Nosferatu

F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens opened in March 1922, the first cinematic vampire film of consequence, an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula made without consent from his widow Florence. She sued; the court ordered all prints destroyed in 1925. The film survived only because copies had already circulated, and is now permanently in the highest tier of horror cinema canons. Werner Herzog remade it in 1979 with Klaus Kinski; Robert Eggers's 2024 version was a critical hit; the original remains the foundational text.

The young estate agent Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) travels to Transylvania to negotiate the purchase of a Wisborg property by Count Orlok. Max Schreck, in the role of his career, plays Orlok with prosthetic ears, claw-like fingernails, and a stillness that has never been surpassed in horror cinema. The plague-rats arriving by ship at the Wisborg harbour, the silhouetted shadow of the Count climbing the staircase, the bedroom-window confrontation with Ellen, these are the foundational images of the genre.

Murnau's collaborator Fritz Arno Wagner shot largely on location, an unusual choice for German Expressionism, which gave the film a documentary realism that intensifies the supernatural rather than contradicting it. Hans Erdmann's score, lost for decades, has been reconstructed and re-recorded multiple times.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that invented horror cinema as a visual grammar. A century later, every vampire film (and most horror films of any kind) owes Murnau and Schreck a debt they cannot repay.