In the winter of 1916, somewhere on the Serbian front, a German soldier named Albin Grau claimed he heard a story from a local farmer. The farmer’s father had died without receiving the holy sacraments. A month later, a string of deaths followed. Witnesses reported seeing the dead man walking. Villagers exhumed his coffin and found it empty. The next morning, they found a healthy-looking corpse with teeth so long he could not close his mouth.
Five years later, Grau co-founded a film company, hired a director, and made the first great vampire film in the history of cinema.
Whether the story was true, or whether Grau constructed it from the well-documented vampire panics of the Serbian Military Frontier, does not change what it produced. The film was called Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens. It was born illegal, sentenced to death by a court of law, and outlived everything that tried to kill it.
Prana Film: The Occultist’s Studio
To understand Nosferatu, you have to understand the man who willed it into existence.
Albin Grau was born in 1884 in Leipzig-Schönefeld. He trained at the Leipzig Academy of Art. He was also, from early adulthood, a practicing occultist. He held the title Master of the Chair in the Pansophic Lodge under the alias Frater Pacitius, a Rosicrucian magical order founded by Heinrich Tränker that combined alchemy, Freemasonry, theosophy, ritual magic, astrology, and Eastern esoteric traditions.
In 1921, Grau co-founded Prana Film GmbH in Berlin with businessman Enrico Dieckmann. They named it after the Sanskrit word for “life force” and gave it a yin-yang logo. The studio’s purpose was to produce films about the occult and the supernatural.
They made exactly one film. It destroyed the company and lived forever.
Grau served as producer and production designer. He designed everything: Count Orlok’s appearance (the bald skull, pointed ears, rat teeth, elongated fingers), the sets, the costumes, the title cards, the promotional posters, and the occult symbols inscribed on Orlok’s contract letter. Those symbols are largely astrological, evoking Luna, Mars, and Saturn, with elements of Enochian script and Hermetic sigils. Whether they produce meaningful translations or decorative occult atmosphere is debated. What is not debated is their effect: they make the world of the film feel old and wrong in exactly the right way.
Multiple scholars have noted that aesthetically and thematically, Nosferatu belonged to Grau. Without his preliminary design work, the film might have been a curious adaptation. With it, it became a nightmare that looked like nothing cinema had produced before.
In 1925, Grau attended the Weida Conference alongside Aleister Crowley and Eugen Grosche, filming the proceedings (the footage is now lost). After a schism at the conference, those who accepted Crowley’s Law of Thelema went on to found the Fraternitas Saturni (Brotherhood of Saturn) in 1926. Grau declined to lead the new order but remained a lifelong member. He contributed articles on sacred geometry to Saturn Gnosis, the order’s periodical. When the Nazis banned the Fraternitas Saturni in 1936, Grau emigrated to Switzerland. He returned after the war, settled in Bayrischzell in the Bavarian Alps, and worked in commercial art until his death in 1971.
Murnau, Galeen, and the Stolen Plot
Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe was born on 28 December 1888 in Bielefeld. He changed his name partly because his family disapproved of both his theater career and his homosexuality. He studied under Max Reinhardt, served in the First World War as an infantry company commander and later in the Flying Corps, survived several crashes, and was interned in Switzerland after a forced landing. His partner, the poet Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, was killed on the Eastern Front in 1915.
By 1921, the man now called F.W. Murnau had already directed approximately eight or nine films, most of them now lost. One, Der Januskopf (1920), was a Jekyll and Hyde adaptation starring Conrad Veidt and Bela Lugosi. He was thirty-two years old, already recognized in German film circles, and about to make the work that would define the rest of his short life.
The screenplay was by Henrik Galeen, born Heinrich Wiesenberg in 1881 in Stryi, Austria-Hungary. Galeen had also studied under Reinhardt and had co-written and directed Der Golem in 1915, the first film adaptation of the Prague Golem legend. He would go on to write and direct The Student of Prague (1926) and Alraune (1928) before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933.
The plot of Nosferatu was, to put it plainly, stolen. It tracked Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula almost scene for scene. The names were changed: Dracula became Orlok, Harker became Hutter, Mina became Ellen, Renfield and Hawkins were merged into Knock, Van Helsing became Bulwer, the ship Demeter became the Empusa. The setting was moved from 1890s London to 1838 Wisborg, a fictional German city. But the skeleton was identical: a real estate agent visits a vampire count’s castle, the count travels by ship to the agent’s city, brings death, targets the agent’s wife.
The original German intertitles did not even try to hide it. They acknowledged that the film was “freely adapted” from Stoker’s novel. This honesty would prove fatal.
But Galeen’s screenplay also made one change that altered the entire future of vampire fiction. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula walks around in daylight. Sunlight weakens him and restricts his powers, but it does not kill him. Dracula is eventually dispatched with knives, not dawn. Galeen invented a different ending: Ellen, having read the Book of the Vampires, discovers that a woman pure of heart can destroy the Nosferatu by keeping him at her side until the cock crows. She sacrifices herself, luring Orlok to her bedside, keeping him feeding on her blood until sunrise. When daylight touches him, he dissolves.
Before this film, sunlight did not kill vampires. After it, sunlight killed almost every vampire in fiction.
The Locations: Wismar, Lübeck, and Orava Castle
Location shooting ran from the summer through autumn of 1921, with studio interiors continuing into late that year. Where other German Expressionist films of the era, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) chief among them, created their nightmares entirely on studio sets with painted backdrops and distorted angles, Murnau did something different. He went outside.
The exteriors were shot in the Hanseatic cities of Wismar and Lübeck in northern Germany, and in what is now Slovakia for the Transylvanian sequences. The Marienkirche tower and the Wasserkunst fountain in Wismar served for panoramic establishing shots. The medieval Wassertor (water gate, built c. 1450) is where Orlok arrives with his coffin; a commemorative plaque was installed there in 2012. In Lübeck, the six salt storehouses on the Trave River (the Salzspeicher) became Orlok’s manor, and the Aegidienkirche churchyard stood in for Hutter’s home.
For Orlok’s castle, Murnau chose Orava Castle (Oravský Podzámok) in Slovakia, because no German castle had the qualities he wanted. The Vrátna Valley, the High Tatras, and the Váh River provided the wild mountain landscape of the journey to the vampire’s lair.
Additional locations included Rostock, Lauenburg, and the island of Sylt. Studio interiors were filmed at the JOFA-Atelier in Berlin-Johannisthal.
This is the key to the film’s visual power. Where Caligari makes everything unreal, Murnau makes everything real except the vampire. The streets of Wismar are solid, recognizable, harshly lit by actual daylight. The Baltic architecture is not painted scenery but stone and brick. When Orlok enters this real world, the intrusion registers as genuinely wrong, a violation of the natural order. The Expressionism is not in the sets but in what walks through them.
Cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, born in 1889, had trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and worked as a newsreel cameraman for Pathé, covering the Mexican Revolution. He shot the film largely on a single camera, meaning only one original negative ever existed. His lighting is spare: deep shadows, harsh daylight for the German city scenes, candlelight and darkness for the castle. He would go on to shoot Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930).
Max Schreck: The Actor Behind the Monster
Friedrich Gustav Maximilian Schreck was born on 6 September 1879 in Berlin-Friedenau. His surname, a gift from fate, means “terror” in German.
He was primarily a stage actor, working at the Munich Kammerspiele from 1919 to 1922, where he appeared in the premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s first staged play, Drums in the Night. He made over forty films in his career. He never played another vampire. On 19 February 1936, he performed the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos on stage. The next day, 20 February, he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six.
The rumor that Schreck was a real vampire is one of cinema’s most persistent myths. It originated from a combination of factors: Murnau deliberately withheld Schreck’s identity during production, the actor reportedly stayed in character and kept to himself between takes, his surname was too perfect, and his subsequent career was obscure enough that the mystery could take root. Contemporary photographs show an ordinary man, unremarkable without the bald cap and prosthetic teeth.
The myth was irresistible enough to generate Shadow of the Vampire (2000), directed by E. Elias Merhige, in which Willem Dafoe played Schreck as an actual vampire hired by a monomaniacal Murnau (John Malkovich). Dafoe was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film also featured Udo Kier as Albin Grau and Cary Elwes as Fritz Arno Wagner.
But the real Max Schreck did not need to be a vampire to achieve what he achieved. His Orlok is not acted so much as observed: a creature that seems documented by the camera rather than performing for it. The blink rate is almost zero. The movements are slow, mechanical, insectile. When Orlok rises from his coffin on the ship Empusa, he does not sit up like a person. He pivots upright from the waist like a lid being opened. It is one of the most unnerving images in cinema, and it was accomplished with nothing but a man, some makeup, and a plank.
The Premiere and the Plague
On 4 March 1922, Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens premiered at the Marmorsaal (Marble Hall) of the Berlin Zoological Garden. The event was billed as “Das Fest des Nosferatu,” and guests were asked to attend in Biedermeier-era costume, matching the film’s 1838 setting. Hans Erdmann’s original score was performed live, conducted by O. Kernbach. General release followed on 15 March at the Primus-Palast in Berlin.
Erdmann’s score is largely lost. He published a portion in 1926 as the Fantastisch-romantische Suite, a forty-minute concert work. Excerpts appeared in 1927 in the Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik, co-authored by Erdmann, Giuseppe Becce, and Ludwig Brav. In 1995, Gillian Anderson and James Kessler released a reconstruction for BMG Classics, filling gaps with new compositions in Erdmann’s style.
The film’s plague imagery was not accidental. Orlok is not a seducer. He is a vector. The ship Empusa (named after a Greek shape-shifting demon, daughter of Hecate in some traditions) carries coffins packed with “accursed earth from the field of the Black Death,” from which rats pour onto the docks. Coffin processions wind through the streets of Wisborg. The title cards speak of pestilence. Orlok does not charm his victims. He infects them.
This was 1922. The Spanish Flu had ended barely two years earlier, having killed an estimated seventeen to fifty million people worldwide. Germany had lost two million dead in the war and tens of thousands more to the pandemic. The coffin processions on screen would have reminded audiences of sights they knew firsthand. Murnau and Grau were not reaching for metaphor. They were reaching for memory.
The connection runs deeper still. If Grau’s story about the Serbian farmer is even partly true, it slots into a genuine tradition. The vampire panic of Medvedja in 1731-32 and the Petar Blagojević case of 1725 both unfolded against backgrounds of actual epidemic disease. The villagers who dug up Arnold Paole believed the vampire had also killed cattle whose meat was eaten by others, spreading the contagion through the food supply. The Austrian military surgeons investigating these cases were looking at decomposing bodies through a medical lens while the villagers interpreted them through a supernatural one. The vampire folklore of Hungary and the Balkans was always, at its root, a theory of plague.
Orlok is that theory made visible. He does not seduce. He spreads.
The Lawsuit That Tried to Kill a Film
In April 1922, Florence Stoker received an unmarked letter containing the Berlin premiere program. Florence, née Balcombe, was Bram Stoker’s widow and the holder of his literary copyright. She was not pleased.
With support from the British Incorporated Society of Authors, she hired a lawyer and sued Prana Film. The timing was unfortunate for any hope of recovery: Prana had already gone bankrupt by mid-1922, undone by a combination of the film’s commercial underperformance and the costs of Grau’s lavish premiere campaign, which reportedly exceeded the production budget.
The case dragged through the German courts for years. A hearing was held in late March 1924. The formal case began in May 1924. In July 1925, the court ruled in Florence Stoker’s favor and ordered the destruction of all negatives and prints.
But by then, copies had already crossed borders. Prints had reached France, the United States (where Dracula was already in the public domain due to Stoker’s failure to properly register the American copyright), and other countries. The destruction order could not reach them. At least six copies survived in archives across Switzerland, Germany, France, and Spain. The most important was a tinted nitrate print of the first French release, discovered in the vaults of the Cinémathèque française on 8 October 1984 by the Spanish film historian Luciano Berriatúa.
No truly complete copy of Nosferatu exists. Every version you have ever seen is a composite, spliced together from multiple surviving prints. The film is, in a very literal sense, undead: stitched from fragments, assembled from what survived the stake.
Ruth Landshoff, who played Harding’s sister Ruth in the film, later recalled filming a scene in which she fled from Orlok along a beach. This scene does not appear in any surviving cut. It is one of those ghosts that cling to early cinema, proof that even the versions we have are incomplete.
The Word
Where does “Nosferatu” come from? The answer is: nobody is entirely sure.
The chain of transmission begins with Emily Gerard, a Scottish author married to a Hungarian cavalry officer stationed in Transylvania. In 1885, she published “Transylvanian Superstitions” in The Nineteenth Century magazine, and in 1888 expanded it into the book The Land Beyond the Forest. In it she wrote that every Romanian peasant believes in the nosferatu, or vampire, as firmly as in heaven or hell.
Bram Stoker read Gerard and adopted the term for his 1897 novel. Van Helsing uses it in Chapter 18. Stoker’s working notes indicate he understood it to mean “not dead,” what we now translate as “undead.”
The problem: “nosferatu” does not appear to be a standard word in any known historical phase of Romanian. Several competing etymologies have been proposed. It may derive from the Greek nosophoros (disease-bearing), which fits the plague-vector concept but has no established phonetic path into Romanian. It may be a garbling of the common Romanian word nesuferitul (“the insufferable one”) or necuratul (“the unclean one,” a standard term for the Devil). It may be a dialectal term from a specific region that Gerard transcribed imperfectly.
There is no scholarly consensus. The word may be, in essence, a literary artifact: introduced to European languages through Gerard’s fieldwork, amplified by Stoker, and made permanent by Murnau. Whatever its origin, it now means exactly one thing.
The Shadow After: Herzog, Eggers, and the Century Between
The film’s first great echo came in 1979 with Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht). Klaus Kinski played the vampire (now called Dracula, since copyright concerns had eased), Isabelle Adjani played Lucy, and Bruno Ganz played Jonathan Harker. Herzog shot simultaneously in English and German, creating two versions with the same cast. He filmed at Pernštejn Castle in South Moravia for Dracula’s interior, and in Delft and Schiedam in the Netherlands for the city sequences.
The production was characteristically Herzogian. An opening sequence was filmed at the Mummies of Guanajuato museum in Mexico, where naturally mummified bodies from an 1833 cholera epidemic are on permanent display. Kinski required four hours of daily makeup. The approximately 11,000 rats used for the plague scenes were transported from Hungary to Holland by truck. The city of Delft refused to allow their release. Schiedam agreed but terminated filming when approximately a thousand rats escaped. The remaining scenes were completed in Hamburg. Delft spent months recapturing strays.
Forty-five years later, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu premiered in Berlin on 2 December 2024. Bill Skarsgård played Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp played Ellen, Nicholas Hoult played Hutter, and Willem Dafoe, who had played Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire a quarter-century earlier, appeared as Professor Von Franz. The film was shot primarily at Barrandov Studios in Prague, with exteriors at Corvin Castle in Hunedoara, Romania, and at Pernštejn Castle, the same castle Herzog had used. It grossed $182 million worldwide against a $50 million budget and received four Academy Award nominations.
Between these poles, the original Nosferatu was restored multiple times. Enno Patalas at the Filmmuseum München began the first serious restoration in 1981. A 1995 revision by Patalas used the tinted French print discovered in 1984. Photoplay Productions (David Gill, Kevin Brownlow, and Patrick Stanbury) added English intertitles and a new orchestral score for a 1997 Channel 4 broadcast. The definitive modern restoration was completed in 2006 by Luciano Berriatúa on behalf of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung.
The film was banned in Sweden from 1922 to 1972 as too disturbing.
Why It Still Matters
Roger Ebert, writing in his “Great Movies” series, observed that watching Nosferatu is seeing the vampire movie before it had really seen itself, the story of Dracula before it was buried in clichés and television skits and cartoons. The film is “in awe of its material,” he wrote. It seems to really believe in vampires. His key distinction: Nosferatu does not scare. It haunts.
The haunting has propagated. Orlok’s shadow ascending the staircase, clawed fingers stretching across the wall, is one of the most recognized images in all of cinema. It is visual shorthand for ancient evil. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975) modeled its master vampire directly on Orlok rather than Stoker’s aristocratic Dracula. When Tobe Hooper adapted the novel for television in 1979, he redesigned the vampire Barlow to look like Orlok: bald, rat-toothed, inhuman. The character Petyr in Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows (2014) is a direct Orlok homage: an 8,000-year-old creature who lives in a stone basement and has no capacity for conversation.
After Orlok, vampire cinema split into two lineages. The seductive lineage, launched by Bela Lugosi’s Dracula in 1931, gave us Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, Anne Rice’s Lestat, and all the beautiful, tragic, romantic vampires that populate modern fiction. Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers belongs to this tradition too, a love letter to the Hammer Gothic that Murnau’s film had nothing to do with.
The monstrous lineage is Orlok’s. It says: the vampire is not your lover. The vampire is a plague. The vampire is a rat with teeth. The vampire is what your ancestors in the villages of Hungary and the Balkans actually feared: not seduction, but contagion. Not desire, but the multiplication of death.
Murnau died on 11 March 1931, at the age of forty-two, after a car accident near Santa Barbara. His driver swerved to avoid an oncoming truck, and the car overturned. He never saw what his film became. He never saw what the word “Nosferatu” would come to mean.
The prints survived. The shadow climbs the stairs. The sunrise still kills.
By the Author
Serbian Folk Tales by Đorđe Kojanović Stefanović, ed. Rade Kolbas Illustrated Serbian Fairy Tales Vol. 1 by Rade KolbasFor fiction set against these traditions: The Vampire: Novel from Bulgaria by Hans Wachenhusen, trans. Rade Kolbas
