Fangs, lust and coffins: 100 years of vampires on screen

‘Nosferatu’ was the perfect prototype for all the other vampire films that followed its 1921 release, says Geoffrey Macnab

Max Schreck’s vampire in ‘Nosferatu’ still makes viewers shudder (Rex Features)

In the summer of 1921, the German filmmaker FW Murnau began shooting his film Nosferatu on location in northern Germany and at Jofa Film Studios in Berlin. This was the first important vampire movie in cinema history and it was entirely fitting that it was a rip-off. Author Bram Stoker’s estate had refused Murnau permission to make a film adaptation of his 1897 novel Dracula. The director and his screenwriter Henrik Galeen dealt with the inconvenience by calling the main character Count Orlok rather than Count Dracula and renaming all the other main characters too. Even so, the production company Prana Film, which was soon to go bankrupt anyway, was sued by Stoker’s widow.

Nosferatu was the perfect prototype for all the other vampire films that have followed it in such profusion over the last 100 years. To its detractors, Stoker’s widow among them, it was a scandalous affair: an exercise in tacky plagiarism. To its admirers, it still ranks among the greatest horror movies of all time.

“It was as if a chilly draught from doomsday had passed through Nosferatu,” the Hungarian critic Béla Balázs wrote in the 1920s of the disturbing effect the film had on viewers. You can still feel that draught today. If anything, the film seems even icier and more disturbing because it is so old. The sight in grainy black and white film of Max Schreck’s cadaverous-faced, hollow-eyed, rodent-toothed, pointy-eared vampire, lurching up from his coffin, still makes viewers shudder. Count Orlok is designed to be as repulsive as possible. His fingers are like talons. Rats and flies follow him wherever he goes. Schreck’s surname translated from German to English means “fright”. He was so convincing in the role that the absurd rumour was put about that he was a vampire for real. This idea was behind the Nic Cage-produced 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire, for which Willem Dafoe was nominated for an Oscar for playing Schreck. He represented death and decay but also exercised a strange erotic fascination on both women and men in contact with him.