Nosferatu 1922

The story

Wisborg, a German port, in 1838. Hutter, a young estate agent, is sent by his employer Knock to Transylvania to sell Count Orlok the house opposite his own. He leaves his wife Ellen with friends. At an inn the locals take fright at the Count's name, and he finds a book about vampires, which makes him laugh.

Orlok is tall, bald and rat-toothed. When Hutter cuts his thumb at supper, the Count goes for the blood. Next morning Hutter blames the marks on his neck on mosquitoes. Orlok signs for the house and notices a portrait of Ellen: she has, he remarks, a lovely neck. Hutter finds him by day asleep in a coffin, then watches him load a cart with coffins and leave.

The coffins go by sea. The crew dies, and the ship reaches Wisborg with no living soul on board and a cargo of rats. Plague follows. Ellen reads in Hutter's book that a vampire can be destroyed if a woman pure in heart gives him her blood freely and so makes him forget the dawn. She sends Hutter for the doctor and opens her window. Orlok stays too long. At sunrise he vanishes in a puff of smoke, and Ellen dies in her husband's arms.

Who made it

The film was the first and last production of Prana-Film, a Berlin company founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau. Grau, an artist and occultist, produced the film and designed its sets, costumes and publicity. The letter Orlok sends to Knock is a page of occult signs. Grau said the idea came from the war: in the winter of 1916 a Serbian farmer told him that his own father had been a vampire. The story is his alone, and may have been invented for the publicity.

The script was by Henrik Galeen, who had worked on The Golem. The director was F. W. Murnau, then 32, and the cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner. Gustav von Wangenheim and Greta Schröder play the Hutters, Alexander Granach plays Knock. Much of the film was shot outdoors, in the summer and autumn of 1921. Wisborg is chiefly Wismar and Lübeck, and Orlok's new house is Lübeck's old salt warehouses. Transylvania is Orava Castle and the Tatra mountains, in what is now Slovakia.

The Berlin premiere, on 4 March 1922, was a costume party in the Marmorsaal, the marble hall of the Zoological Garden: "The Festival of Nosferatu". Guests were asked to come in Biedermeier dress, the composer Hans Erdmann conducted his own score, and a ball followed. The reviews were mostly good and the business was not. By the summer Prana was bankrupt.

The lawsuit, and how the film survived

Nobody had asked Bram Stoker's estate. The new names are usually explained as a way round the copyright. If so it was a thin disguise: the original German titles name the novel Dracula as the source. Stoker's widow Florence learned of the film in April 1922, when someone posted her the programme. She joined the Society of Authors, which hired a Berlin lawyer.

A Berlin court found for her in 1924, the bankrupt company's receivers lost their appeal, and in July 1925 they were ordered to destroy the negative and every print. But prints had gone abroad: the film had played in Paris in November 1922. A copy surfaced in London within months of the ruling, and the film opened in New York in 1929. The British Film Institute sums up the destruction order in five words: "Luckily this was never achieved."

The restoration made in 2005 and 2006 by Luciano Berriatúa for the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung starts from a tinted French print of 1922 kept at the Cinémathèque française, and fills the gaps from other copies. Most of Erdmann's score was lost. What survived was a published suite of about forty minutes, the basis of Berndt Heller's reconstruction.

Sunlight and shadows

The film does more than rename Stoker's characters. It drops or plays down several, Van Helsing among them, adds the plague and gives the ending to a woman. It also changes how a vampire dies. In the novel, daylight does not kill the Count. Film historians generally credit Nosferatu with introducing the vampire destroyed by the sun's rays, on screen at least. In Murnau's copy of the script the pages for the last scene are his own rewriting, and the idea has been credited to him.

The camera does the haunting. The Count's coach comes for Hutter in jerky fast motion, shot a frame at a time, and the forest turns white: a strip of negative. Orlok passes through a closed door by double exposure. At the end he is only a shadow climbing the stairs, and the shadow of a hand closing on Ellen's heart. The prints were tinted, blue for night and pink for dawn, which the black-and-white copies that circulated for decades had lost.

The man called Fright

Schreck is German for fright, and it was the actor's real name. That, the make-up and his obscurity gave rise to tales that no such actor existed, that Murnau had played the part himself, or that the Count had. The film Shadow of the Vampire (2000) runs with the joke: John Malkovich's Murnau has hired a real vampire, played by Willem Dafoe.

The real Max Schreck was born in Berlin in 1879, acted in Max Reinhardt's company and at the Munich Kammerspiele, and appeared there in Bertolt Brecht's Drums in the Night. He died in Munich in 1936, the morning after a performance. The tales, as one critic puts it, are "unfortunately untrue".

Why it matters

It is where the screen vampire starts. The foundation that bears Murnau's name calls it the first feature-length vampire film, and the British Film Institute "the first serious Dracula adaptation". Death at sunrise, now a rule of the genre, starts here.

It took horror outdoors. Filming on location was rare in Germany at the time. Murnau's dread lives in real streets, a real castle and real mountains.

It made the vampire repulsive. Schreck's Orlok is, in the BFI's words, "the polar opposite of the suave Count later typified by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee".

It would not stay dead. Werner Herzog remade it in 1979 with Klaus Kinski, and Robert Eggers in 2024 with Bill Skarsgård as Orlok and Willem Dafoe back, this time as the professor. Since 1 January 2020 the film is out of copyright in Germany too, the country whose court once ordered it destroyed.