Nosferatu (1922)
An estate agent sends a clerk to a remote Carpathian castle to close a house sale, and the buyer follows him home by ship — rats in the hold, crew dead at the wheel, plague coming ashore with the coffins. An unlicensed Dracula adaptation that had to survive a court order to burn every print.
Stoker’s widow won her lawsuit and the negatives were ordered destroyed. Enough smuggled prints survived to make Count Orlok the face of screen horror.
Background
Nosferatu was the only production of Prana Film, a company formed by Albin Grau, who wanted to make a film about the supernatural. It borrowed Bram Stoker’s Dracula without paying for it, renaming the characters. Stoker’s widow Florence sued, and a German court ordered all copies destroyed; enough prints survived abroad to keep the film alive. Murnau shot on location in Slovakia’s Carpathian mountains and in the Baltic towns of Wismar and Lübeck.
What to watch for
Max Schreck’s Count Orlok is a very different vampire from later screen versions: rat-like, gaunt, with long fingers and pointed ears, and no charm at all. Watch for the shadow climbing the staircase and for the moment the sunrise defeats him. The idea that sunlight destroys a vampire is widely credited to this film, not to Stoker. The subtitle “A Symphony of Horror” fits its structure of slowly building dread. It was remade by Werner Herzog in 1979 and again by Robert Eggers in 2024.
