Nearly a century after his untimely death, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931) is still widely recognised as one of the most influential directors the silent cinema has ever seen. From humble beginnings in Westphalia, Germany, to the bright lights of Hollywood, by the end of his career Murnau had achieved both critical and commercial success across two international powerhouses of silent cinema, including winning the first Academy Award for Best Unique and Artistic Production (now known as the Best Picture Award) for Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Despite his films perpetually appearing in compilations of Best Films of All Time (British Film Institute, 2012, American Film Institute, 2007), much of his work and influence is unsung in comparison to contemporaries like Fritz Lang and Charlie Chaplin. In fact, relatively little was known about his life and work before Lotte Eisner’s as yet unparalleled monograph F.W. Murnau in 1964 (English language edition: 1973). Over half a century after its initial publication, Eisner’s study on his life and work continues to provide unmatched insight into his personal and professional life. This is in part due to her acquirement and use of original screenplays, letters and first-hand accounts from Murnau’s family, friends and colleagues to construct what is for many students a reference work. While undoubtedly invaluable, Eisner’s work does not offer a detailed analysis of gender and sexuality within Murnau’s films. As she states, his most prominent films were dealt with in her other standardized work on the German Expressionism movement titled The Haunted Screen (Eisner, 1965), which unsurprisingly focuses predominantly on expressionist imagery and techniques in Weimar film. This approach is extended to her monograph of Murnau, where she situates his films within (and sometimes outside of) the Expressionist movement and focuses on his directing style and pioneering techniques. While an invaluable source to this project, due to the large scope of both bodies of work Eisner touches on many different aspects of Murnau’s films, yet only offers detailed analysis on some. Though her work on Murnau displays a great respect for his work, this is often communicated in the form of subjective statements: “Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, the greatest film director the Germans have ever known” (Eisner, 1965, p. 97). That being said, Eisner’s work provides the foundation on which to build a more specific approach to Murnau’s oeuvre. With this in mind, this project will re-examine the films of F.W. Murnau through the specific lens of gender and sexuality, with the intention of charting the progression – or regression, as I will argue – in representations of gender and sexuality from his beginnings in Weimar Germany to Hollywood.