Cinema’s first Dracula adaptation and among the best aged horror films of the silent era. It’s a moody, shadowy good time with impressive production values and great use made of Max Schreck creeping around in outrageous bug-eyed, pointy-eared goblin make-up. On almost all counts, it soundly beats the stagey 1931 Tod Browning Dracula.
Officially though, it was court-ordered out of existence.
Director F.W. Murnau and producers Enrico Dieck
mann and Albin Grau never actually got the RIGHTS to adapt Bram Stoker’s novel (published only twenty-five years earlier in 1897) so they changed some things. Dracula became “Count Orlock”, Renfield became “Knock”, Jonathan Harker became “Thomas Hutter”, and so on. Murnau and company kept the novel’s basic plot though, and then got their German asses promptly sued by the Stoker estate after the film was released. The Stokers won (rightfully, from a purely legal perspective) and all extant prints of Nosferatu were ordered destroyed.
Of course, all the prints weren’t destroyed and the film lives on after its death like a true vampire.