100 years ago, Nosferatu made vampire movie history out of a global catastrophe

polygon.com:

Sunlight wasn’t always fatal to vampires.That idea first entered the public consciousness in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, or Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, the illegally made, now widely beloved 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The trope has followed the genre ever since. It isn’t part of Stoker’s novel, but to most modern viewers, a Dracula movie would feel incomplete without it.

Directed by F.W. Murnau and written by Henrik Galeen, the German Expressionist landmarkturns 100 years old on March 15. Due to a legal battle with Stoker’s estate — after producers failed to purchase the rights to the novel, even though they credited it in the opening titles — Nosferatu spent its early life on the brink of erasure. But its narrative and visual language have echoed through the decades. These hallmarks grew out of a historical theme that has found renewed relevance in recent years: At its heart, Nosferatu is about fears of illness and plague. The silent-era classic opens with title cards describing a fictitious scourge, but its story was crafted in the shadow of the 1918 Spanish Flu, a pandemic that affected roughly a third of the world’s population. Like so much of modern horror, Nosferatu is a film where darkness consumes, light liberates, and color — yes, color — foreshadows both hope and doom.

It may come as a surprise to those familiar with Nosferatu by reputation alone — and even to some who may have only seen the black and white version of the film — that while it was captured in monochrome at the time, Murnau’s silent classic isn’t a black and white movie as we understand it today. In fact, color is one of its most significant narrative elements. Some surviving versions, like the one available on