F. W. Murnau

With its industrial sound effects (including, Mark Korven's menacingly booming score), suffocating black and white photography, and dreamlike narrative logic, The Lighthouse evokes David Lynch's monochrome nightmare Eraserhead, as well as the cosmic terror of H.P. Lovecraft and the silent expressionist cinema of F.W. Murnau (Eggers is an admitted Nosferatu fanboy, after all), right down to its vintage square box aspect ratio.

It’s rather telling that the director opted for this aesthetic given that his second feature was originally supposed to be a remake of Nosferatu – and if this film is any indication, he probably would’ve nailed it.

Reportedly, Eggers has since been attached to a Nosferatu remake and a miniseries about Rasputin, both of which sound very interesting.

The film, which was written by Elisa Briganti (who later worked with Fulci on Manhattan Baby and House by the Cemetery), opens with a nod to F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized Dracula adaptation Nosferatu (1922) as an abandoned sailboat slowly wanders into the New York harbor.

Peter Cushing carries most of the ho-hum script as Dr. Van Helsing, though the well-lit color photography, central to the Hammer formula, can't compare with the shadowy magnificence of Nosferatu (1922) or Dracula (1931).

That nickname applies to an instantly iconic Nicolas Cage creation, no less disturbing than Max Schreck’s hunchbacked Nosferatu, a performance that has been a career-long inspiration for Cage. Like that early screen vampire, Longlegs puts us on edge with his twisted body language and exaggerated gestures — that, plus odd framing that crops him off at the head, explains how the character manages to worm his way into our brains.

Their seemingly innocuous exchange serves as a perfect storm of destiny and chance for Light, who soon finds himself in possession of a “death note” gifted to him by Ryuk (Willem Dafoe), a devil-like figure with a gift for gab who suggests a cross between Emil Jannings’s satanic trickster from F.W. Murnau’s Faust and Walter Huston’s Mr. Scratch from William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster.

The name could be an homage to "Count Orlock," which was the name of the Dracula character in Nosferatu , and Olaf's first scene borrows heavily from the meet-and-greet with the Lugosi vampire.

Looking back at the earliest years of the genre, we can see how Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s groundbreaking Nosferatu (1922) was a caricature of the perceived Jewish threat in Weimer Germany; the titular count in Todd Browning’s Dracula (1931) can be similarly viewed as an exotic menace to western culture; monstrosities from the manmade monster in Frankenstein (1931), to the ape-like Hyde in Rouben Mamoulian’s version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), to the giant ape himself in King Kong (1933), have been read as metaphors for the supposed threat posed by black men to white women and a culture of racial purity.

Ever since the silent days of movies, when F.W. Murnau chilled audiences with Nosferatu, a creepy, atmospheric adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, film-goers have been entranced by vampires on the big screen.

Yet Dracula, unlike, say, F.W. Murnau's 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu, doesn't have a discernible ''look.''

In the grand scheme of all movies ever made—including, say, F.W. Murnau’s exquisite 1927 silent film Sunrise and the totally useless 2015 Entourage movie—the line between a super-awesome Marvel movie and a bad one is cellophane-thin.