He’s one of the most recognizable vampires in the world, but do you know his name? No, it isn’t Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. It’s Count Orlok—the pale, bald, pointy-eared vampire from the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was itself an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula.
Although Nosferatu became caught up in copyright disputes, it had a major impact on the vampire stories that came after it. One of its most significant contributions to the horror genre is the idea that sunlight can kill vampires—a detail that doesn’t appear at all in Dracula. In addition, the haunting visage of Count Orlok has influenced how other filmmakers have portrayed vampires on screen, including in a 2024 remake of the film.
Count Dracula vs. Count Orlok
It’s hard to know whether Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau and producer Albin Grau thought they were breaking any copyright laws when they made their famous film. Murnau had previously made a knock-off of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde called Der Januskopf, but it doesn’t appear that the 1920 film attracted any legal action from the late author Robert Louis Stevenson’s family.
“In those days, they didn’t take copyright very seriously,” says Rolf Giesen, author of The Nosferatu Story: The Seminal Horror Film, Its Predecessors and Its Enduring Legacy. The filmmakers were in touch with the publishing house that had released a German translation of Dracula, but they didn’t reach out to Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence Stoker, to secure the film rights, Giesen says.
Instead, they made some changes. They changed the vampire villain from Count Dracula to Count Orlok, changed the main woman he preys on from Mina to Ellen, and swapped vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing for vampire skeptic Dr. Bulwer. For the title, they chose “nosferatu,” a word that Western European writers, including Bram Stoker, had identified as a Eastern European word for “vampire,” although its actual etymology is unclear.
In addition to the name changes, Nosferatu features several plot points and character details that are different from the original Dracula. Instead of traveling to London like in the book, Count Orlok, played by actor Max Schreck, travels to a fictional town in Germany, and brings a ship of plague rats with him. While Dracula casts no shadow, Count Orlok has a menacing shadow that seems to have a power all to itself. And although Dracula is most powerful at night, he can still walk around in the daytime. For Count Orlok, sunlight is fatal.
Dracula and Count Orlok’s deaths reflect the characters’ differences. In the novel, Dracula’s hunters kill him by piercing his heart and cutting off his head. In Nosferatu, Ellen sacrifices herself to Count Orlok in front of a window near dawn. The vampire is too preoccupied with attacking her to notice that the sun is about to rise; and when it does, it kills him.
Despite these differences, Florence Stoker was not happy when she got wind of Nosferatu. With the help of the British Society of Authors, she sued Prana, the production company behind the film. A German court ruled in her favor and ordered that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed, but that didn’t happen. Like a vampire rising from the dead, various versions of the film continued to pop up in different places.
Copyright Lawsuit Couldn’t Kill ‘Nosferatu’
After Bram Stoker’s death in 1912, Florence Stoker supported herself on royalties from Dracula. One of the reasons she wanted to kill Nosferatu was because she thought it threatened her ability to sell the rights to her late husband’s most successful novel. In 1924, she sold the stage adaptation rights to Hamilton Deane, who wrote a play based on the book. In 1930, Universal Pictures bought the film rights to the novel and the play.
But Nosferatu wouldn’t die. In 1929, the New York Times ran a negative review of the film, noting that it was currently playing at Film Guild Cinema in Greenwich Village. Around the same time that Universal secured the film rights, a recut version of Nosferatu called The Twelfth Hour began screening in Europe. In this “happy ending” version, Ellen survives Nosferatu’s attack, and the film concludes with a clip of her and her husband together.
In 1931, Universal released its version of Dracula starring Béla Lugosi (who had previously appeared in Murnau’s Jekyll and Hyde knock-off). Interestingly, Universal had also acquired a copy of Nosferatu before filming Dracula. Christopher Frayling, author of Vampire Cinema: The First One Hundred Years, says Universal was supposed to destroy that copy. Yet in 1932, the company released a short film called Boo! containing clips of Nosferatu—evidence that Universal had held onto the footage, or at least part of it.
Nosferatu gained a small following in the 1920s and ’30s, especially with French surrealists, among whom one of the movie’s intertitles—“And when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him”—became a sort of “catchphrase” for the surrealist movement, Frayling says. In the 1960s and ’70s, when the film was no longer mired in ongoing legal drama, it gained new fans at film screenings in Europe and the United States.
Lyndon W. Joslin, author of Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker's Novel Adapted, says he first saw a screening of Nosferatu in the 1970s at Rice University in Houston. Patrick Stanbury, a director at Photoplay Productions—which produced one of the current versions of the 1922 film—also saw a full-length version of Nosferatu in the 1970s at the National Film Theatre in London (now known as BFI Southbank). Before that, Stanbury remembers seeing clips of Nosferatu on a TV show about horror films.
In 1979, Nosferatu came back in a big way. That year, director Werner Herzog released the movie Nosferatu the Vampyre, an adaptation of Dracula and Nosferatu. In addition, the TV miniseries Salem’s Lot, based on the Stephen King book, introduced viewers to a vampire villain who looked a lot like Count Orlok.
Since then, images of and homages to Count Orlok have appeared on the children’s television show SpongeBob SquarePants, in the 2014 film What We Do in the Shadows and in the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire, in which Willem Dafoe plays a version of Count Orlok actor Max Schreck who turns out to be a real vampire. Dafoe appears in director Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake of Nosferatu, this time as the Van Helsing-like character.
