When Robert Eggers adapted Nosferatu in 2024, he drew upon many familiar elements from the original film but added his own distinctive touches. The original Nosferatu is a masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema, directed by F.W. Murnau, and loosely based on the novel Dracula, with character names changed in an attempt to avoid copyright infringement.

Once the Bram Stoker estate finally allowed a studio to make Dracula, the Nosferatu version was largely forgotten. However, as the years pᴀssed, it survived thanks to film scholars and historians, and it now lives on as the earliest successful vampire story, predating Universal Studios’ Dracula by a decade. Like Dracula, Count Orlok’s weakness is sunlight.

However, while that is true for Murnau’s Nosferatu movie, and also for the Werner Herzog remake from 1979 with Klaus Kinski as Count Orlok, it is not the case for Robert Eggers’ iteration. While the sun seems to have an effect on Count Orlok at the end of the 2024 film, in this case, it is not what ultimately kills the vampire.

It’s Not Sunlight That Kills Count Orlok In Nosferatu

Vampires Must Be In Their Graves By Dawn

In Eggers’ 2024 version of Nosferatu, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) is a young newlywed suffering from preternatural nightmares. When she was young, Ellen promised herself to a mysterious spirit, and it seems that this demonic presence has returned to claim her. This situation grows ᴅᴇᴀᴅly when her husband disappears after visiting a mysterious Count.

When Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) arrives in the German town of Wisborg, a plague comes with him, and people start dying, and those who don’t attempt to flee the city. The vampire hunter, Professor Eberhart (Willem Dafoe), and Ellen’s husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), are actively searching for Count Orlok to kill him, but the vampire instead finds Ellen.

Nosferatu ends with Ellen surrendering to Count Orlok, and she begins making love to the vampire. However, this is when the vampire and Ellen die together in bed, as Thomas looks on in horror. It may seem the sunlight coming through the window killed Orlok, as it did in the original movie. However, that isn’t exactly what happened.

Eggers explained what really killed Orlok:

I need to have a beautiful sunrise at the end. Murnau’s film is often credited with creating the myth that a vampire can be killed by the sun. But it’s actually in folklore that the vampire must be in their grave by the first cock crow. So it’s not sunlight killing him. It’s the purity of dawn.

Therefore, it isn’t sunlight that kills the vampire. Instead, it is the fact that he didn’t get back to his grave in time to escape the rising of a new day. Thus, this scene demonstrates a clever way to subvert the basic vampire tropes without ignoring them completely.

How Count Orlok’s True Cause Of Death Changes His Ending

Count Orlok Died As The Rest Of The World Healed

For many, the initial thought process when Count Orlok died was that he was kept out too long, and the sun killed him. However, that is only partially the truth. The idea that he dies, because he couldn’t get back to his grave by morning, makes things feel different from just killing the vampire with a trope like a stake or sunlight.

It would seem that in vampire movies, there are rules filmmakers must adhere to when dealing with their creatures’ fates. Sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes, and crosses have become such a crutch for filmmakers that many recent movies have tried to eliminate one or all of them to make things more difficult for the protagonists. Eggers, however, didn’t eliminate one, but instead subverted it.

What Eggers did was demonstrate that the notion of sunlight killing vampires stemmed from a misunderstood concept. It appears as though, in this world at least, opening a coffin and allowing sunlight in during the day might not kill Count Orlok. It isn’t the sun that kills him, but the first light of day. Orlok wasn’t killed by a trope — he was killed by purity.

Sunlight Is Still Thematically Important In Nosferatu

The Sun’s Healing Powers Have The Opposite Effect On Vampires

However, this does not mean the sun is not also what kills him, because it is still the sunlight that ends Count Orlok’s life. It’s just not necessarily the sun in and of itself. Instead, it is the idea of the sun purifying the world for a new day. Instead of magical rays killing a vampire, it is the thought that the sun, which creates life, ends the life of the damned.

The night is where Count Orlok and all the other vampires find their power. This is when the world has gone to sleep, when the sun is no longer there to provide its light, helping people grow. Vampires are powerful at night because that is when things die. The darkness of night brings fear, but it also brings an end to the day.

When the sun rises, the world awakens, and the sunlight helps everything grow and flourish. This is not a place where a being of pure darkness like Count Orlok can survive. As the flowers, grᴀss, and even people rise and grow, it sucks the power from the vampire. As Nosferatu shows, the morning light kills vampires, not the sun itself.