The original German title reads Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, which translates to Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Axing the sub-head of the title makes sense for a cleaner, harder hitting name on a poster, but the original communicates something essential and true. Nosferatu is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of horror cinema, embedding a genre with the narrative, thematic, and visual ideas that will come to define it. It is a horror opera on the most epic of scales, with a minimalist story that’s more elemental than narrative. Henrik Galeen’s screenplay collaborates with the shadowy alcoves of folklore, with simple straightforward storytelling carrying an undercurrent of depth. No scene is wasted, with many suggesting a broader supernatural universe than the frame of Count Orlok’s tale. Patrons inside an inn warn Hutter of werewolves, and Murnau cuts to (what appears to be) a devilish hyena stalking a nighttime forest. What is the nature of this beast? The film does not say, but the hint is enough.

Like 2001 established for movies the issues of man versus machine, free will, God, and our place in the universe, all with an unblinking stare, Nosferatu unsuspectingly started as many traditions. Anyone who has watched a supernatural themed horror movie in the last 40 years will recognize tropes Nosferatu started or helped solidify. Horror movies often show a primary character finding a journal or (sometimes ancient) book that describes the otherworldly evil that will inevitably descend. The character, usually sharing a reality meant to be synonymous with our own, dismisses the writings as lunatic ravings. Often, they laugh. Equally as often, they later wish they didn’t. It’s amusing then, that a movie released in 1922 might have been the first film in the history of cinema to introduce this. At the same inn Hutter is warned of werewolves, he finds a book descriptively detailing all there is to know of vampires. We learn, for example, that vampires must carry with them, and live in, the tainted dirt of the Black Death. After reading, he gives out a full-bellied hearty laugh only to then literally throw the book onto the ground. What hogwash! What an odd thing this scene became a horror staple.

Each episode of Nosferatu distinguishes itself from the others in flavor and pace. Each is larger in scale, less forgiving, and more wicked. The call of adventure tricks Hutter into a mood of hopefulness and excitement, and Gustav von Wangenheim convincingly plays Hutter as a Tolkien-esque hero eager to see the world. The early sections of Nosferatu have the gleaming warm quality of the roadside travelogue film, which were little more than assembled shots of faraway lands and places, showing audiences exotic parts of the world they would never had the chance to visit themselves. The warmth quickly turns to the suffocating coldness of Count Orlok’s stone castle, a labyrinth of stretched narrow hallways drowned in darkness. Murnau’s mise en scène is visionary, and more subtle than Robert Wiene’s radical stylization in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Murnau’s effect is creepier and harder to dismiss: reality and nightmare are as one.