This article contains some spoilers for "Nosferatu."

For the most part, a trend that emerges during any particular year of cinema doesn't have anything genuinely competitive about it. Sure, there may be the "Dante's Peak" and "Volcano," "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" years, where highly similar projects are developed to compete with each other, but most trends that occur are less about an intentional duel and are more an indication of where the culture's head is at. Remember 2017, when a John Denver song turned up in no less than five separate movies? While there's no one catch-all explanation for such a thing happening, it's intriguing and potentially illuminating to identify the trend and see what, if anything, it speaks to in the contemporary real world.

When identifying a trend in art, especially cinema, it's important to remember that films are made on a time delay — the movies of 2024 were shot, for the most part,...