The iconic and chilling 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu has terrified audiences for now over a century. Eager to tempt fate and brave into the undead world, I sought out experts in the gothic and undead to help me understand the lingering legacy of Count Orlok.
Nosferatu is a silent German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau and an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Count Dracula is replaced with the monstrous and terrifying Count Orlok, who preys upon the wife of his estate agent and inflicts an infectious plague on their village.
Stoker’s widow sued Prana Films for breach of copyright and when she could not receive financial recompense, demanded for the film to be destroyed. This meant that the film did drop out of common circulation for many years, but international prints continued to move between archives, museums and cinematheques thus ensuring its legacy.
My search led me to the Open Graves Open Minds (OGOM) Project, a group of academics dedicated to unearthing depictions of vampires and the undead in literature and art, in addition to werewolves, fairies and other supernatural beings and their worlds. Their studies consist of the fantastical, folkloric, and magical in the hopes that others will view Gothic works as enchantment, rather than simple horror.
OGOM’s extensive horror research led them to discover some potent, rather frightening, secrets kept about the blood-bloated undead monster of East European folklore, the vampire, and the reincarnations through novels, films, and other media since the eighteenth century.
I decided to brave the monster’s lair, to confront the mysterious league of supernatural unholiness and meet them in the flesh.
Despite my most unholy suspicions, they were all surprisingly normal people. No blood on anyone’s clothes, no hooded black cloaks, no cultists performing sacrifices, but warm smiles and open-minded people eager to discuss all things Nosferatu.
I had the pleasure of meeting Sam George, a self-proclaimed ‘coffin boffin’ and Associate Professor of Research at University of Hertfordshire. George believed that the fearsome vampire was the embodiment of contagion.
She said: “Nosferatu is close to the Greek word nosforos, meaning ‘plague bearer’. Vampirism and plague are symbolically combined in the metaphor of vermin characterised by the rats in the film.”
Bearing similarity to post-pandemic modern audiences, George added: “Contemporary audiences for Nosferatu, with its unsettling scenes of plague rats and mass burials were familiar with the terrors of contagion. Germany had been one of the nations afflicted by the appalling Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which killed more people world-wide than did WW1.”
Origins of Nosferatu: The Birth of an Ancient Vampire
Nosferatu is famous for introducing new concepts to established vampire lore. Albin Grau, responsible for the film’s set and costumes, wrote of his inspiration for the film’s vampire in 1921. He recalled a story from 1884 retold to him in 1916 featuring a Romanian undead or Nosferatu.
Later that summer Grau met the comrade whose account had fed into his undead obsession. He had from that point reflected upon the occult aspects of life and began conceptualising a film about a vampire. In the old city of Prague, they drank Hungarian wine and exchanged memories and conversation deep into the night. The conception of Nosferatu’s vampire was born.
The vampire belonged to the power of the night, such a creature, they asserted, would concentrate all its bestial instincts towards humankind until what results is a being given over to a ferocious and absolute animality, thoroughly bound to the earth.
The terror of Count Orlok:
Undoubtedly, the most striking feature of the film is Orlok himself, played by Max Schreck. He is no Edward Cullen; a bald head, pointy ears, a hooked nose, and rat-like teeth. The central image of Nosferatu will always be Schreck’s cadaverous performance as the vampire, his appearance totally unlike the film vampires that were to follow.
I felt somewhat in the dark in my comprehension of why Orlok became such an iconic and different take on the vampire, that was until I met Stacey Abbot, Professor of Film and Television at University of Roehampton. Abbot regularly teaches classes on the horror genre, with specialism around vampires and zombies in TV. She spoke to me about her paper “Monstrous Strain: The Horror Legacy of Nosferatu”:
“Most people’s expectation of a vampire today is a tall, elegant gentleman in a black cloak, but that would be the vampire of fiction. The inclusion of a cape is highly suggestive of the cinematic vampire: specifically, Bela Lugosi’s performance of Dracula in Todd Browning’s film in 1931. … it was the stage and screen version of Dracula, iconically performed by Lugosi, that turned Dracula’s nineteenth century black suit into twentieth century formalwear in the form of the black tuxedo and cape. “
This is the image of Dracula that is repeatedly referenced in adaptations, parodies, television, and film: from Sesame Street and Hotel Transylvania to the more recent BBC adaptation of Dracula. While the Lugosi Dracula continues to be ubiquitous, it is however not alone in its influence on the representation of the vampire.
Abbot added: “Murnau’s Nosferatu presents a very different image of Dracula renamed Count Orlok. The influence was not an immediate, but the Orlok image has fostered a distinct strand and narrative trajectory for the vampire based on Orlok’s makeup design and Schreck’s performance.”
Schreck’s characterisation of Orlok as a kind of human vermin draws energy in part from Stoker but also from universal fears and collective obsessions. Arguably, Schreck has fostered a distinctive and lasting cinematic legacy that has run parallel to the Lugosi tradition, emphasising the monstrous characterisations and meanings that continue to underpin the vampire onscreen.
When we first see Orlok, he emerges from the shadows dressed all in black and wearing a black cap that covers his ears and clutches his hands with long fingers into fists, concealing the pointed features that are associated with the monster. In Romanian lore, a vampire is a dead person’s shadow. Orlok first appears as a shadow, fittingly it is light that destroys him in the end: moving on the screen is the vampire’s love affair with the kingdom of shadows, cinema itself. His first meeting with Hutter features Orlok staring at him without blinking, framed in silhouette revealing his sharp nose, bushy eyebrows, and blackened eyes. When he moves: his gaze is stiff, his shoulders hunched, and his movements are slow and ominous – Schreck’s performance exudes menace.
Our first exposed look at Orlok’s vampiric identity, having shed his cap, shows him to be a pale, ghostly creature with hollow eyes and pointed ears as an almost motionless figure. When Orlok enters the room, the arch of the door fits him exactly like a coffin; a passage towards death. He stretches out his large hands with elongated fingers, revealing talon-like claws. Sharp rat-like teeth emerge over the lower lip as his face twists into a polite grimace.
This depiction of the vampire is more than the charismatic human-like Lugosi version, which intends to blend in unnoticed, instead a more monstrous form. Even before he reveals his vampiric nature his physical appearance and Schreck’s exaggerated performance still marks him as physically other – an embodiment of the plague that will soon overwhelm the port town in the film.
This image of the monster’s vampire was born from Grau’s fascination with the undead: emphasising the vampire’s bestial instincts, animality, and diabolical cunning – the result of the corruption of the human spirit. These characteristics not only underpin Orlok’s decision to spread his infection, but the physicality of his monstrosity. His physical features embody his spiritual corruption.
Nosferatu’s undying influence on the vampire
Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot (2-part TV miniseries) in 1979:
In Stephen King’s original novel, the vampire Mr Barlow was depicted as an articulate and Dracula-like vampire described by King as tall, thin, high cheek boned with white hair. Instead, he was replaced with a Max Schreck-like Nosferatu incapable of speech. This decision, whilst unpopular with King fans, was made precisely because producer Richard Kobritz and director Tobe Hooper wanted to contrast their vampire to the Lugosi style vampire seen that year in Love at First Bite.
They offered a seemingly new, horrifying face of the vampire enhanced by his burning yellow eyes and guttural snarls and growls. Furthermore, as the miniseries was produced for US network television at a time when censorship made depictions of violence challenging, the adoption of the Orlok image immediately evoked fear without having to confront censors. Reflecting the Orlok image, Barlow has elongated, claw-like fingers, skeletal features, sharp fangs, pointed ears, a bald head, pale skin, and the addition of seething yellow eyes. Barlow is terrifying primarily because of how he looks, and thus scares viewers without having to do anything vampiric or violent. Though his scenes in the mini-series are brief they make a profound impact because of how sudden, shocking, and escalating in implied violence they are.
Werner Herzog’s remake Nosferatu the Vampyre in 1979:
As a remake of Murnau’s film, Klaus Kinski’s embodiment of the vampire subconsciously imitates that of Schreck’s take on Orlok. His appearance mirrors the same make-up: ghostly white skin that contrasts in deep pallor against his pitch-black cloak and the shadows from which he repeatedly emerges. He is hairless and possesses the same iconic elongated fingers and rat-like teeth. Kinski’s vampire not only builds upon the bestial nature of Schreck’s vampire, he is visibly ancient and inhumane but also has a world-weariness and melancholy to his persona. While Schreck’s movements are rigid and arched, mirroring the gothic architecture that so often surrounds him, Kinski’s posture is rounded as if constricted from within and his movements are genuinely slow and pained. He speaks in hush and possesses dark, sad eyes. Consequently, Herzog and Kinski reimagined Murnau’s soulless vampire as soulful.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and the Blade Trilogy (1998-2006):
Releasing in 1997 and 1998 respectively, both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Blade offered a modern revitalisation of the vampire genre through the decentring of the narrative away from the white male hero: a teenage girl in Buffy and an African American half-vampire in Blade.
The vampires in both Buffy and the Blade films generally appear to be human until they ‘vamp out’ and reveal their fangs, yellow eyes, and in the case of Buffy their pronounced ridged brow. However, in both series, the modern vampire stands in opposition to an old one, such as the ancient and powerful leader of vampires shown in Buffy. This opposition between old and new is established in the opening episodes of Buffy with the introduction of The Master as the show’s main antagonist, whilst in Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade II Blade confronts the leader of the vampire nation – overlord Eli Damaskinos. Both The Master and Damaskinos are introduced in similar ways to suggest the presence of the old within the heart of the modern.
In Buffy, The Master is introduced emerging from a pool of blood deep within the Earth that marks the opening of the Hellmouth beneath the high school. Similarly in Blade II, Damaskinos is shown bathing in blood in the dungeon buried in the foundations of the vampire’s ultra-modern high rise. To show how both The Master and Damaskinos stand apart from all other vampires, and to convey their age and power, the filmmakers turn to Nosferatu – they’re both modelled on Orlok. Hairless, pointed ears, hard white skin suggestive of bone, long thin fingers with extended and sharpened nails, both are dressed entirely in black: The Master wears a black leather jerkin, whilst Damaskinos wears a rather luxurious, black, fur-lined cloak.
Significantly neither text presents these characters as anachronistic: they may be old but they’re not out of date. They’re not easily dispatched by our heroes, rather they are formidable opponents that embody the past but look to the future. The Orlok image is utilised to convey a formidable antagonist in contrast to the increasingly humanised vampires that surround both Buffy and Blade – a return to the monstrosity that underpins the monstrosity.
Nosferatu’s continued legacy as a pop culture icon
After a century, the Orlok image has still infected the more terrifying visual vampire imagery. Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows film had the petrifying Petyr, an 8000-year-old vampire that was an exact and chilling homage to Orlok in every way, providing a frightful and serious character to contrast the wackier human-like vampire characters for comedic effect.
Rather than fade away with Orlok at the end of the film, Max Schreck’s personification of the vampire continues to provide a visual language for what Grau saw as the corruption of humanity, fostering an important alternative path for the cinematic and television vampire as a monstrous being in stark contrast to more human depictions such as in Twilight.
Dungeons & Dungeons has an entire vampire type in their Monster Manual called “Nosferatu”. Blue Oyster Cult wrote a song with the same name. Queen and David Bowie used footage from the film in their “Under Pressure” music video. Nosferatu is undying: not just as a vampire or film, but as a terrifying pop culture icon.