It took me a while to come around to F. W. Murnau. I've never really liked Nosferatu, which certainly brands me as a heretic in both horror spaces and among film critic types. I didn't much like the second film I saw by the director, either. That was The Haunted Castle, made a few years prior to Nosferatu. I liked Faust quite a bit. It had that grandiosity that only silent mega productions seem to have had and it was chock full of special effects. The young horror punk I used to be really dug all of this, but it didn't illuminate Murnau for me, not in any substantial way. Sunrise, on the other hand, blew me away. I came to Sunrise as an adult. I'm glad that I came to it after I had grown enough as a film-watcher to really "get" it, but even so, watching Sunrise was a surreal experience for me. All the while I was watching it, I was trying to reconcile the fact that this deliriously romantic reinvention of cinema was the work of the same man who made Nosferatu. I think the barrier was the fact that Murnau was a horror director in my then-insufficient understanding of film. I hadn't seen the quantum leaps the director was taking in films like The Last Laugh, because they were outside my tidy little personal taxonomy. In other words: in this as in many other things, the younger me was an idiot.