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More about Nosferatu Murnau made several departures from the Stoker novel in creating his silent classic. The vampire has a distinctly reptilian appearance (in another era, he would look like a B-movie alien), he is called Count Orlock, the setting is Baltic, and the hero is female - Nina, initially the Count's prey, who at the end turns predator to destroy him.
The vampire is portrayed by Max Schreck and the film opens with Orlock renting a home in Brennen and then killing the land agent, Jonathan (Gustav Von Wangerheim), after meeting his beautiful fiancee, Nina (Greta Schroeder). Later he travels aboard a cargo ship with a shipment of coffins to take up his lease. When the ship docks in Brennen with its dead crew, the populace fear and earthly plague rather than a supernatural one, but Nina suspects the truth. No longer the virginal bride she was when she first me Orlock, she now knows the darker side of sexuality and uses it to ensnare him - in her room as the rising sun engulfs it with light.
Nosferatu is a masterpiece of the first great horror school of German cinema. In its time it was a technical benchmark - packed with tricks and special effects, such as slow motion and blurred photography to give the vampire a supernatural existence, and negative printing to add an eerie, uncanny atmosphere. Although the acting appears stilted and crude by todays standards, it is much more mature than its Hollywood equivilant at the time. The subject matter, too, is complex and subtle - it may have been filmed in monochrome, but its concept is hardly black and white. Shortly after Nosferatu was premiered in 1922, Florence Stoker (Bram's widow) sued Murnau for breack of copyright, allegng the film was an unauthorised version of Dracula. The cuort agreed and ordered the film to be destroyed, but some prints did survive and, riding high on later successes, Murnau eventually re-released the film in the United States in 1929.
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