A court ordered every copy of Nosferatu destroyed, and the film survived anyway
F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent vampire film borrowed Dracula without permission, renaming the count Orlok and moving him to a German town. Bram Stoker's widow Florence sued and won an order to burn every print. A few escaped, and the film went on to define horror cinema.
Prana Film produced the picture from a screenplay by Henrik Galeen, with Max Schreck as the gaunt Count Orlok. The name changes are often described as a dodge around copyright, but the original German intertitles openly credited Stoker's novel as the source. The film historian David Kalat argues the real motive was local: a cheap German production aimed at German audiences felt more immediate with German settings and names. So the story opens in 1838 in the invented port of Wisborg, from where a young estate agent, Thomas Hutter, is sent to the Carpathians to sell a house to a strange nobleman.
The biggest departure from the novel is the plague. Orlok's coffins arrive by ship crammed with rats, and the town sickens. Only a pure-hearted woman who willingly gives the vampire her blood and keeps him distracted until sunrise can end it; Hutter's wife Ellen does exactly that, and the dawn light dissolves Orlok into smoke. Murnau and producer Albin Grau layered in occult references, making Orlok a creation of the demon Belial and having his letters to the estate agent Knock written in Enochian, the supposed angelic language recorded by John Dee and Edward Kelley.
The imagery has attracted uncomfortable readings. Orlok's hooked nose, claws and rat-like look resemble antisemitic caricatures of the era, and the professor Tony Magistrale linked the foreign invader plot to the mood of Northern Europe in 1922. Others push back: the writer Kevin Jackson noted Murnau protected Jewish friends, including Alexander Granach, who played Knock, and many judge any such echoes unlikely to have been deliberate.
War shadowed the production. Grau claimed a Serbian farmer told him in the winter of 1916 that his father was undead. Murnau commanded a company on the Eastern Front, then flew and survived at least eight crashes, while Schreck, also a trench veteran, kept to himself and wandered forests alone for hours. The critic Kim Newman called the result the template for horror films, and it became public domain worldwide in 2019.
Source: Nosferatu
