The Film Robert Eggers Says “Invents Horror Movies”
Robert Eggers has never hidden his love for old cinema. He builds stories with the care of a historian and the curiosity of a kid peeking behind a curtain. When he talks about the roots of fear on film, he points back to a single black and white vision that shaped what followed.
He does not just admire its spooky images. He believes this early masterpiece taught filmmakers how to move an audience through dread and suspense. In his view, the grammar of the genre clicked into place because of it.
That film is Nosferatu, released in 1922. In one interview, Eggers put it plainly. “But in many ways — there’s horror movies before it, obviously — Nosferatu invents horror movies. The editing of the parallel story together in some ways invents cinema.”
The idea is not just about fangs and fog. It is about technique. Eggers points to how the movie cross cuts between danger and safety to make tension rise in your chest. That push and pull is now second nature to scary storytelling, and he credits the silent landmark for showing how it works.
His connection to this movie runs deep. “I’ve been sort of obsessed with Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror since I was nine years old,” he said in a recent chat while noting that it “kind of invented horror movies.” That lifelong fixation helps explain why he keeps returning to its shadowy corridors in his own work.
Eggers sees the film’s fingerprints all over the genre. The creature’s angular presence and the nightmarish play of light and architecture inspired generations who came after. Writers have tracked its influence from early talkies through modern favorites, showing how the same long shadows keep creeping into new decades.
So when Eggers says this silent classic invented horror, he is not only praising a beloved relic. He is pointing to a blueprint that still works. The movie taught filmmakers how to breathe suspense into a scene and how to make fear feel like it is moving toward you step by step. A century later, his words read less like exaggeration and more like a simple truth that the genre keeps proving on screen.