Horror-loving moviegoers know that few films can be called cult films, and it is so iconic that, regardless of the passage of time, they are still as relevant as ever, even if they are silent films. Nosferatu, is perhaps the most revered film of its genre for its ethereal atmosphere brimming with terror, although it has a huge contradiction, because it is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with some changes to avoid plagiarism litigation. This is the true story of Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens, the 1922 vampire film by FW Murnau.
Today the great Nosferatu is crowned as the most critically acclaimed horror film, even one of the cornerstones of German expressionism that still remains a great inspiration for lovers of the seventh art. However, in its time Nosferatu was not a great success, and, in fact, its distribution was banned, and all copies of the film were ordered to be burned.
The duo of a filmmaker and an occultist
Like many films, Nosferatu did not have easy filming, there were many obstacles along the way that even ruined the lives of many of those involved in its creation. Perhaps the name that jumps out first is that of director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, but after him, the most important person in charge of Nosferatu was Albin Grau, the film’s producer who was an experienced occultist.
Even before Grau read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he was already interested in vampires, because there were numerous legends in ancient Eastern Europe about this type of entity. According to an article by Grau written in 1921 in Buhne und Film, a Serbian farmer told Grau how his father had been transformed into a vampire. The article describes that the community ended with the threat of a wooden stake.
Many believe that Grau’s story was only part of a campaign to arouse excitement for the film, although it is well known that Eastern Europe holds great narratives about vampire creatures, so it could well have been true what the occultist heard.
An adaptation that imposed concepts yet was condemned
It seems that Murnau and Grau’s intention was to use Bram Stoker’s Dracula as the central inspiration for Nosferatu. It is clear that there are great similarities between one story and the other; a young clerk who travels to the old country to discover a vampire.
But Grau found it impossible to get the necessary copyrights to use Stoker’s story, so name changes were created, and even a readjustment in the cast was made. Thus we have Count Dracula becoming Graf Orlok, Thomas Hutter as Jonathan Harker, Renfield becoming Knock and Mina Harker becoming Ellen Hutter. Van Helsing and Quincy Morris did not even make an appearance in Murnau’s narrative.
It is believed that these changes were made with the firm purpose of evading a lawsuit against Nosferatu for plagiarism. However, even this did not save them from Florence Balcombe, Stoker’s widow, who won the case in the German courts. But Grau pulled out his ace up his sleeve by declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying the royalties to Balcombe, who, knowing she had been outwitted, demanded the burning of all copies and negatives of the film, which was one of the first cases of capital punishment against a film.
Fortunately for Murnau, many of the copies had already been distributed to several countries, and that is how the now iconic film survived. Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens, maybe a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but there is no denying that it is an exceptional case where the adaptation manages to position itself on a par with the original work and even imposes new ways of conceiving vampires. As simple as saying that thanks to Nosferatu, today we have the concept that vampires are not immune to the sun’s rays because, until Dracula, vampires could walk under the light of day and only be weakened.
Story originally published in Spanish in Ecoosfera
