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ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL HORROR MOVIES EVER MADE—AND ALMOST LOST FOREVER.

The story behind Nosferatu is almost as frightening as the film itself, at least from the perspective of historic film preservation. Today an undisputed masterpiece of world cinema, F. W. Murnau’s most celebrated achievement was the first, though completely unauthorized, film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the specter of copyright infringement haunted it from the beginning, endangering its very survival. Most silent films have been lost through neglect (75 percent, according to the Library of Congress). In the case of Nosferatu, the film was the target of a campaign aimed at its deliberate destruction. Had Nosferatu not survived, the entire trajectory of fantastic filmmaking could well have been materially altered—and greatly impoverished.

Nosferatu is a prime example of German expressionism, a broad category covering a range of artistic experimentation arising from the cataclysm of World War I, and often employing grotesquely distorted characters and situations, allegory, and social criticism. In cinema, expressionism employed stylized theatrical settings and a dramatic use of light and shadow. The most influential expressionist film was another horror story: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which featured skewed sets and sharp shadows reflecting a preoccupation with nightmares and insanity. The story of a mesmeric carnival charlatan (Werner Krauss) who controls a murderous somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) has been interpreted as a parable of the Great War itself, in which untold numbers of soldiers were sent forth by madmen in positions of power to kill and be killed.

The guiding force behind Nosferatu was the artist and occultist Albin Grau, who in 1921 founded an independent production company, Prana Film, dedicated to supernatural themes. In the end, Nosferatu would be its only realized project. Grau hired Henrik Galeen, a screenwriter and actor known for his work on The Golem (1915), and the rising German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Grau took a hands-on approach to his vision, acting not only as producer but also as art director and costume designer; he additionally created all the publicity materials and posters.

Grau attributed the film’s genesis to vampire legends he heard recounted in Serbia during his service in World War I. Like Caligari, Nosferatu told a story by way of allegory; Grau regarded the war itself as a “cosmic vampire” that had drained the lifeblood of Europe. He also interpreted Dracula (whom he renamed Count Orlok) as a rat-like vector of plague—a highly effective and grimly appropriate choice. Overcrowded hospitals attending maimed soldiers had proved a major breeding ground for the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1920. Like the fantasy world of Nosferatu, Europe itself was gripped by a plague, which by some accounts took more lives than the war.

No one knows exactly where the word “Nosferatu” originated. Bram Stoker assumed it was the Romanian/Transylvanian word for “vampire” (based on a claim made by a Scottish folklorist), but it cannot in fact be definitively traced to any language. Nonetheless, it sounds authentically ancient and convincingly creepy, and it is now generally accepted as a synonym for “undead.”

Whereas Dracula is set contemporaneously in Stoker’s Victorian age, Nosferatu takes place much earlier in the nineteenth century, during the age of the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the full flowering of literary Romanticism. The characters are archetypal and simply delineated, like figures in a fairy tale. The actors all came from the German stage, which had already been advancing the acting and design conventions that greatly influenced expressionist film. The most memorable performance is that of Max Schreck as Orlok/Dracula, an indelibly disturbing amalgam of human and rat. Stoker’s Dracula was also repulsive—a fact usually overlooked by filmmakers—but Grau’s conception exceeded even Stoker’s vision.

While Nosferatu changed many aspects of Stoker’s book, it retained others. Dracula is an epistolary novel—an assemblage of letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, and other documents—and Nosferatu parallels the technique through an extensive use of calligraphic title cards that provide an omniscient narrative framework. A direct borrowing from Dracula is the use of a ship captain’s harrowing log, recounting the stowaway vampire’s commandeering of the doomed vessel.

One of the most famous and chilling images in film history occurs after the heroine Ellen (Greta Schroeder) learns that the vampire can be destroyed by a virtuous woman willingly inviting the monster to her bed and keeping him there until sunrise. Ellen makes the invitation by flinging open her window, and then, in what amounts to the most iconic pair of shots in German expressionist film, Count Orlok’s shadow is seen stealing up the stairs to her bedroom, followed by the dark shape of his claw-like hand stretching out to her door.

A gala Berlin premiere, including a costume ball, was held in early 1922. Grau’s publicity efforts were ambitious and extensive, reportedly costing more than the film’s entire production budget, and word of the film’s existence soon reached the widow of Bram Stoker, who had died ten years earlier. Florence Stoker struggled to maintain a stable income from Dracula’s royalties and was eager to exploit potential stage and film adaptations. Universal Pictures had considered a film version as early as 1915, but passed because of irregularities with the book’s American copyright registration. Nevertheless, in 1920 Universal made a press announcement that it was considering Dracula as the next vehicle for its up-and-coming “mystery man” director Tod Browning—who, of course, would ultimately helm the famous 1931 version.

When Nosferatu appeared, the filmmakers naively made no attempt to hide the fact that it was “freely adapted” from Dracula. Florence Stoker was outraged at the brazen infringement of her copyright and immediately enlisted the assistance of the British Society of Authors to help press a legal case. A three-year legal war ensued, which bankrupted Prana Film. The widow never collected money, but in 1925 she did win a ruling by the German courts, which officially declared Nosferatu an infringement of her copyright and ordered all prints of the film and its negative to be destroyed. But even without copyright protection, pirated copies of Nosferatu were soon surreptitiously escaping Germany, seeking refuge in foreign lands in much the same way that Dracula had fled his native Transylvania.

Nosferatu, however, was not finished disturbing Florence Stoker’s dreams.

Because Nosferatu never had a proper American distribution, when Murnau, by then acclaimed for the Ufa production of Faust, relocated to Hollywood, interviewers and publicists didn’t know of the earlier film’s existence and never asked him about it. Murnau died tragically in a car crash in 1931, having never given an interview or other account of the film’s production. Nosferatu essentially vanished until the 1960s, when prints began to resurface and the full importance of its achievement was recognized. It has since been regularly revived, often accompanied by highly creative new orchestral scores performed live. A definitive restoration utilizing the best available elements was finally completed in 2013.

In 1979 Werner Herzog’s remake/homage, Nosferatu the Vampyre, starred Klaus Kinski closely resembling Schreck but playing Dracula as a tragic, lonely figure. In E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a fictionalized account of the making of Murnau’s film, Willem Dafoe played Nosferatu/Schreck (the actor presented, cheekily enough, as an actual vampire), with John Malkovich as Murnau and Udo Kier as Albin Grau.

If you enjoyed Nosferatu (1922), you might also like:

THE HANDS OF ORLAC

PAN FILMS, 1924 (AUSTRIA/GERMANY)

A CLASSIC TALE OF IMPOSSIBLE LOVE HAD ITS OWN STAR-CROSSED JOURNEY TO THE SCREEN.

Broken bodies and ruined faces were common sights on the streets of America in the 1920s, as untold numbers of maimed and disabled World War I veterans tried, often unsuccessfully, to merge back into society. Broken bodies and ruined faces were also a curiously persistent feature of Hollywood movies in the Jazz Age, particularly those starring the protean Lon Chaney—“The Man of a Thousand Faces”—and directed by Tod Browning. Chaney never actually played a wounded soldier, but the public’s need to confront the veterans’ plight, however indirectly, may go far to explain the popularity of Chaney’s trademark portrayals of disfigurement and disability.

In 1923, Universal Pictures released its sumptuous production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, featuring Chaney as the deformed Parisian bell ringer, Quasimodo. The actor’s established facility with greasepaint, putty, and prosthetics was given its biggest challenge to date, and he rose to the task by creating one of the most iconic characterizations of the silent era. During a trip to Paris, Universal’s president, Carl Laemmle, had made the acquaintance of the French mystery writer Gaston Leroux, who gave him a copy of his 1910 novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. Immediately intrigued, Laemmle heeded his showman’s instincts and purchased the screen rights for Chaney.

Leroux’s story was, at its center, a modernized version of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast. The title character is Erik, whose face is hideously deformed since birth. A musical genius in his own right, the “Opera Ghost” haunts the cellars and boxes of the Paris Opera and becomes romantically obsessed with a rising young singer, Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin in the film). When the opera management fails to promote Christine as he demands, Erik drops the opera house’s massive crystal chandelier on an unsuspecting audience. Amid the ensuing horror and confusion, Erik abducts Christine to his subterranean lair. Provoked by the face covering he wears, she rips away the mask, revealing the living death’s head he has kept hidden from the world. The rest of the story involves the efforts of Christine’s real-world lover, Raoul de Chagny (played by Norman Kerry), to rescue her, Christine’s pity for her kidnapper, his threat to dynamite the opera house, and the Phantom’s eventual death from the heartbreak of unrequited love.

Chaney’s makeup, withheld from the public in all advance publicity, re-created the look of a skull by enlarging the actor’s nostrils with dark paint and pulling up the tip of his nose with small hooks and fine wires hidden by makeup and putty. There are few cinema faces more indelible and iconic than Chaney’s Phantom, a single photo of which still has the power to immediately conjure the world of silent film.

To re-create the interior of the Paris Opera, Universal erected a new, steel-reinforced, state-of-the-art building—Stage 28—that could support the weight of massive sets and hundreds of extras. These extras played the audience members who witness the crashing of a full-scale crystal chandelier onto the stalls, and the revelers at a lavish masked ball that takes place on an exact replica of the Paris Opera’s grand staircase. Stage 28 achieved the distinction of being the world’s oldest working soundstage before its demolition in 2014, and the venerable opera boxes appeared in many other Universal films over the decades, the last being The Sting in 1973. The preserved sets were afterward occasionally undraped for photo shoots and documentaries.

The film had a Hollywood preview in January 1925 and was poorly received. The production had been compromised by director Rupert Julian, who clashed repeatedly with the cast, especially Chaney, who ultimately directed himself in most scenes. To protect its investment, the studio took the drastic step of reshooting the majority of the footage, adding subplots and comic relief that radically changed the film. In the process, Julian quit and was replaced by Edward Sedgwick. One of Sedgwick’s major contributions was replacing Erik’s mawkish, lovesick demise with an exciting chase as a mob storms the Phantom’s lair and then drowns him in the Seine. Nonetheless, an April preview in San Francisco proved a complete disaster; the audience actually jeered and booed. Film editor Maurice Pivar and Universal’s prolific (and at one point highest-paid) director Lois Weber were given the task of creating a third and final edit of the film. Weber had Carl Laemmle’s complete trust, and her extensive and trailblazing work as an actress, screenwriter, producer, and director made her unusually qualified to impose a workable dramatic shape on the troubled production.

When the picture finally premiered in September 1925, with a general release in November, it clicked with audiences and reviewers alike. Its worldwide gross was $2 million, less than the $3.5 million earned by The Hunchback of Notre Dame but still enough to make it a major success. Chaney’s performance was widely praised, but Philbin’s doll-like demeanor failed to endear the actress to critics. Universal released a reworked, part-talking version in 1929, with music and new dialogue sequences featuring Philbin and Kerry.

Notably, later screen versions of The Phantom of the Opera didn’t even try to replicate Chaney’s singular makeup achievement, although the 1957 Universal biopic Man of a Thousand Faces