I know that when I am ready to break down and cry after a long, hard day that they will be waiting for me in the room with open arms ready to cuddle me and comfort me.

When I get a good grade on my test they are the first to congratulate me and tell me how proud of me they are. These two have pushed me every single day to be a better woman than I was the day before.

Riley has taught me to love until I have nothing left to give. Annie has taught me how to be kind to everyone around me. She is so compassionate and truly wants everyone to feel welcomed, included and loved.

Riley and Annie both have taught me how to journey through life as if it is a glorious adventure. They have shown me that is does not matter where you are or what you are doing you can make the best memories if you are surrounded with people who truly love you and care about you.

Though Nosferatu 's creators gave their central vampire a look and feel all its own, many contend that the plot — a young clerk traveling to the old country, only to discover a vampire nobleman who covets his beloved — is just Bram Stoker's Dracula with the names changed.

According to Forward , the job of trying to dodge litigation fell on screenwriter Henrik Galeen. He changed names, settings, descriptions, and even the cast of the story in order to avoid litigation and adapt Stoker's lengthy epistolary novel into a silent film.

Count Dracula became Graf Orlok, Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter, Renfield became Knock, and Mina Harker became Ellen Hutter. Many of the novel's supporting characters, such as Professor Van Helsing and cowboy Quincy Morris, are absent entirely.

Unfortunately, the writer's hard work was not enough to keep Prana Film out of legal hot water. The actor playing Graf Orlok, one Max Schreck, has been the subject of rumors over the years.

The most common one is that he was, in fact, a vampire himself, a concept that was turned into the full-length horror film Shadow Of The Vampire , starring Willem Dafoe as the undead Schreck.

While the story is obviously untrue, everything about Schreck did little to dispel these rumors. According to an interview with biographer Stefan Eickoff in Reuters , Schreck was no supernatural creature but rather a versatile actor with an unusual temperament.

He was a civil servant's son with over screen and stage roles and was "a loyal, conscientious loner" with no family to speak of.

Schreck was also known for his detached, offbeat sense of humor, leading one of his contemporaries to claim that he lived in his own "remote and strange world.

While different depictions of vampires cherry-pick their strengths and weaknesses — fearing the crucifix, casting no reflection in mirrors, transforming into bats — one of the universally recognized tropes is that vampires are killed by direct sunlight.

However, this wasn't always a common concept. In fact, Bram Stoker's Count Dracula walks around in the sun — he's merely weakened by it.

It was Nosferatu 's climax that cemented the idea of sunlight killing the vampire into the minds of the public. As noted in a piece on Medium , it was F.

Murnau who came up with the idea of the vampire being disintegrated by the rays of the dawn. While the poetry of the final scene is laid on thick — the viriginal Ellen Hutter sacrifices herself to the vampire, so that he, drunk on her innocent blood, doesn't notice the rising sun until it's too late — truthfully, the use of this special effect was just a cheap alternative to a grisly death scene.

The folkloric way to dispense with a vampire involved driving a stake through its heart, cutting its head off, and burning the corpse, which wasn't easy to show onscreen.

So whether the sun as vampire repellent spread quickly among the few folklore enthusiasts who saw the film, or whether Murnau had heard about it in some rare piece of lore, is unknown.

For a work of art as atmospheric and macabre as Nosferatu , Grau and Murnau couldn't simply host the world premiere in a movie theater.

Instead, the film was premiered with the kind of event one wishes more horror movies launched with — an epic costume party at a zoo.

According to Mental Floss , Nosferatu premiered March 4, , at the Marble Hall of the Berlin Zoological Gardens.

Before the film, there was a stage show including a spoken-word prologue by star Max Schreck himself, followed by a dance number.

After the showing, there was an elaborate masquerade ball, complete with gowns, frocks, and suitable costumes to honor such a morbid film.

The party, dubbed "Das Fest des Nosferatu" "The Festival of Nosferatu" raged until AM, with guests including German filmmakers like Ernst Lubitsch and Heinz Schall.

Thankfully, this elaborate event has been recreated to a certain degree today. Austin, Texas, hosts an annual Nosferatu Festival , inviting fans from all over the world to travel to America's "City of Bats" and celebrate all things vampiric.

Given the climate of anti-Semitism in Europe during the first third of the 20th century, it's unsurprising to learn that many saw Nosferatu as an inherently anti-Semitic film.

Jews had for some time been cast as blood-drinking witches by anti-Semites, and the similarities between the vampire Graf Orlok and contemporary stereotypes of Judaism — the long nose, rat-like features, and hunger for innocent Germanic women — lent the movie a bigoted undertone.

One member of the audience at Nosferatu 's premiere leaped on this concept: Julius Streicher, who would become chief editor of Hitler's antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer.

Later on, in the pages of Der Stürmer, Streicher would repeatedly use art and prose to conflate Jews with vampires, making Jewish people out to be rat-faced, bloodthirsty plague-spreaders.

While it has since been noted that F. Murnau was friendly with many Jewish people in the film industry, the feeling that Nosferatu was made to stoke the fear of the universal Other — a claim often made about Dracula as well — remains to this day.

Nosferatu was a direct adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, with names and references changed to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit.

Unfortunately, the makers of the film weren't ready for the sheer tenacity of the enemy they had made: Florence Balcombe, Stoker's widow.

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