Special Features



Nosferatu: 100 Years of Fear



By AL J. Vermette



It was and still is the most influential horror/vampire movie ever created coming from the silent era of movie-making. Released in its homeland of Germany on March 4, 1922 one hundred years ago, its lasting mark upon film history lingers on in every vampire story since its release a century ago. This was the movie that first used sunlight as a means of destroying a vampire, a trait that would follow nearly every vampire movie or TV series ever since. This movie was Nosferatu, the masterpiece that first introduced Dracula, the undead vampire lord, to the world of cinema.


Directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau or better known professionally as F.W. Murnau, was the very first filmmaker to adapt the Bram Stoker novel Dracula to film. Although the cast and location of the book were changed to accommodate its German audience, the overall plot is very much that of the Stoker novel released in 1897. The film produced by Prana Films was their one and only production as the company suffered money issues and soon shut its doors not long after the release of the movie.


Much of their money woes were caused by the widow of Bram Stoker who sued the film studio for not getting her permission to use her late husband’s novel as their source, but since Prana was already going under, she got the court to order all copies of the movie destroyed. Lucky for all horror fans and film historians, a few copies of the movie slipped through the cracks and survived. It’s from these few survived copies that all renditions of Nosferatu derived from. All 35 mm film prints, VHS, and DVD are all the film children of these last remaining film prints that survived this inquisition. ​


Nosferatu was produced at the height of what was called the German Expressionist movement in art and film. The art in filmmaking was expressed with the use of strange camera angles, over articulated acting, and the use of shadows and light. Overexpression was the normal way silent actors got their point across in films with no speaking dialogue. However, this was less true for the film's titular character Count Orlok who deliberately moved slowly and precisely adding to his overall creepiness. Just by the way the actor carried himself, held his arms, and never once blinked gave the creature an unnatural forbidding presence. Even when the Jonathan Harker German stand-in character peeks into Orlok’s wooden coffin upon discovering it the creature is sleeping with his eyes wide open.


The vampire of the movie….its stand-in for Dracula, Count Orlok was played by German actor Max Schreck. Born in 1879, the only actors who could have read the Dracula novel upon its release before playing the vampire were a stage and early film star. His actual sir name of Schreck means terror in German nearly ordaining him as an actor who would go on to star in the most influential horror film of all time. The actor was so scary in his vampire role that stories started to rotate that Schreck was actually a real creature of the night. This peculiar idea was the base for the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire, the making of Nosferatu in which implied that the actor was a real vampire, playing an actor playing a vampire.



In the hundred years since its release, Nosferatu paved the way for all vampire movies that followed. The fact that sunlight will kill the creature came directly from Nosferatu and has remained a staple of vampire lore ever since. Prior to the release of Nosferatu in 1922, vampires as well as Dracula himself, in the novel could walk freely in the daylight. Nosferatu changed all that and to the point that all Dracula movies since starting with House of Frankenstein had the vampire destroyed by the rising sun. In fact, nearly every vampire movie, TV shows, comic book, video game, and novel with few exceptions has the creatures meet their demise by sunlight.


Strangely enough, this death by sunlight was only executed for Count Orlok because the filmmakers of Nosferatu didn’t have the means of doing any elaborate special effects. Stakes through the heart or decapitation would have been costly upon the fact that actions such as that would not have gone over well in a 1920’s world. The vampire’s death by fading away with the rays of the rising daybreak was simple, trouble-free, and most of all acceptable for the time. Even in the 1931 Universal classic with Bella Lugosi, when Dracula meets his end, he is staked off-screen to appease moviegoers of the time. Blood and vampire staking wouldn’t become a thing until the Christopher Lee era of the 60’s and 70’s.


Prana, the film studio behind the making of Nosferatu was founded in 1921 and had the intent to follow Nosferatu with other supernatural movies before Universal and Hammer Films would become the horror icons they are today. Prana was to be that kind of studio and may have followed up Nosferatu with their own adaptation of perhaps Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Phantom of the Opera among other literary properties. However, it was not meant to be and those novel adaptations were covered later by Universal.


The very look of the vampire himself gave the film a creepy feel. His very appearance was as frightening then as it is today. His bald head, pointed ears, rat-like fangs in the front of his mouth, and his long claw-like fingernails gave the creature a scary inhuman façade unlike anything ever seen in early cinema. It must have been truly terrifying to see this creature walk on screen for the first time. We today have seen this monster's image in one place or another even if you have never seen the movie. We know what this creature looks like but to the moviegoers of 1922, his forbidding presence must have been truly chilling. Despite the creatures, menacing facial features, in truth, only the actor’s ears and teeth were enhanced with his signature rat teeth and pointed ears. When casting Max Schreck for the role of the vampire, the film’s director F.W. Murnau thought that the actor was a frightening and unattractive man…ideal for someone to play the first incarnation of Dracula on screen.


A misconception over the years forced a Dracula vs Nosferatu kind of rumor when it was thought that the filmmakers went behind the widow of Bram Stoker’s back to make the movie without her permission. That all the main characters as well as the vampire himself had their names changed to hide the fact that they were doing Dracula on the sly. However, this is untrue because right at the beginning of the title cards it reads (Based on Dracula by Bram Stoker) giving full credit to the author. What they didn’t do was get the okay from Stoker's wife nor pay her for the use of her late husband’s novel. The fact that the names were all changed and the film's location in Germany was not to hide that they were making Dracula, but to give the characters and setting more of a German feel since, unlike the novel that was written for a British audience. The filmmakers never meant to deceive anyone and hide the fact that they were doing Dracula under scandalous circumstances. They just wanted to make it more German for their viewers….who were German. ​



Even after 100 years, the long-lasting effects of Nosferatu can be seen in many horror and vampire movies today. The very look of Count Orlok was the direct influence for the character of Mr. Barlow in the 1979 TV adaptation of Salem’s Lot. Here the vampire sported two long fangs in the front of the creature’s mouth, a bald head, and long-clawed fingernails. The similarity was uncanny and extremely obvious as both a tribute to the monster that came before and a loving gesture for the first-ever on-screen vampire.


In the TV series Buffy, The Vampire Slayer’s first season, the character of The Master was also heavily influenced by the look of Count Orlok and even in the short-lived series Kindred The Embraced, an entire vampire group was called the Nosferatu clan.


In 1979, film director Werner Herzog would helm a remake of the 1922 silent classic called Nosferatu The Vampyre. This time the actor who would take on the vampire role and don the fangs and claws was Klaus Kinki. At this point in time, the novel Dracula was now in the public domain plus Florence Stoker was long gone, so in the remake, Count Orlok was now Count Dracula since no one could now make an issue. Like its predecessor, the 1979 remake is bathed in an eerie ambiance that sets the tone for the whole movie. Klaus Kinki’s vampire was forbidding as was Max Schreck’s portrayal, only this time the movie was shot in full color and of course, there was sound.


In 2000, as was mentioned before, the movie Shadow of the Vampire was part drama part documentary about the making of the 1922 classic. The film starred William Defoe in the role of Count Orlok a real vampire playing a human actor playing a vampire. Defoe looks great in the makeup as he brings actor Max Schreck to life making the actor really seem like he was in fact a living vampire.


The original music composed for Nosferatu was written by Hans Erdmann for the movie’s opening premiere in Berlin. Remember this was early cinema when all music was performed live by an orchestra while the movie played on screen. How exciting that must have been to experience live… and yet lost once sound was introduced to films. But in a pre-sound movie world… live music performed was that gift to the new media of film. The live movie score crafted by Hans Erdmann sadly was lost once the film company who produced Nosferatu closed their doors and the whole Stoker widow debacle opened a can of worms. With the advent of sound where a musical score could now be incorporated into the movie itself, the need for live orchestras was no longer needed. But since the originally written sore was lost, no one knew what music should have accompanied the film once it had been copied and re-released.



Remember only a few copies of Nosferatu survived widow Stoker’s wrath so new music had to be written for the movie. Upon new 35 mm film releases, new music was added by composers who tried to interpret what Hans Erdmann was going for when he first wrote the original score. Once the movie was released to home media such as VHS, DVD, and streaming services over the last few years, a wide array of musical scores were added to the movie. Everything from classical music, to heavy metal, pop, and beyond had been added to copies of Nosferatu over the years. Hell, even YouTube has like five musical variations of the same movie available for streaming on its service.


Although Nosferatu uses the novel Dracula as its backbone of the source material, it’s very much its own thing. Along with the cast of characters' names being turned more German friendly for its times, but its setting such as moving the action to Germany from its British novel counterpart. Even the year in which the story takes place was changed from 1897 to 1838 to coincide with a very much real plague that held Europe by siege during that era. However, the vampire himself still hails from Transylvania Romania as did Dracula. Unlike his novel counterpart, Count Orlok does not create other vampires like Dracula’s brides or other victims suggesting that maybe he is one of a kind. Perhaps he was a victim of a curse now plagued to walk the earth alone as an undead creature without love, friends, or company, with only his lust for human blood as his only companion.


Novel Dracula could walk freely into the day's light with no fear of death and is only dispatched at the end of the novel by a Bowie knife (not a stake!) where Count Orlok vaporizes upon first contact with the morning rays. This death by sunlight would go on to become vampire lore forever linking the creature with the sun as a sort of yin yang dark comparison. In fact, this death by daylight is so synonymous now with vampires that we couldn’t even dream of a vampire story without it for nearly every vampire novel, movie, or TV uses this weakness as its driving force to keep vampires at bay.


Nosferatu stepped off the screen and into the real world upon the stage with a musical called Nosferatu The Vampire. Created and produced by Bernard J. Taylor, the production made its premiere in September 1995 at the Madison Theater in Peoria Illinois. Just in time for Halloween in 2012, a BBC radio broadcast performed Nosferatu on the air and Nosferatu even shows up in the children’s show Sponge Bob Square Pants in an episode called Graveyard Shift. Also, the 90’s teen horror show Are You Afraid of The Dark had an episode where the title vampire can leave the film and enter our world in an episode called The Tale of The Midnight Madness. In 2004, there was even an opera that opened under the title of Nosferatu as well. The American rock band Blue Oyster cult released their album Spectres with a song named Nosferatu that sat in good company with this second single release Godzilla.


The impact that this movie left us over the last 100 years is still going on and I would think in 100 years from now, horror film fans will still be watching this movie and emulation this creature's look, mannerisms, and overall scariness for years perhaps centuries from now. Happy 100th Anniversary to the movie Nosferatu, the granddaddy of all vampire movies. ​