Nosferatu (1922) and the Birth of Vampire Cinema

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens — usually known just as Nosferatu — was released by Prana-Film in Germany on March 4, 1922. The picture is foundational to vampire cinema, to horror cinema, and to film history more broadly. It nearly didn't survive the year of its release: Bram Stoker's widow successfully sued for copyright infringement, won the case, and ordered all prints destroyed. A handful survived in private collections. The film's now in the public domain through age, and its influence on every subsequent vampire production has been continuous and direct.

The unauthorized adaptation

Director F.W. Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen adapted Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897) without paying for the rights. They changed character names — Count Dracula became Count Orlok, Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter, Mina became Ellen — and relocated the action from London to the fictional German town of Wisborg. They thought the changes would be sufficient to avoid copyright issues.

They were wrong. Florence Stoker, Bram's widow and the holder of his copyright, sued Prana-Film in 1925. The German court ruled in her favor and ordered all prints and negatives destroyed. Prana-Film was bankrupted by the lawsuit. Florence Stoker spent the next decade pursuing copies of the film around the world; she eventually succeeded in destroying most of them. Approximately five prints survived in private collections, scattered across Europe. The film survives today only because of those private hold-outs.

What makes the film

Murnau's vampire — played by Max Schreck in extraordinary makeup — broke completely with the gothic-aristocrat tradition Stoker had established. Schreck's Count Orlok is a corpse-like figure: bald, pointed ears, enormous extended teeth (not just fangs), elongated bony fingers ending in claws, hollowed cheekbones. The makeup design and Schreck's spectral physical performance created a vampire who looked genuinely inhuman — not a seductive aristocrat in disguise but an actual reanimated dead thing.

The visual design defined screen vampire imagery for a century. Subsequent vampire performers — Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski (who played the role in Werner Herzog's 1979 remake), Gary Oldman — all reckoned with the Nosferatu visual template even when departing from it. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series adopted Schreck's design wholesale for its "original" vampires. Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1975) returned to the Nosferatu vampire-as-corpse imagery directly. The visual influence has been continuous.

The cinematic technique

Beyond the design, Nosferatu is technically extraordinary for its era. Murnau used location shooting (the picture was filmed in real Carpathian villages and Slovak castles) at a time when most German films were studio-bound. He pioneered visual tricks — the famous "negative film" sequence where Orlok's coach travels through a black-and-white-inverted forest landscape — that genuinely terrified contemporary audiences. The shadow sequences (Orlok's shadow ascending a staircase while approaching Ellen's bedroom) are among silent cinema's most-quoted images.

The Murnau context

F.W. Murnau (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau) was 33 years old when he made Nosferatu and had directed nine prior features. He would go on to direct several of silent cinema's masterpieces — The Last Laugh (1924), Faust (1926), and the American-produced Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, often cited as the finest silent film ever made). Murnau died in a 1931 car accident at age 42; his career was just entering its peak when it was cut off.

The Werner Herzog remake

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) was the first major attempt to remake the picture for a sound-era audience. Herzog cast Klaus Kinski as Orlok and built the production around the public-domain status of the original — by 1979 the Stoker copyright had also expired, making a faithful Dracula adaptation possible without the legal-modification dance Murnau had attempted. Herzog's version is widely regarded as the best vampire feature of the 1970s.

Robert Eggers's 2024 remake

Robert Eggers's Nosferatu (2024) — starring Bill Skarsgård as Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen, and Willem Dafoe as Professor von Franz — returned to Murnau's German Expressionist visual vocabulary for a contemporary remake. The picture grossed over $180 million globally and renewed mainstream interest in the 1922 original.

Public-domain status

The 1922 Nosferatu is now firmly in the public domain through age — the copyright (whatever its complicated history) has expired in every jurisdiction. The film is freely available in multiple restored editions, including a stunning 2K restoration from the F.W. Murnau Foundation that's now widely circulated.

Where to start

Start with the 2007 F.W. Murnau Foundation restoration if you can find it — it's the cleanest available print and includes the proper German intertitles. The film runs about 94 minutes. Despite being 100+ years old, it remains genuinely unsettling, particularly in the Orlok arrival sequences and the climactic Ellen confrontation. Nosferatu is foundational text; every serious vampire film since 1922 exists in relation to it.