From endless amounts of vampiric folklore and the token figure of Dracula to the monsters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the sparkling protagonists of Twilight, vampires and vampiric symbolism have been seemingly omnipresent for centuries. With the 2024 release of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, the two Nosferatu films preceding it have come back into focus among those who love film, the charm of gothic storytelling, and vampiric symbolism.

It began with F.W. Murnau’s interpretation presented in 1922’s silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Adapted from Henrik Galeen’s screenplay, the first on-screen iteration of the now-infamous vampire developed into a staple of silent films. Murau’s film kickstarted a whole other dimension of Dracula retellings, one that became beyond iconic within cinema and gothic canon despite beginning as a simple defense against copyright infringement.

The general path of the story is well known by now— a young solicitor is sent to Transylvania by his boss to visit an elusive Count Orlok, looking to buy a house. On his journey, he is warned against continuing his journey by the locals, but continues anyway, despite warnings and obstacles he encounters along the way. Throughout his interactions with the count (which vary from interpretation to interpretation) and the signing of the contract, Orlok develops a connection with the young man’s wife, who begins to sleepwalk and have visions of the count while her husband attempts to escape.

Orlok’s coffin makes its way onto a ship and spreads a plague around the city of Wisburg upon its arrival. Simultaneously, the solicitor’s boss is confined to an asylum, and his wife’s obsession with Orlok grows deeper. As she discovers more, she makes a decision to sacrifice herself to stop Orlok.

Each iteration has its own version of the details, but the themes of the occult and the taboo of feminine sexuality remain prominent. Ultimately, despite the efforts made by Murau in his iteration, Bram Stoker’s widow sued for copyright violation. Although all copies of the film were meant to be destroyed following the lawsuit, the prints that survived later led the film to become a blueprint for the horror genre, and more specifically, the vampiric film genre.

The 1922 silent film was reinvented over half a decade later by Werner Herzog, whose 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre served as an homage to Murnau’s film — an adaptation of an adaptation. By its creation, the original text of Dracula had entered the public domain, and while Herzog chose to include original character names in his iteration, he also openly discussed his admiration of Murnau’s film and his desire to pay homage to it.

Naturally, the gothic and horror elements were still prominently present in the film, but Herzog himself referred to the vampire as more than a horror-driven catalyst — an agent of change. Following his arrival and that of the plague, the people of the upper-class town seem to rid themselves of the very possessions that make them into the bourgeoisie. Everything in the world of Nosferatu shifts with his arrival and seemingly remains changed with his destruction at the end of each iteration of the Stoker story.

The final exploration of the classic story (for now) is Robert Eggers’ 2024 interpretation of Nosferatu. The 2024 film loyally sticks to the themes and original storyline of Murau’s screenplay, but his interpretation places an emphasis on the taboo-ridden perception of female sexuality alongside the main plot. While all the iterations of Nosferatu have a focus on female desire, Eggers arguably does the best job of making his heroine even more of a focus than Orlok himself.

There are distinct differences between the 20th-century films and Eggers’ Nosferatu, with the main point of contrast being the detail Eggers worked into his script when it came to acknowledging Ellen’s touch with the supernatural. While in other iterations it’s regarded as fascinating but ultimately terrifying, the 2024 film makes an effort to paint her connection with Orlok as more than desire and her ultimate sacrifice as more than a simple combination of logistics and myth.

Dracula, and with it Nosferatu, is a staple of vampiric lore and storytelling. All modern tales of vampires can be traced back to Stoker’s work, although the book itself is an amalgam of myths and folklore that have been around for centuries. Still, it remains almost a default to return to when approaching vampirism as an overarching theme.

To have three interpretations that continue to grow and expand into more detail while still celebrating the source material is arguably the entire point of filmmaking and maybe art in general. None of the Nosferatu films erase Stoker’s text, despite Murau’s efforts to avoid a lawsuit, yet none of them are completely like the others. The stories of Nosferatu, from their beginning in the 1920s to their most recent appearance over a century later, make for a masterclass in skillful adaptation and creating an homage to something greater than them all.