The Best Free Classic Sci-Fi Movies to Watch Online
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Science fiction is almost as old as the movies. Within a few years of the first film shows, filmmakers were sending cannons to the Moon, and by the 1950s drive-ins were full of giant bugs, alien teenagers and mad scientists. A surprising amount of that history is now free to watch, and Starlite TV airs a good chunk of it on our Rocket Age and Silent Pictures channels.
This guide runs in rough order, from the very first space trip to a couple of modern open-source shorts. Everything named here is on the air right now.
The trick films: Méliès and friends
Start where it all started. A Trip to the Moon (1902) was written, directed and produced by the French magician-turned-filmmaker Georges Méliès, who also plays the lead. Loosely inspired by Jules Verne, it sends a group of astronomers to the Moon in a capsule fired from a giant cannon. They meet the Selenites who live there, escape, and bring one home. The shot of the capsule landing in the Man in the Moon’s eye is one of the most famous images in film history, and the whole thing runs about a quarter of an hour.
Méliès followed it with The Impossible Voyage (1904), a satire in which a group of tourists try to travel to the Sun, and it was a big international hit. Much later came The Conquest of the Pole (1912), about a comic expedition to the North Pole that runs into a man-eating frost giant. It was a flop at the time, and it helped push Méliès toward bankruptcy, but some critics now call it his greatest work. For a curiosity, watch Excursion to the Moon (1908) right after A Trip to the Moon. Segundo de Chomón made it for Pathé as an almost shot-by-shot copy of Méliès’s film. This time the capsule lands in the Moon’s mouth instead of its eye.
The silent era grows up
Frankenstein (1910) is a one-reel Edison Studios short directed by J. Searle Dawley, and it’s generally recognized as the first screen version of Mary Shelley’s novel, with Charles Ogle as the creature. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) mixes Verne’s submarine novel with parts of The Mysterious Island and is in the National Film Registry. It was the first feature-length film shot underwater.
Dinosaur fans should see the two films by effects pioneer Willis O’Brien. The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918) was the first film to put live actors and stop-motion creatures on screen together. It was a trial run for The Lost World (1925), the Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation starring Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger, whose stop-motion dinosaurs paved the way for O’Brien’s most famous work eight years later.
The rest of the world was dreaming too. Denmark’s A Trip to Mars (1918) has been called the beginning of the space opera. Italy’s The Mechanical Man (1921) is believed to be the first film to show two robots fighting, though only about 26 minutes of it survive. The Soviet film Aelita (1924), directed by Yakov Protazanov, sends an engineer by rocket to Mars, where the queen who has been watching him through a telescope helps him lead an uprising. Its Constructivist Martian sets and Aleksandra Ekster’s costumes are still wonderful to look at. René Clair’s comedy Paris Qui Dort (The Crazy Ray) plays here in its short 35-minute version and is a light, funny palate cleanser.
And then there’s Metropolis (1927). Fritz Lang’s city of towers and underground workers, and its robot made in the image of a woman named Maria, have influenced nearly every science fiction film since. If you watch only one silent movie in this guide, make it this one, and our silent film starter guide has more like it.
Early talkies imagine the future
High Treason (1929), directed by Maurice Elvey in Britain, is set in a futuristic 1940 where a “United States of Europe” and an “Empire of the Atlantic States” edge toward war, and a peace league tries to stop it. It was started as a silent and turned into a part-talkie halfway through production, and it’s also Raymond Massey’s first screen appearance. MGM’s The Mysterious Island (1929) was photographed mostly in two-color Technicolor, a rare thing for a science fiction picture in 1929.
Just Imagine (1930) is the odd one: a Fox science fiction musical comedy set in New York City in 1980, with 250-story buildings, air traffic between them and a trip to Mars. El Brendel plays a man from 1930 brought back to life in the future, and Maureen O’Sullivan co-stars. Its sets earned an Academy Award nomination for art direction.
1950s drive-in favorites
The postwar years gave us the B-movie, and these are the ones people still quote. Plan 9 from Outer Space is Ed Wood’s infamous tale of aliens who raise the dead to get humanity’s attention, with Vampira, Tor Johnson, narration by Criswell, and silent footage of Bela Lugosi that Wood shot before Lugosi died in 1956. In 1980 a book called it the “worst film ever made,” and it has been a cult favorite ever since. Watch it with friends.
Teenagers from Outer Space (1959), made by Tom Graeff, is about a young alien named Derek who rebels when his crew plans to use Earth as grazing land for giant creatures called Gargons. Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), produced by Gene Corman, is a swamp creature feature in which one character guesses that atomic radiation from nearby Cape Canaveral made the leeches grow. Indestructible Man (1956) gives Lon Chaney Jr. a crime-meets-science-fiction role, and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962) follows a surgeon who keeps his fiancée’s severed head alive. It’s gruesome and very much for grown-ups. It has been in the public domain since its release because of a flawed copyright notice. Several of these also turn up on our Graveyard Shift channel.
Two modern shorts to finish
For something new, the Blender Institute’s open movies are free by design. Tears of Steel (2012), directed by Ian Hubert, mixes live action and visual effects as warriors and scientists in Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk try to save the world from robots. Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle (2015) is an absurd, gorgeous short about a gloomy sheep named Franck and a mysterious salesman who offers him every life he ever wanted.
Want real rockets after all that? Our guide to NASA’s Apollo films covers the documentaries that share the Rocket Age channel, and the full sci-fi collection lists every title on air.