Faust (1926)

The opening ten minutes of Faust are the best special effects ever achieved and no one has improved on them in a hundred years, because Murnau was not doing effects. He was doing weather. Wings covering a town. Plague as a business decision. Deathspell Omega write theology in the shape of collapsing scaffolding — dissonance as argument, not texture. Both take the contract seriously. That is what makes them frightening.

— PAH