There are few figures as frightening as Gloria Swanson‘s Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. Freddy? Jason? Leatherface? All of them cower in fear as she walks down the staircase. It was the capstone to her career, and a meta experience in more ways than one, but on a simpler level, it was nominated for an unbelievable 11 Oscars (and won 3 of them). What apparently deserved awards for Best Music, Best Black and White Art Direction, and Best Writing became an enduring force of a film that still thrills to this day. Fortunately, this trailer is just as ethereal and mysterious as the movie itself.

Your weekly fix of great movies made before you were born that you should check out before you die. An aging actress of another era wastes away in her mansion on Sunset Blvd. It’s by chance alone that a young writer stumbles upon her dreary existence and is pulled deep down into her madness alongside her. That young writer is now floating face down in a beautiful pool. A classic, a must-see, a brilliant film, Sunset Blvd. succeeds on every level no matter how desensitized by the past 60 years of filmmaking we’ve been.

What begins as a standard sales visit about car insurance renewal, slowly builds piece by piece into a tale of infatuation, intrigue and murder.