How Nosferatu Rewrote The Rules Of Vampires – /Film

Prana Film, the German studio that made "Nosferatu," was founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and an artist namedAlbin Grau, who had a taste for the occult. The idea of Prana Film was to house a long series of occult and supernatural feature films, but the studio folded quickly after making just one. According to the 1993 biography by ChristianeMckenberger, Grau claimed that he was inspired to make a vampire film after hearing a "true" vampire story from a Serbian farmer while Grau was serving as a soldier during World War I. Grau and Dieckmann, who infamously had not secured the film rights to the popular 1897 novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, put their Dracula movie "Nosferatu" into production in 1921, with F.W. Murnau directing, and shooting locations secured in Slovakia.

Because it was clearly an adaptation of Stoker's works, and because Prana didn't have legal permission to make the film, Stoker's widow successfully sued the company and all copies of "Nosferatu" were ordered destroyed. Luckily for film historians, copies of the film did survive, and "Nosferatu" is available to this day.

"Nosferatu" screenwriter Henrik Galeen apparently didn't actually read Stoker's novel, so while the story remains the same, many of the details differ. The names have all changed, for one, with Count Dracula becoming Count Orlok, and so on. In the novel, Dracula is a short old man with a mustache who becomes temporarily younger after drinking the blood of his victims. In "Nosferatu," Orlok (played by Max Schreck) is a lanky, rat-like creature whose terrifying countenance embodies pestilence and death. Indeed, the design of Count Orlok has led to claims of antisemitism on the part of the filmmakers; Orlok's nose and claws were popular in negative Jewish caricatures at the time, and the character's "invasion of Germany" narrative mirrors similar fears expressed in antisemitic pamphlets of the early 1920s.

The rules of vampires were also laid down: In "Nosferatu," the vampire must travel with coffins full of earth, presumably, as one intertitle explains, the soil that a vampire was initially buried under. A more notable deviation from Stoker was the conceit that a vampire can only operate at night Stoker's Dracula was free to come and go at all hours. It was actually "Nosferatu" that popularized the notion that vampires have an aversion to sunlight.

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How Nosferatu Rewrote The Rules Of Vampires - /Film

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