About Nosferatu (1922)
The story behind the film
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was made in Germany in 1921 and released in 1922 by Prana Film, a short-lived studio co-founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and the occult-minded artist Albin Grau. Director F. W. Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen based it, without permission, on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. Names were changed — Count Dracula became Count Orlok, Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter — and the story moved to the fictional German port of Wisborg in 1838, but the debt to Stoker was obvious. Stoker's widow, Florence, sued, and a German court ordered every copy destroyed. Prints had already travelled abroad, though, and enough survived for the film to be reassembled and restored over the following decades.
Unlike most German productions of the period, Nosferatu went outdoors. Murnau shot real streets, harbours and warehouses in Wismar and Lübeck, and filmed the "Transylvanian" scenes in northern Slovakia, including Orava Castle. That mix of real locations and nightmarish staging is a big part of why the film still feels so strange: the horror happens in places that look like they could exist.
Cast & crew
- Directed by F. W. Murnau; screenplay by Henrik Galeen
- Max Schreck as Count Orlok
- Gustav von Wangenheim as Thomas Hutter, the young estate agent
- Greta Schröder as Ellen, Hutter's wife
- Alexander Granach as Knock, Hutter's sinister employer
- Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner; production design by Albin Grau, who was also one of Prana Film's founders
Why it's worth watching
Max Schreck's Orlok is nothing like the suave vampire later popularised on stage and screen. He is rat-like, bald and spindly, with long claws and front fangs, and he brings plague with him rather than romance. Images from this film — the shadow of Orlok's hand climbing a staircase, the vampire rising stiffly from his coffin on the ship, the procession of coffins through the town — have been copied and quoted for a century. It is also a surprisingly quick watch: the story moves from Hutter's journey to the castle, to the doomed voyage of the ship, to the plague in Wisborg with very little padding.
Watch it with the lights low. The film works by suggestion: long silences, a creeping figure in a doorway, a ship drifting into harbour with no living crew. Modern horror's use of shadows and slow reveals owes a lot to it.
Fun facts
- Because the court ordered the film destroyed, Nosferatu is one of the most famous examples of a movie that survived only because copies had already been distributed.
- The film has been remade and paid homage to many times, including Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), the fictionalised making-of film Shadow of the Vampire (2000), and Robert Eggers' Nosferatu (2024).
- Orlok is never called Dracula in the German original, but the original intertitles credited Stoker's novel as the source.
Public-domain status
Nosferatu was published in 1922, so its US copyright term has long expired, and it is in the public domain in the United States. Some modern restorations add new translated intertitles or new music, which can be protected separately; see "Rights & source" below for notes about the exact copy we broadcast.