In recent decades vampire-centric entertainment has been populated with two kinds of monsters. One archetype is a seductive mystery man (or woman, though more often a man) who seems almost human. The other is a grotesque lonely monster. For the former think of Edward from the Twilight Saga and Brad Pitt’s character in Interview with a Vampire. For the latter think of the yellow-eyed vampire stalker in the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot or the villainous Master in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
As the longevity of the vampire character would suggest, the ideas of vampire-as-lover or vampire-as-villain are not confined to the 21st century. To simplify the examples of each, the former is Dracula, and the latter is Nosferatu.
Nosferatu, released in 1922 and directed by F.W. Murnau, is a silent film following an animalistic vampire preying on innocent victims. The story is clearly adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula—the monster in need of human blood must be defeated by an unsuspecting visitor to his castle—but with key differences. Rather than be killed by a knife to the throat and heart as the novel portrays, Nosferatu’s monster, named Count Orlok, can be vanquished only if an innocent woman lures him into staying outside his coffin past dawn by sacrificing her own blood. Whereas Stoker’s Count Dracula is odd but certainly passes as human, Nosferatu’s Orlok is skeletal and bat-eared, a monster clearly developed for a horror movie.
These changes did not stop Stoker’s estate from noticing the similarities between the two. Produced in Germany as an exemplar of German Expressionism, Nosferatu existed in a country where novels did not enter the public domain until 50 years after the author’s death—which, in Dracula’s case, meant 1962. Murnau and his producers, then, were working on the project more than 40 years too soon.
Stoker’s estate won the lawsuit against Murnau’s production company in Germany, and the film was intended to disappear for its flagrant violation of copyright law. (Some accounts today even claim that the court ordered every existing copy of the movie to be destroyed.) But as contemporary horror movie fans know, that copyright lawsuit was not the end of Nosferatu. The film had already made its way from Germany to the United States, where Dracula was already in the public domain and therefore fair game for filmmakers, such as Murnau, to adapt and adjust. Copies were created, fans emerged, and Nosferatu survived.
This proved to be good news for future authors of vampire fiction. Not only did Nosferatu help establish the idea of a monstrous lonesome vampire, but it also inspired Tod Browning’s legal film adaptation of Dracula in 1931, which starred Bela Lugosi as the seductive version of the count that influenced so many vampire romances to come.