal plots, The Unknown is widely considered Browning’s crowning achievement and one of the greatest works of the silent era. Starring Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford.

One of the most demented melodramas of Hollywood’s pre-Code era is Browning’s misdirected revenge yarn starring Lon Chaney as a scheming cuckold magician who, after being paralyzed from the waist down by his wife’s lover, bitterly follows his nemesis to the Congo. Also starring Lionel Barrymore and Mary Nolan.

Browning and Lon Chaney’s final film together, Where East Is East transports the duo to French Indochina, where a facially disfigured animal trapper (Chaney) has a seemingly chipper relationship with his daughter (Lupe Velez) that is sidelined by the appearance of her American fiancé (Lloyd Hughes) and her estranged mother (Estelle Taylor).

A year before breaking out as a star in his own right with the lead performance in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinson made an indelible mark on Browning’s second sound picture, a loose remake of the director’s own 1920 film. Here, Robinson steals the show as Cobra Collins, a scowling Los Angeles gangster—the counterpart to Lon Chaney’s Black Mike Sylva.

Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 genre-defining novel, starring then-little-known Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, is an understated and elegantly stylized masterpiece of the uncanny, a macabre work of perverse Gothic melodrama that kicked off the first cycle of Universal horror films.

Browning’s follow-up to his hugely successful Dracula adaptation is a surprisingly sensitive cautionary tale starring Lew Ayres as a lightweight boxing champ whose affection is divided between his friend and manager (Robert Armstrong) and his double-crossing wife (Jean Harlow).

Widely considered among Browning’s best films, Freaks tells the doomed love story of a moneyed circus performer with dwarfism manipulated into marriage with a gold-digging trapeze artist. Shifting from finely shaded, dreamlike chiaroscuro to documentary pragmatism, this exceedingly disturbing horror film is pitched somewhere between daringly compassionate and—despite its infamous “one of us” chant—guilty of the very horrors it denounces.

In this densely composed satire disguised as a vampire mystery, an occultist (Lionel Barrymore) is called in to assist with the investigation of a high-profile murder after locals conjecture that it must be the work of a presumed vampire (Bela Lugosi) who lives in a vacant castle with his chalky daughter.

This imaginative, Dumasian revenge tale finds Browning returning to pet themes of mesmeric influence and parental estrangement, but the film’s carnivalesque spectacle of double-exposure techniques and gigantically oversized sets—plus Lionel Barrymore’s totally committed drag performance—nearly turn The Devil-Doll into all-out farce.

Browning’s last film is a briskly paced locked-room whodunnit that showcases the director’s fascination with the moral implications of professional magic-making, centered on a debonair ex-magician and debunker of fraudulent spiritualists who stumbles into a murder investigation around the death of a mysterious “demonologist.”