"Creepy" is the first word viewers use to describe Ben Linus, former leader of The Others on Lost. Some time back, Entertainment Weekly got Michael Emerson, the actor who plays Ben, to reveal who he credits with giving the five creepiest performances in film and television history. EW later posted the video on YouTube.

So who creeps Michael Emerson out? First up is Max Schreck in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.

I saw Nosferatu for the first time when I was in college. It was during a fund raiser for the Dallas PBS station, KERA — the same station that first brought Monty Python to the U.S. (as they were fond of telling us whenever they wanted us to open up our wallets).

On that Saturday night, KERA played a double vampire feature, starting with the 1974 BBC Dracula starring Louis Jourdan. It floored me. Jourdan's Dracula was so handsome, so sexy, yet so dangerous. Not to mention that the production, unlike all the others I'd seen, was largely faithful to the Bram Stoker novel.

   

I don't think that anyone that's even seen a still from that movie can argue with him being something really horrifying. — Michael Emerson

But the Jourdan Dracula was not to be the evening's big event. KERA was saving its "special" vampire feature for the wee hours: the 1922 German silent movie that kicked off the whole cinematic vampire trend. Nosferatu. At that time, 30 years ago, it was largely unavailable and infrequently seen.

Directed by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu adapted Bram Stoker's Dracula, playing up the creepy and eerie qualities of the tale. Alfred Hitchcock, who learned about storyboarding from Murnau during a 1924 assignment in Berlin, regarded Murnau as the master of "pure cinema", i.e. visual, rather than strictly narrative, storytelling.

But regardless of Murnau's credentials or Nosferatu's place in vampire movie history, I frankly didn't know what to make of it. It wasn't really what I would call a "scary" film. It didn't have any sudden shocks or screams, no blood or gore. Instead, it slowly unfolded its eerie atmosphere and mounting sense of doom.