"And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him."
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Now, it's very likely that anyone reading a blog like this has at least a passing familiarity with Nosferatu's history, but allow me for the sake of exposition and clarity to infantilise you - like a businessman who pays good money on a weekend to be dressed in a nappy, breast-fed and spanked. No kink-shaming or judgement here.
Stoker's tome of terror had, as said, been published in 1897 and swiftly went on to be performed live on stage as a dramatic reading organised by the author himself in his day to day workplace of London's Lyceum Theatre on the 18th of May that same year, during which the establishment's principal star - and the man whose physiognomy Stoker had used for the physical description of the vampire Count - Henry Irving had declared the text to be "Dreadful!". This criticism notwithstanding, the novel would be adapted into a fully-fledged theatrical (as in on stage live as it's performed, rather than in the American sense where they really mean 'cinematic') production by actor-producer Hamilton Deane which began a wildly successful tour in Derby in 1924 and would in turn be transferred to Broadway (with an Americanised, or rather 'Americanized' script by John L. Balderston) in 1927 for a run starring Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi that would run for 261 performances to packed houses of enraptured audiences and lead to Universal's immortal yet stagey 1931 classic movie.
But during the in-between days, the lacuna betwixt the staged reading of the novel and the first professional and official acted rendition there crawled from the dark heart of Europe in 1922 the wholly unofficial and unauthorised first film adaptation (though not the first Dracula film, as in a film featuring the character of Dracula, the now lost Hungarian flick Dracula's Death [or Drakula halala] directed by Karoly Lathjay and co-scripted by future Hollywood maven Michael Curtiz emerging a year earlier in 1921, though this unrelated tale of a visitor to an asylum for the insane seeing visions of the Count is certainly an atypical entry in the canon). Directed by cinematic pioneer Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau who would go on to helm classics such as The Last Laugh (1924), Faust (1926) and Sunrise (1927), Nosferatu would dodge paying Florence Stoker - widow of Bram Stoker and executor of his literary estate - for the rights to Dracula forcing Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen to come up with their own (albeit barely disguised) spin on the tale of terror.
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Murnau, who had previously tried to circumvent copyright on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde [and see here for more on early adaptations of that tale) by simply changing the names of the protagonist's alter egos to Dr Warren and Mr O'Connor in the now sadly lost - like many of the twenty one films in his canon - 1920 Der Januskopf. The dual role was essayed by Conrad Veidt who in your correspondent's humble opinion would have made a fine screen Dracula, and in fact was Universal head Carl Laemmle's pick to play the role (after Veidt's turn as the Joker-inspiring Gwynplaine in Paul Leni's 1928 The Man Who Laughs) subsequent to the loss of Lon Chaney Sr., firstly to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and then to the cold grip of Thanatos due to throat cancer - other actors such as Victor Jory, Ian Keith and William Courtney also being taken under consideration before Lugosi successfully lobbied for the role.
"Freely adapted" by Galeen, as the credits phrase it, Nosferatu like Der Januskopf attempts a "not Dracula, honest guv!" veil by giving the characters different names; so we are introduced to solicitor Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), our Jonathan Harker analogue and Ellen, his wife (called Nina in some prints, rather giving the Mina game away, played by Greta Schroeder) as our distaff Mina Murray-Harker combined with Lucy Westenra who dwell in the town of Wisborg (the filming location was the similarly-named real world city of Wismar as well as Lubeck) in the year 1838. True to the usual versions of the story, Hutter is sent on a mission to deepest, darkest Transylvania (represented by location filming in Slovakia including Orava Castle for Orlok's damned demesne, a location later used for the Count's citadel in Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's rendition) by his employer, the bizarre and eccentric estate agent Knock (Alexander Granach) - a strange hobgoblin of a man with whom the vampire client Count Orlok communicates in letters containing esoteric Kabbalistic signs and Enochian symbols. These pictograms reflect the producer Albin Grau's esoteric inclinations; Grau was responsible for set designs and props including the Orlok/Knock correspondence and imbue the sinister characters with a feeling of an ancient and dreadful power - Orlok is as much a sorcerer (Orlok the Warlock?) as a vampire. This calls to mind the mentions of the Scholomance from Dracula - the hidden school of witchcraft hidden among the peaks of the Carpathians wherein the Count trained as a Solomani, something that also finds a modern echo in in the 2024 version (2025 if you're in the UK, due to what the TV guide used to call "regional variations").
Leaving the distraught Ellen with Harding, a ship owner and the Hutters' neighbour (Georg Heinrich Schnell) and Ruth, his sister (Ruth Landshoff, in a similar fashion to the way Hammer's 1958 version makes Lucy Arthur Holmwood's sister) and takes the familiar journey to Transylvania, a land replete with fearful peasants dwelling within inns warning travelers to beware the castle on the hill so familiar after a century of entries in the Universal and Hammer canon and derivatives thereof. In this land of phantoms, gods, monsters and werewolves that look suspiciously like striped hyenas, Hutter finds himself swept through a negative-tinted landscape at unbelievable inhuman speed - for the dead travel fast; it's interesting that these days one might depict a terrifying supernatural journey with slow motion, as Herzog did in the '79, rather than the opposite - to come face to monstrous visage with the Count.
Max Schreck's Orlok is certainly not the suave and slick bloodsucker familiar to audiences now and exemplified by the likes of Lugosi, Lee and Langella and first introduced in the form of Lord Ruthven (pronounced 'Rivven' - yes, I've been mentally mispronouncing it for decades too) in Polidori's The Vampyre, but a truly folkloric vampire. Stoker's Irving-inspired Count may have been portrayed as noble of brow with a strong aquiline nose, but Orlok is a of rodentine, reptilian race apart from humanity; with a skull-like head from which protrude pointed ears and central incisor teeth - which make more sense for his diet than the now-traditional canines - and overgrown talons for fingernails like the pointed fingers of the nocturnal aye-aye, he certainly seems more animal than man, the lone surviving embodiment of an ancient race, the very seed of the daemon Belial rather than Stoker's moustached undead nobleman that inspired other embodiments including Bill Skarsgard in Eggers' film. Orlok certainly appears every inch the disease-bearing beast, which brings us to the derivation/etymology of "nosferatu" - whether it comes from the Greek nosophoros meaning 'plague carrier', or Romanian nesuferitul signifying 'the unsufferable one', he fulfils both remits, his black shadow of death spreading across Europe like the mediaeval Black Death or the (then extremely, uncomfortably recent) Great War.
The vampire dwells in a realm of dreams and nightmares, a shadow land beyond life and death, and perhaps represents our shadow selves. The eldritch thing that is Orlok himself may be Ellen Hutter's animus - in the Jungian sense, the masculine part of her, as well as the other sense of ill-feeling or ill-will; their deep and primordial destructive attraction for each other resulting in their mutual destruction. Murnau plays up the shadow of the vampire (arf!) with some real Expressionistic shadowplay: the iconic shot of Orlok ascending the staircase to his and Ellen's terminal conflagration in flagrante delicto (taking the sexual term of le petit mort, "the little death" to its literal apogee) is one of the most recognisable in horror cinema if not cinema in toto.
As it turned out, the attempts to skirt copyright (despite actually crediting Bram Stoker in the title credits!) resulted in Stoker's widow Florence suing Prana Film into bankruptcy and gaining a court order to have all copies of the film destroyed. Whatever the legal rights and wrongs though, thankfully for us lovers of the macabre some copies slipped through the net and survived (and yet a perfectly legal film like London After Midnight [for more on which...] didn't, such are the vagaries of the fickle finger of Fate) and to this day 103 years later - a vampiric lifespan - we can thrill to the chills of Orlok creeping through the darkness of German Expressionism to feast on our life's blood.
Or maybe just flick our lightswitch on and off.
Oh, Nosferatu!
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