Did George Lucas borrow elements from Nosferatu for Revenge of the Sith? Let's take a closer look!

When Count Orlok from the movie "Nosferatu" rises from his coffin aboard the ship that is taking him to England. All rights belong to their rightful owners

 When Darth Sidious "Rise Of Lord Vader"

 

When Darth Vader rises from the operating table in Revenge of the Sith, his movement strongly echoes Count Orlok’s unsettling emergence from the coffin in Nosferatu. In both scenes, the body does not rise in a natural or human way. Instead, the figure slowly lifts upward with a stiff, almost mechanical motion, creating the impression that something dead—or something that should not be alive—has been brought back into the world. The vertical movement makes the character appear to be pulled up by an unseen force, transforming a simple act of standing into a disturbing resurrection.

The similarity is also meaningful because both scenes mark the birth of a monstrous identity. Orlok’s rise presents him as a supernatural creature emerging from darkness, while Vader’s rise represents Anakin Skywalker’s death and the beginning of his existence as Darth Vader. The stark lighting, rigid posture, and slow pacing make Vader seem less like a wounded man recovering from surgery and more like a horror figure awakening from a coffin. By borrowing the visual language of Nosferatu, the scene frames Vader’s transformation as a kind of gothic resurrection: he survives physically, but the person he once was has been buried.