Nosferatu (1922)
Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu invented vampire cinema and still frightens a century later. The estate sued anyway and won, and a court ordered every copy destroyed.
Actor: Alexander Granach
Alexander Granach played Knock in Nosferatu, the estate agent whose madness precedes the vampire’s arrival. He was born in a Galician shtetl, could not read until adulthood, fled the Nazis via the Soviet Union where he was briefly imprisoned, and worked in Hollywood including in Ninotchka.