The Essential Christopher Lee: 14 Must-See Films

Christopher Lee was the quintessential professional. His résumé contains over 280 films, TV shows, cartoons, musicals, and video games, and he was a stalwart and whole-hearted performer in every single one of them. Lee, who stood 6’5” and was possessed of the deepest, most sonorous voice this side of Thurl Ravenscroft, could stride onto a screen, glance in your direction, and you would be exhilarated. Even into his 90s, Lee was knocking people over with a seeming lack of effort. Perhaps after so many decades in front of the camera, it just came naturally to him.

Related: R.I.P. Christopher Lee (1922-2015)

Lee’s filmography is loaded with amusing, scary, silly, bonkers, and classic exploitation and genre films. He has said that he loved playing Dracula (which he did over a dozen times), and that he was always fond of horror movies. He was the face of Hammer Horror for many years, and worked with numerous notably off-the-wall genre directors, from Jess Franco to Alejandro Jodorowsky to Joe Dante to Tim Burton.

Distilling his enormous career into a few choice films is a difficult task, but we here at CraveOnline, who have a comfortable sampling of Lee’s filmography under our belts, can recommend the following films as a healthy cross-section of Lee’s body of work.

Slideshow: The Essential Christopher Lee


Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.

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