‘Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (German: Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens) is a 1922 silent German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok, a vampire who preys on the wife (Greta Schröder) of his estate agent (Gustav von Wangenheim) and brings the plague to their town.
Nosferatu was produced by Prana Film and is an unauthorized and unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Various names and other details were changed from the novel, including Count Dracula being renamed Count Orlok. Although these changes are often represented as a defense against copyright infringement, the original German intertitles acknowledged Dracula as the source. Film historian David Kalat states in his commentary track that since the film was “a low-budget film made by Germans for German audiences… setting it in Germany with German named characters makes the story more tangible and immediate for German-speaking viewers”.
Even with several details altered, Stoker’s heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. However, several prints of Nosferatu survived, and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.
‘. . . Nosferatu has been noted for its themes regarding fear of the Other, as well as for possible anti-Semitic undertones, both of which may have been partially derived from the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, upon which the film was based. The physical appearance of Count Orlok, with his hooked nose, long claw-like fingernails, and large bald head, has been compared to stereotypical caricatures of Jewish people from the time in which Nosferatu was produced. His features have also been compared to those of a rat or a mouse, the former of which Jews were often equated with. Orlok’s interest in acquiring property in the German town of Wisborg, a shift in locale from the Stoker novel’s London, has also been analyzed as preying on the fears and anxieties of the German public at the time. Professor Tony Magistrale opined that the film’s depiction of an “invasion of the German homeland by an outside force […] poses disquieting parallels to the anti-Semitic atmosphere festering in Northern Europe in 1922.”
When the foreign Orlok arrives in Wisborg by ship, he brings with him a swarm of rats which, in a deviation from the source novel, spread the plague throughout the town. This plot element further associates Orlok with rodents and the idea of the “Jew as disease-causing agent”. Writer Kevin Jackson has noted that director F. W. Murnau “was friendly with and protective of a number of Jewish men and women” throughout his life, including Jewish actor Alexander Granach, who plays Knock in Nosferatu. Additionally, Magistrale wrote that Murnau, being a homosexual, would have been “presumably more sensitive to the persecution of a subgroup inside the larger German society”. As such, it has been said that perceived associations between Orlok and anti-Semitic stereotypes are unlikely to have been conscious decisions on the part of Murnau.
‘The studio behind Nosferatu, Prana Film, was a short-lived silent-era German film studio founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and occultist artist Albin Grau, named for the Hindu concept of prana. Although the studio’s intent was to produce occult- and supernatural-themed films, Nosferatu was its only production, as it declared bankruptcy shortly after the film’s release.
Grau claimed he was inspired to shoot a vampire film by a war experience: in Grau’s apocryphal tale, during the winter of 1916, a Serbian farmer told him that his father was a vampire and one of the undead.
Diekmann and Grau gave Henrik Galeen, a disciple of Hanns Heinz Ewers, the task to write a screenplay inspired by the Dracula novel, although Prana Film had not obtained the film rights. Galeen was an experienced specialist in dark romanticism; he had already worked on The Student of Prague (1913), and the screenplay for The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920). Galeen set the story in the fictional north German harbour town of Wisborg. He changed the characters’ names and added the idea of the vampire bringing the plague to Wisborg via rats on the ship, and left out the Van Helsing vampire hunter character. Galeen’s Expressionist style screenplay was poetically rhythmic, without being so dismembered as other books influenced by literary Expressionism, such as those by Carl Mayer. Lotte Eisner described Galeen’s screenplay as “voll Poesie, voll Rhythmus” (“full of poetry, full of rhythm”).’