Richard Oswald Produktion

A demon, a reaper, and the ghost of a prostitute read gothic short stories and act them out.

Conrad Veidt plays a famous musician who is blackmailed for being gay. Eventually he stands trial and is convicted. At the end the film pleads for the abolition of §175 (the law that punishes homosexuality).

An ill-fated love affair between a brothel waitress and a doctor's son.

Engineer Walter Fahr has constructed a massive passenger submarine, the 'Gloria'. The vessel undertakes a test journey with various esteemed invitees aboard, together with several animals, and the blind passenger Professor Keigo Sotuma. […] When those aboard the 'Gloria' return to the surface, they find a ship whose entire crew is dead. It is the astronomer Sotuma who figures out what has happened: during their undersea journey, the Earth was scorched by the tail of a comet, and all life extinguished. The 'Gloria' sails back to shore, carrying the final humans into a dead world…

When the old, wealthy Doctor Schön takes Lulu under his wing, he has no idea that she will be his certain death. Young and beautiful, Lulu is endowed with tremendous erotic charisma that utterly enchants any man in her reach. Although Schön sees disaster approaching, he cannot let go of her. (Stumfilm.dk)

Paris, France, 1784. After living many tribulations, Joseph Balsamo, known as Count Cagliostro, an infamous adventurer, enigmatic magician and necromancer, experienced physician and ruthless swordsman, triumphs among the members of the decadent French aristocracy. But a bold foretelling about a very prominent noblewoman causes his fall in disgrace… (Partially lost film.)

Moritz Stiefel faces expulsion due to poor marks. When he is caught with an essay titled “Shame and Lust”, he is indeed kicked out – instead of classmate Melchior Gabor, who actually penned it. Gabor was drawing on his experiences with neighbourhood girl Wendla. Then Wendla turns up pregnant. Stiefel descends into despair ... Exploitation between Eros and Thanatos in this “sexual tragedy of youth” based on Frank Wedekind’s play. Setting the film in the 1920s provided a chance to explore “modern” youth culture, complete with cigarettes, jazz music, the gramophone, and a goodly bit of alcohol. Richard Oswald, a master of films of manners and young sex beginning in the 1910s, fully explores the temptations of the youthful body, even early childhood flirtatiousness. At the same time, with his target audience in mind, the film laments the bigotry and double standards of the adult world.

A young unemployed man gets a job as a private secretary by chance. A good salary, a first-class apartment - but things are not going right in his new residence. Notes warn him, a beautiful woman appears in the mirror, valuable documents disappear from the tightly locked safe.

Dida Ibsen, daughter of impoverished farmers, has, according to her father's will, to marry the main creditor. But she refuses and decides to live with a married man as a mistress, till he gets his divorce. In the town she opens a restaurant with the money of her wealthy lover, from whom she soon gets pregnant, but their dreams of marriage fail, his wife refuses the divorce. After a while, she decides to marry one of the regular guests at her restaurant, van Galen, who spent quite some time in the tropics and because of this is at the brink of madness. Shortly after the marriage his condition worsens and life becomes hell for Dida.

The married Lady Emma Hamilton has an ill fated romance with Admiral Horatio Nelson.

Such a soul torments young composer Georg von Wergenthin, around whom the author creates a precise picture of the fin de siècle, its neuroses and its politics. Georg starts a relationship with a young singer, but does not confess to her in front of his friends, even when she becomes pregnant by him.

In late nineteenth century Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish heritage, is falsely accused of espionage. Found guilty of treason he is drummed out of the army and sent to prison on Devil's Island.

A scientist, Professor Jakob ten Brinken, interested in the laws of heredity, impregnates a prostitute in a laboratory with the semen of a hanged murderer. The prostitute conceives a female child who has no concept of love, whom the professor adopts. The girl, Alraune, suffers from obsessive sexuality and perverse relationships throughout her life. She learns of her unnatural origins and she avenges herself against the professor.

An episode in the life of the Austrian composer Franz Schubert, who wrote the most beautiful love songs, but whose love life was very unhappy: The timid, myopic and rather portly Schubert falls for the beautiful, blond Countess Maria Esterhazy and has impossibly unrealistic fantasies about the two of them as she only admires him for his music. When he’s fired from his position as a teacher in the parish school, the village innkeeper Therese, who secretly has the hots for Schubert, gets him an engagement at a concert in Palace Esterhazy.

Alexander Bessel is a young man in a failing marriage. His wife cheats on him, and so the outbreak of WW1 comes in handy for a change. When young French soldier dies right in front of him Bessel seize the opportunity assuming his identity.

The Devil decides to go and visit Kurfürstendamm, where all his clients seem to come from. He settles at "Pension Elvira", where everybody cheats and deceives him. He comes to the conclusion, that Hell is a much better place.