Nosferatu is one of the earliest horror films ever made, and is often credited as being the movie that truly started the genre. Even though the film was released in 1922, the movie actually holds up pretty well on terms of creepiness. Most of this is due to the absolutely chilling design of the vampire Count Orlok himself, cause lets be real here: no matter what time period the movie’s made in, this can give anyone nightmares.
The movie, being made almost a century ago, is silent, and all the dialogue is told through title cards. Most copies you can find now have a piano/orchestra accompaniment that plays along with the movie, as back in 1922 when you’d watch this film in a theater, there would be live musicians accompanying the film.
Today, the movie is definitely pretty cheesy, but it’s still a pretty unsettling experience because of the horror elements. Although it’s one of the earliest horror movies ever made, the way the directors and cinematographers captured the terror of Nosferatu is actually pretty modern. Their understanding of how to scare an audience was quite ahead of its time- probably because this movie pretty much wrote the rulebook on how to scare an audience. If you’d like to watch the whole film, you can easily find full copies of it on YouTube.
Many of you might be thinking right now that for some reason, you recognize Count Orlok… even though you’ve never seen the film. Well, over the past century, this character has had a huge impact on the world’s pop culture, even infiltrating cartoons like Spongebob Squarepants.
Although for a majority of my life, this was my only knowledge of Nosferatu, I’ve recently delved into the history of this character and this film, and I’ve discovered that the story of Nosferatu is actually a really interesting one. So, I’d like to diverge a little bit from my usual format this week, and talk about how Nosferatu is the most successful illegal movie ever made.
The Beginning (which immediately led to the end)
In Germany, 1921, two men named Albin Grau and Enrico Dieckmann founded a silent film production company called Prana Film. The intent of this production company was to produce and release supernatural horror films, and Grau had decided that their first endeavor should be a vampire movie based off of Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula.
They hired experienced screenwriter Henrik Galeen to write a script, and within months a full script was prepared. All seemed to be going well for Nosferatu and the up and coming horror studio, except for one problem: they never got the rights to Dracula.
Whether the studio was just ignorant to copyright laws or whether they were purposely trying to find a loophole in the law is still unclear- however, there’s a lot of indications that they were simply trying to work their way around getting sued.
For example, the story of Nosferatu is pretty much identical to that of Dracula, but there’s a few differences, mostly in the characters names. Count Dracula, for example, is renamed to Count Orlok, and instead of referring to him as a vampire, they use the Hungarian-Romanian term “nosferatu”. The famous Van Helsing character from the original novel is taken out from the script completely, and a plot point involving a plague being brought to the town of Wilsburg by Orlok is added. Other than that though, Nosferatu and Dracula are almost identical.
The studio filmed the movie fairly quickly, lead by director F.W. Murnau and cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner. Once the film was completed, it premiered on March 4th, 1922.
The public fell in love with Nosferatu. Newspapers reported consistently on the film and its now famous director, Murnau. While everything seemed to be going great for Prana Film and Nosferatu, Florence Stoker, widow of Bram Stoker, was not happy.
Stoker v Prana Film
After Bram Stoker had passed, Florence acted as his literary executor, meaning that if anyone wanted to use his work in any way, they would have to get her permission first. As mentioned before, Prana Film never did this.
In 1922, Stoker received an anonymous letter that provided a program detailing the premiere event for Nosferatu, in which it was stated that the film was “freely adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula“. Because of this quote, the case against Prana Film was over before it even began.
Stoker, being in some serious financial trouble at the time, decided to file a lawsuit against Prana Film, and easily won. The court ruled that every copy of Nosferatu be burned, declaring that it was now an illegal film. Sadly for Prana Film, this caused them to declare bankruptcy, and the company ended up disappearing altogether shortly after.
Nosferatu, their first film, was also their last.
Nosferatu Lives On
Today, you can still watch Nosferatu. In fact, you can even buy the film on Blu-Ray. How is this even possible if all the copies were burnt in 1925?
Well, turns out, it’s really hard to destroy every single copy of a film after it’s already been released. Illegal copies of the movie were sold left and right, and the film began to amass a “cult-status”, also making this movie the first ever cult classic.
By the late 1920s, Nosferatu began playing in American theaters, all due to bootlegged copies being spread around illegally.
Because fans of the film over a century ago preserved this horror masterpiece, we still are able to watch this movie today. This is honestly a miracle. A majority of films from that time period are lost forever, since they were only ever put on film reels and nobody thought about preserving them up until the 40s.
Nosferatu is a horror classic, a blueprint for all other horror directors who followed. If Nosferatu hadn’t survived, who knows where horror as a genre would be today? And more importantly… who knows if we would still have that joke in Spongebob?
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