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Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" resurrects a 102-year-old vampire who first appeared in F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent black-and-white film "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror." /Film's own review of Nouveau-"Nosferatu" raves about it as a truly terrifying horror picture, as scary to modern audiences as Murnau's was a century prior.

It's incredible that cinema is now old enough that certain classic films have endured for a century or more. Heck, the 100th birthday of "The Wizard of Oz" is only 15 years away. However, "Nosferatu" is technically older than he appears — because the character is, in all but name, Count Dracula.

Now, the vampire himself is not named Dracula in Murnau's film but rather Count Orlok (played by Max Shreck). The story follows the major beats of Bram Stoker's novel, though, aside from moving the setting from England to Germany. Thomas Hutter...

Cineastes the world over know about the scandal surrounding F.W. Murnau's horror classic "Nosferatu." It's clearly an adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, "Dracula," but Murnau infamously didn't obtain the rights to adapt Stoker's book into a screenplay. He changed the names of the characters -- most notably Count Dracula was changed into Count Orlock -- but that didn't stop Stoker's estate from suing Prana Film, the production company. Every copy of "Nosferatu" was ordered to be destroyed. Thanks to shiftlessness in this task, however, several prints survived, and audiences can enjoy and be terrified by "Nosferatu" to this day. For my money, it's one of the scariest movies ever made. ("The Lighthouse" director Robert Eggers is currently remaking it.)

In Rolf Giesen's 2019 book "The Nosferatu Story: The Seminal Horror Film, Its Predecessors and Its Enduring Legacy," the premiere of "Nosferatu" is described in detail, and Prana...