by Tara Adams
Writer, Haunt Hunters App
When the Vatican released its list of “Some Important Films” in 1995, which was meant to celebrate movies that reflected moral, artistic, and spiritual value, the 45 selections leaned heavily toward biblical epics, humanist dramas, and reverent classics.
And then there was “Nosferatu.”
F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire film, an unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula,” is thought to be the only horror movie ever recommended by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications, which released the movie list 30 years ago in honor of cinema's centennial.
The Vatican didn’t honor “Nosferatu” because it was scary. It honored it because it was moral.
Unlike modern horror, which often revels in chaos, excess, or nihilism, “Nosferatu” presents evil as something unmistakable, corrupting, and self-destructive.
Max Schreck’s Orlok isn’t a seductive romantic antihero. He’s a walking plague. He's skeletal, rat-like, and associated with pestilence and death. His presence brings disease to entire towns, rather than temptation or glamour.
In other words, evil in “Nosferatu” isn’t complicated. It’s a curse.
That clarity is precisely what makes the film spiritually resonant. Count Orlok doesn't win. He doesn't evolve. He is destroyed by light: sunlight, purity, and self-sacrifice. The film’s heroine, Ellen, defeats the vampire not with violence, but by willingly offering herself to delay him until dawn. Her act is one of conscious martyrdom, echoing Christian ideas of sacrifice, redemption, and the triumph of light over darkness.
For the Vatican, “Nosferatu” isn’t horror as exploitation. It’s horror as a parable.
The film was included under the Vatican’s “Art” category and has been praised for its groundbreaking visual language, including expressionist shadows, distorted architecture, and imagery that externalizes spiritual decay. Long before jump scares and gore, “Nosferatu” showed how fear could be philosophical, symbolic, and deeply moral.
It might also help that the film doesn't indulge in cynicism. There is no irony. No wink to the audience. The monster is a monster. The cost of evil is catastrophic. And goodness, while fragile, is stronger.
That view aligns far more closely with religious storytelling than most horror that followed. It’s, perhaps, why films like “The Exorcist,” despite its religious themes, didn't make the Vatican’s list. “Nosferatu” doesn’t question faith or blur moral lines. It affirms them in shadow and silence.
A hundred years later, the idea that the Vatican’s lone horror pick is a silent German vampire film feels poetic. “Nosferatu” endures not because it shocks, but because it warns. And because it understands that horror doesn't have to be blood or screams. It can also be the slow spread of darkness when it goes unchallenged.
In the end, that may be why the Catholic Church found it worthy.
Evil exists.
Light matters.
And dawn always comes.
Even for vampires. 🦇
References
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc_19960101_100-cinema_en.html
https://decentfilms.com/articles/vaticanfilmlist
