Faust at 100: Murnau’s silent horror is back in theaters

Ufa spent more on it than on anything it had made. Murnau left for Hollywood the moment it was finished. A century later, Mephisto’s wings still need a screen bigger than a person.

WhatScares · September 2026 · Schedule rebuilt from our screenings feed on every build

Faust — Eine deutsche Volkssage premiered in Berlin in October 1926, four years after Murnau made Nosferatu and a year before he left Germany for good. It turns a hundred this year, and it is on real screens for it: 6 screenings at 6 cinemas, 7 October to 2 November 2026.

What it is

Murnau shot Faust for Ufa on the studio’s largest budget so far, and then left. It is his last German film: Fox brought him to Hollywood the same year, where he made Sunrise. The German film industry did not get him back — he died in California in 1931.

Gösta Ekman plays Faust twice over — the old alchemist who signs, and the young man the signature buys him. Emil Jannings, who would win the first Academy Award for best actor, plays Mephisto, and plays him as a delighted provincial gossip rather than a monster. Camilla Horn plays Gretchen. Carl Hoffmann shot it.

Why it is a horror film

The frame story is a bet. Mephisto wagers an archangel that he can take one man’s soul, and he opens his case by unfurling his wings over Faust’s town until plague fills the screen. That single image is why the film sits in a horror catalog and not only a film-history syllabus: it is a hundred years old and it is still the most convincing picture of a town being killed that silent cinema produced.

What follows is quieter and worse. The bargain is spent on a seduction, and the ledger is settled on the woman: a child dead in the snow, and Gretchen condemned to the stake for it. The devil in this film does very little himself. He arranges circumstances and lets the town do the burning.

Why a big screen changes it

Nothing in Faust was added afterwards. The wings, the plague, the flight over the mountains — models, smoke, glass and light, built at a size calibrated for projection. Mephisto’s wings work because they are larger than the town beneath them, and scale is the first thing a small screen takes away.

Silent films have a second problem at home, which is that they are easy to talk over and easier to pause. A room of people who have all agreed to sit still for 107 minutes is most of what a repertory screening is selling. We cannot tell you which print or what accompaniment any venue is running — the schedules we read do not say, and we are not going to guess at it.

How scary it is

On our scorecard Faust is 1/5 for jump scares, 1/5 for gore and 3/5 for dread. Those are honest numbers for a 1926 morality play: nothing in it is engineered to make you flinch, and there is no blood to speak of. The dread is pictorial and it is entirely in the second half, once you understand that the bet has already been lost and you are watching the invoice arrive.

If your tolerance is calibrated on modern horror, this will not frighten you. It will do something the modern films mostly cannot, which is look like a nightmare rather than describe one.

Where to see it

Every row below is from a cinema’s own published schedule, read on the morning of this build. We read every Alamo Drafthouse market and seven single-site repertory houses, and nothing else — a silent-film society or a museum near you may well be running it too, and we would not see that. Times are the venue’s own.

What to watch after

The obvious one is Nosferatu (1922), the film Murnau made four years earlier and the reason most people arrive at this one. After that, the rest of the German and Nordic silent shelf: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) for painted delirium, The Phantom Carriage (1921) for Sjöström’s double-exposure ghosts, and Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) for the point where the silent grammar meets sound and refuses to behave.

Questions people actually ask

How scary is Faust (1926)?

We score Faust 1/5 for jump scares, 1/5 for gore and 3/5 for dread. It is a silent morality play, not a shock machine: nothing in it is built to make you flinch and there is almost no blood. The unease is in the images — Mephisto’s wings over the plague town, and a burning at the stake in the last act.

Is Faust worth seeing in a theater?

Its effects are all in-camera and built to projection scale, so the wings and the plague sequence lose most of their size on a laptop. A silent film also asks for 107 uninterrupted minutes, which a cinema enforces and a sofa does not. We cannot say which print or what musical accompaniment a given venue is using — that is not published in the schedules we read.

Where is Faust playing this October?

Across the cinemas we track we have 6 screenings of Faust at 6 cinemas, 7 October to 2 November 2026: Arlington, Ashburn, Brooklyn, Yonkers, Austin and San Antonio. Dates, times and ticket links are in the schedule on this page, and the live view is on our showtimes page.

What should I watch after Faust?

Nosferatu (1922) first — Murnau made it four years earlier. Then The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Phantom Carriage (1921) and Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932). All four are in our catalog with their own scare, gore and dread scores.