How “Nosferatu” reinvented the vampire

He is one of the most famous vampires in the world, but do you know his name? No, it's not Count Dracula from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. It's Count Orlok – the pale, bald, pointy-eared vampire from the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrorwhich was itself an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula.

Although Nosferatu embroiled in copyright disputes, it had a major influence on subsequent vampire stories. One of his most significant contributions to the horror genre is the idea that sunlight can kill vampires – a detail that doesn't appear at all in Dracula. Additionally, Count Orlok's haunting face has influenced the way other filmmakers have portrayed vampires on screen, including in a 2024 remake of the film.

Count Dracula versus Count Orlok

It's hard to know whether Nosferatu Director FW Murnau and producer Albin Grau believed they had violated copyright law with the production of their famous film. Murnau had previously given a high five The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde called The Janus headbut it does not appear that the 1920 film drew any legal action from the family of late author Robert Louis Stevenson.

“Back then, people didn’t take copyright very seriously,” says Rolf Giesen, author of The Nosferatu Story: The Groundbreaking Horror Film, Its Predecessors, and Its Enduring Legacy. The filmmakers were in contact with the publisher, who had published a German translation of Draculabut they didn't approach Bram Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker, to secure the film rights, Giesen says.

Instead, they made some changes. They changed the vampire villain from Count Dracula to Count Orlok, the main woman he hunts from Mina to Ellen, and swapped the vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing for the vampire skeptic Dr. Bulwer. As a title they chose “nosferatu,” a word that Western European writers, including Bram Stoker, had identified as an Eastern European word for “vampire,” but whose actual etymology is unclear.

In addition to the name changes Nosferatu features several storylines and character details that differ from the original Dracula. Instead of traveling to London like in the book, Count Orlok, played by actor Max Schreck, travels to a fictional town in Germany and brings with him a ship full of plague rats. While Dracula doesn't cast a shadow, Count Orlok has a menacing shadow that seems to have a power all its own. And even though Dracula is strongest at night, he can still run around during the day. For Count Orlok, sunlight is deadly.

The deaths of Dracula and Count Orlok reflect the differences between the characters. In the novel, Dracula's hunters kill him by piercing his heart and cutting off his head. In NosferatuEllen sacrifices herself to Count Orlok in front of a window at dawn. The vampire is too busy attacking her to notice that the sun is about to rise; and when it happens, it kills him.

Despite these differences, Florence Stoker wasn't happy when she got wind of it Nosferatu. With the help of the British Society of Authors, she sued Prana, the production company behind the film. A German court ruled in their favor and ordered that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed, but that didn't happen. Like a vampire rising from the dead, different versions of the film kept popping up in different places.

Copyright lawsuit couldn’t kill “Nosferatu.”

After Bram Stoker's death in 1912, Florence Stoker lived on royalties Dracula. One of the reasons she wanted to kill Nosferatu The reason for this was that she believed it would jeopardize her ability to sell the rights to her late husband's most successful novel. In 1924 she sold the rights to the stage adaptation to Hamilton Deane, who wrote a play based on the book. In 1930, Universal Pictures bought the film rights to the novel and the play.

But Nosferatu wouldn't die. In 1929 the New York Times gave a negative review of the film, noting that it was currently playing at the Film Guild Cinema in Greenwich Village. Around the same time that Universal secured the film rights, a new version of Nosferatu called The twelfth hour began screening in Europe. In this “happy ending” version, Ellen survives Nosferatu's attack and the film ends with a clip of her and her husband together.

In 1931, Universal released its version of Dracula with Béla Lugosi (who had previously appeared in Murnau's film). Jekyll and Hyde Imitation). Interestingly, Universal had also acquired a copy of it Nosferatu before filming Dracula. Christopher Frayling, author of Vampire Cinema: The First Hundred Yearssays Universal should have destroyed that copy. But in 1932 the company released a short film called Buuuuh! Includes clips from Nosferatu– Evidence that Universal had kept the footage, or at least some of it.

Nosferatu He gained a small following in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly among French surrealists, where one of the film's intertitles – “And as he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came towards him” – became a kind of “catchphrase” for the surrealist Movement, says Frayling. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the film was no longer embroiled in the ongoing legal dramas, it gained new fans at screenings in Europe and the United States.

Lyndon W. Joslin, author of Count Dracula goes to the cinema: Stoker's novel adaptedhe says he saw a screening of for the first time Nosferatu in the 1970s at Rice University in Houston. Patrick Stanbury, director at Photoplay Productions – which produced one of the current versions of the 1922 film – also saw a full version of Nosferatu in the 1970s at the National Film Theater in London (now known as BFI Southbank). Stanbury remembers previously seeing clips of Nosferatu on a TV show about horror films.

In 1979 Nosferatu came back in a big way. Director Werner Herzog released the film this year Nosferatu the vampirean adaptation of Dracula And Nosferatu. Also the TV miniseries Salem's propertybased on the book by Stephen King, introduced viewers to a vampire villain who looked a lot like Count Orlok.

Since then, images and homages to Count Orlok have appeared on the children's television show SpongeBob SquarePantsin the 2014 film What we do in the shadows and in the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampirein which Willem Dafoe plays a version of Graf Orlok actor Max Schreck, who turns out to be a real vampire. Dafoe appears in the 2024 remake from director Robert Eggers Nosferatuthis time as a Van Helsing-like character.

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