The Golem: How He Came Into the World

The Golem: How He Came Into the World (Der Golem, 1920) is a German silent horror and fantasy film you can watch online on iFILM, co-directed by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese. Set in sixteenth-century Prague, it follows Rabbi Loew, who shapes a giant from clay and breathes life into it through a kabbalistic incantation, raising a guardian to shield the Jewish quarter from an imperial edict of expulsion.

Wegener also plays the Golem himself — a hulking, blank-faced figure that obeys without question as long as the right word commands it. When that word falls into the wrong hands, the protector turns. Production designer Hans Poelzig built the ghetto sets with lurching towers and angular, compressed streets that seem physically wrong, generating dread through geometry alone. That visual language fed directly into Nosferatu two years later and shaped the whole German Expressionist tradition.

The Golem landed in 1920, a hundred-odd years ago, and it still reads as horror rather than curiosity — because the anxiety it taps into, a created thing turning on its creator, has not dated. Stream The Golem (1920) online on iFILM.