Nosferatu (1922)

The setup

In the German port town of Wisborg, a junior property agent is sent across the mountains to complete a sale with a reclusive nobleman who wants a house near his own. The journey into the Carpathians is the start of something that will follow him home. The film is silent, told in intertitles, gesture, painted light and real landscape, and it depends on the viewer's willingness to watch a shadow as closely as a face.

Context

Nosferatu was the only production of Prana Film, a small Berlin company founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and the artist Albin Grau, who had a deep interest in the occult. Grau is credited with the film's production design, costumes and makeup, and he also created its posters and publicity. F. W. Murnau directed from a screenplay by Henrik Galeen, who adapted Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897) without obtaining the rights. The names were changed, the setting was moved from England to a German port, and the vampire became Count Orlok.

That shortcut had consequences. Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker's widow, pursued the producers for copyright infringement, and Prana went bankrupt soon after the film opened. In July 1925 a German court ordered the negative and all prints destroyed. Copies had already traveled abroad, and enough of them survived for the film to be pieced back together over the following decades. A work that a court wanted erased is now one of the most studied titles of the silent era.

Why it matters

Nosferatu is the earliest surviving feature-length vampire film that anyone still watches for its own sake, and it fixed an image that cinema has been answering ever since. Its Count Orlok is not a seducer in evening dress. He is bald, stooped, long-fingered and rodent-toothed, a visitor who brings plague as much as menace. When later filmmakers gave their vampires charm, they were choosing against this design, and when they went back to something feral, they were returning to it.

It is also a landmark in how horror is staged. Much of the fear comes from composition: a figure rising stiffly from a coffin, a silhouette climbing a stair, a long shadow reaching for a door. The film shows that dread can be built from placement, editing rhythm and the audience's imagination, a lesson that sound-era directors kept relearning. For the wider story of how the genre started, see the timeline of early horror cinema.

What to look for

• The shadow of Orlok on a staircase, which arrives before the figure does and is among the most reproduced images in film history.
• Max Schreck's performance, built on slow, deliberate movement and a stare that rarely blinks.
• The use of real locations, including Baltic port towns and Slovak castles and mountains, set against sets built in a Berlin studio.
• Albin Grau's design work, including an occult-looking contract written in an invented script.
• The daylight rule: the film is credited with being the first to have a vampire destroyed by daylight.
• A story told through intertitles, mime and cutting, with a score that has been reconstructed or replaced many times.

Development: a vampire novel without permission

Albin Grau was an artist and occultist as well as a producer, and he is usually described as the driving creative force behind the project. With Dieckmann he set up Prana Film in 1921, reportedly taking the company's name from a Theosophical journal. Nosferatu was meant to be the first of many pictures. It turned out to be the only one.

Henrik Galeen wrote the script. He kept the shape of Stoker's story but trimmed the cast, dropped many subplots and shifted the action to the fictional German town of Wisborg in the year 1838. He also added a plague carried by rats, which turns the story from the invasion of one household into the sickening of a whole community. Murnau, according to Wikipedia, rewrote a dozen pages of the script, including the ending. The title came from a word Stoker had used in his novel under the mistaken belief that it was an Eastern European term for vampire.

Production: Baltic towns, Slovak castles and a Berlin studio

Filming began in July 1921. Wismar, on the Baltic coast, supplied the look of Wisborg, and its marketplace and church tower appear in the opening views of the town. Other German locations, including Lübeck and Rostock, added harbor and street scenes. For the Carpathian chapters the company traveled to northern Slovakia, working around the mountains of the High Tatras and the castle at Orava. Interiors, including Orlok's rooms, were built at the JOFA studio in Berlin-Johannisthal.

The cinematographer was Fritz Arno Wagner, who worked with a single camera. That detail matters for the film's history, because a single camera means a single original negative, and when a court later ordered that negative destroyed there was no duplicate camera original to fall back on. Max Schreck was not the first choice for Orlok: according to one account, the actor Conrad Veidt was approached but declined, for scheduling reasons. The cast also included Gustav von Wangenheim as the agent Hutter, Greta Schröder as his wife Ellen, and Alexander Granach as his unsettling employer Knock.

The lawsuit and the film's near disappearance

The film had its first public screenings in 1922. A Dutch run in February is reported, and a society premiere took place in Berlin on March 4, 1922, at the Marble Hall of the Zoological Garden. Florence Stoker, who ran the author's estate, learned of the film that spring, according to accounts of the case, and her lawyers moved against Prana. The company was by then in financial collapse and could not pay damages.

The case dragged on through hearings and an appeal. In July 1925 the court ruled that every print and the negative must be destroyed. The order was never carried out in full, because prints had circulated outside Germany. A planned London showing in 1925 was halted after Stoker's objection. The film reached the United States in 1929, where it played to mostly unfavorable notices. Universal's Dracula (1931) was an authorized adaptation of the novel.

Why the vampire looks the way he does

The design of Orlok was not a happy accident. Grau shaped the makeup and the look of the character, and the result draws on rats, corpses and medieval woodcuts of pestilence more than on the romantic nobleman of Victorian fiction. The pointed upper teeth sit at the front of the mouth, like those of a rodent, and the hands end in long nails. The posture is rigid and vertical, so that when Orlok rises from his coffin it looks as if something is being lifted by a string.

Schreck's acting leans into that stiffness. He was, by most accounts, a quiet and private stage actor, and the film does little to give him a human face. That reticence is why the character still works: he is less a person than a force that moves through the story. The famous Hollywood vampires who came later would talk, flirt and bargain. This one just arrives.

Reading the film: plague, nature and anxiety

Critics have found a lot to read in Nosferatu. A common interpretation sees the story as a plague narrative made by people who had just lived through a world war and a flu pandemic. Orlok comes by ship with a cargo of rats, and the town's cheerful routines give way to coffins in the street. Another line of criticism stresses how closely the film ties the count to the natural world of vermin and contagion, so that the horror feels biological as much as supernatural.

A darker strand of commentary points to the physical caricature of Orlok and the figure of the grasping property dealer Knock, and has argued that they echo antisemitic imagery of the period. Other scholars dispute that conclusion, pointing to Murnau's own record of working with Jewish colleagues and to the possibility that the design came from folklore and from rats rather than from ethnic stereotype. The debate has not been settled, and it is a fair reminder that a classic can carry the biases of the world that produced it.

Is it really Expressionist?

Nosferatu is routinely grouped with German Expressionism, the movement that produced The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and used painted sets, extreme angles and heightened acting to show states of mind. By comparison Murnau's film is more naturalistic. Much of it was shot outdoors, among real fields, streets and ruins, and its shadows and sudden movements work inside a world that otherwise looks like the physical one.

That mixture is part of its strangeness. The film's most unnatural moments, such as Orlok rising stiffly from his coffin, feel eerier because the surroundings are believable. Some critics prefer the label Romantic or Gothic for this reason, while others say Expressionism was always a broad habit of mind rather than a fixed style. Either way, the film's use of light and shape to express fear is the reason it is taught in film schools and why its images are known to people who have never seen it.

Restoration, music and the many versions

No single complete original print has come down to us, which means every modern version is an assembly. Over the years the film circulated in sped-up, scratched bootleg dubs; in an unauthorized 1930 re-edit called Die zwölfte Stunde; and in translated prints whose intertitles had been copied from language to language. A German print distributed by Atlas Film in 1965 helped carry the film into the home-video era, and the Museum of Modern Art completed a restoration in 1981 that drew in part on a French print. A later restoration, finished around 2005 and 2006, was released on DVD and Blu-ray.

The film's music is a story of its own. Hans Erdmann wrote the original score for the Berlin premiere, but most of it is lost. Gillian Anderson and James Kessler worked on a reconstruction in the 1990s, and composer Berndt Heller prepared a version used in the restored edition. Many new scores have been written since. Because of this, two people can watch the film and have very different experiences of its pace, depending on the music and the projection speed, which makes the running time range from roughly an hour to about an hour and a half.

Influence: remakes and echoes

The first big echo was the Hollywood Dracula of 1931, which took the story in a more polished direction. Murnau's version nevertheless left its mark on a long line of films that revisit the vampire as a thing of rot and shadow. Werner Herzog directed a loving remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre, in 1979, with Klaus Kinski in the title role. Shadow of the Vampire (2000) imagined a fictional account of the shoot. Robert Eggers, a director known for atmospheric period horror, released his own version on December 25, 2024.

The film also lives in indirect ways. Orlok's silhouette is widely recognized, and horror filmmakers still use the idea that a monster can be shown more through its shadow than through the creature itself. If you follow the vampire thread in this library, start with the entry on vampires on screen and compare it with the chosen path of supernatural horror.

How to watch it, and where to go next

Choose a restored, tinted edition if you can, and pay attention to the score. The film moves at the pace of its era: scenes hold longer than a modern edit would, and the acting is broad by today's standards. It helps to treat the intertitles as part of the design and to look at the edges of the frame, where doors, stairways and windows are used to build tension. A newcomer should expect an uncanny fable, not a fast thriller.

From here, the natural companion is the work of its director, F. W. Murnau, whose later American film Sunrise (1927) shows the same command of light. For another landmark that rebuilt a monster for its time, compare Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, and to see how the genre later replaced silent atmosphere with engineered sound, read how horror uses sound. Browse the creature feature entry for a related family of films.

Verified details

• Max Schreck plays Count Orlok; Gustav von Wangenheim plays Hutter and Greta Schröder plays Ellen.
• Prana Film was founded in 1921 and Nosferatu was its only production.
• Filming began in July 1921, with locations in Wismar, Slovakia and a studio in Berlin-Johannisthal.
• Conrad Veidt is reported to have been offered the role of Orlok but to have declined.
• The cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner used one camera, so only one original negative existed.
• A German court ordered the negative and all prints destroyed in July 1925.
• The film is credited as the first in which a vampire is destroyed by sunlight.
• Hans Erdmann composed the original score; most of it is lost.
• The Museum of Modern Art completed a restoration in 1981.
• Werner Herzog directed Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) with Klaus Kinski.
• Robert Eggers' Nosferatu opened on December 25, 2024.

Connections

• Creature profile: The Vampire.
• Subgenre: Supernatural Horror.
• Director profile: F. W. Murnau.
• Read the The Birth of Horror Cinema: A Short Timeline timeline for where this film sits in the genre's early years.

Sources and further reading

• Nosferatu, Wikipedia
• Nosferatu Is Found to Have Violated Dracula Copyright, EBSCO Research Starters
• How Nosferatu went worldwide, Mental Floss
• Film 2: Nosferatu (1922), British Film Institute