If you’re reading this, then you must be interested in increasing your knowledge and appreciation of horror movies. Roger Ebert has pointed out that the best way to become more educated and better appreciate a genre of movies is to watch movies. Here is a list of must see movies to watch if you want to be a horror expert.

Start with some of the earliest horror movies, including Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Other really early choices include The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Monster, both of which star Lon Chaney, Sr.

Then move into the Universal movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s. These include classics like Dracula and its sequels, Frankenstein and its sequels, The Mummy and it sequels, The Wolfman and its sequels, The Invisible Man and its sequels, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequels. These early horror films starred Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr., among others.

Hammer made great horror movies too, and that’s a great next stop in your horror movie education. They produced an entire series of Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, and Wolfman horror movies too. Their movies differed from Universal’s in their use of color. And the actors became a new generation of horror film star, including Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Those will just get you started. Other classic horror movies include many of Hitchcock’s films from the 1960’s, George Romero’s films, and John Carpenter’s movies. You shouldn’t just watch these movies though; you should discuss them with other horror fans. If you can’t find people to discuss these movies with live, then find some horror movie forums at which you can participate.

A handful of the great natural scientists, who observed the seemingly insignificant divergence of traits among certain species, and the many connections that are found between the most dissimilar classes of animals and plants.These evolutionary scientists also observed that quite a few species do diverge considerably in their forms, colors, and habits. They thereby put forth the theory that the individuals in a species may be all made one from the other. The most eminent of these early scientists was the French naturalist, Lamarck, who composed an impressive work in which he endeavored to demonstrate that all species are descended from common ancestry.

He attributed the modification of species principally to the effect of changes in the conditions of their environment and especially to the instinctive impulse of the animals themselves to improve their existence, leading to a modification of form or size in certain parts, owing to the familiar biological fact that all organs are strengthened by continuous use, while they are weakened or even altogether lost by non-use. The arguments of Lamarck did not gratify many of his colleagues, and though a few embraced the view that closely allied species had descended from each other, the overall belief of the educated public was that every species was a “special creation” unrelated to any other. Contrarily, most evolutionary scientists believed that the change from one species to another for any external cause was inconceivable, and that the “origin of species” was an unsolved and likely insolvable problem.

Another significant work dealing with the question of common ancestry was the renowned Vestiges of Creation, penned anonymously, but now acknowledged to have been written by the late Robert Chambers. In Chamber’s book, the processes of natural laws was observed throughout the universe as a system of growth and development, and it was contended that the assorted species of animals and plants had evolved in orderly succession from each other by the process of unfamiliar laws of development assisted by the action of external conditions. Although this book had a respectable effect in shaping public belief as to the extreme improbability of “special creation” of each species, it had lesser effect upon naturalists, because it made no effort to grapple with the problem in detail, or to indicate in any single instance how the allied species of a genus could have developed.

At present, in the evolution creationism debate, the theory of “special creation” is maintained unilaterally and quite fiercely by creationists as an unrefutable law not only of nature, but of God. Divine laws are not to be contended, and thus, the evolution creationism debate remains in an impasse.

Learn more about the demographics on the evolution creation debate.