More than a century after it first unsettled audiences, Nosferatu still works. Strip away the scratches, the missing frames and the orchestral patch-jobs of a film that was almost erased from history, and F. W. Murnau’s vampire keeps doing the one thing horror is supposed to do and so rarely manages: it makes the ordinary world feel unsafe. A doorway, an empty staircase, the deck of a becalmed ship — the camera finds the dread already living inside them.

Count Orlok is the reason it endures. Max Schreck plays him not as a velvet-voiced aristocrat but as something closer to vermin — bald skull, rat teeth, fingers that taper into claws, moving with the stiff patience of a creature that has all the time in the world. He is the first great monster the cinema ever built, and almost everything the medium has done with vampires since is, in some way, an argument with him.

An unauthorized Dracula

The film exists because someone broke the rules. Producer Albin Grau and his short-lived studio, Prana-Film, set out to adapt Bram Stoker’s Dracula without ever securing the rights. Screenwriter Henrik Galeen’s workaround was brazen and cosmetic: rename the characters, shift the action to a German port town, turn Count Dracula into Count Orlok, and trust that no one would notice the resemblance. Thomas Hutter travels east to close a property sale, and his client turns out to be a corpse that refuses to stay in its coffin.

Murnau and the architecture of dread

What lifts Nosferatu above its pulpy origins is Murnau’s eye. The film is routinely filed under German Expressionism, yet it breaks with the painted, studio-bound nightmares of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Murnau dragged his camera outdoors, into real Carpathian valleys and Baltic streets, so that the horror seems to seep into actual daylight rather than a stage set. The most famous images are deceptively simple — Orlok rising rigidly from his coffin as if pulled by strings, the carriage to the castle filmed in flickering negative, and the shadow of the vampire’s hand creeping up a staircase and closing over a sleeping woman’s heart.

Murnau also reframed what a vampire is for. Orlok does not seduce; he infects. He travels with rats and brings the plague, and the film cross-cuts his arrival with coffins carried through emptied streets, until the monster becomes indistinguishable from the epidemic he delivers. A hundred years before contagion thrillers were a genre, Murnau understood that the most frightening thing about a predator is that it spreads.

A film the courts tried to erase

The disguise did not hold. Florence Stoker, the author’s widow, recognized her husband’s novel at once and sued for infringement. She won, and a German court ordered every print of Nosferatu destroyed; Prana-Film, already bankrupt, never made another film. That the picture survives at all is an accident of distribution — copies had scattered abroad, beyond the reach of the ruling, and were quietly reassembled over the decades that followed. The vampire that was meant to be wiped from the record outlived nearly everyone who tried to kill it.

The shadow it cast

Its influence is almost too large to measure. Werner Herzog made his reverent, mournful remake with Klaus Kinski; Shadow of the Vampire spun the production itself into fiction, with Willem Dafoe playing Schreck as a genuine vampire; and Robert Eggers returned to the story with a lavish, dread-soaked retelling for a new generation. But the deeper legacy is a visual grammar. Every elongated shadow, every silhouette climbing a wall, every monster framed as disease rather than romance traces back to this one silent film.

The verdict

What dates Nosferatu — the broad silent-era performances, the simplicity of a story lifted wholesale from Stoker — matters far less than what doesn’t. Murnau’s compositions are still genuinely frightening, Schreck’s Orlok remains the template every screen vampire is measured against, and the film’s fusion of folklore and contagion feels eerily current. This is not a museum piece to be admired politely; it is a horror film that still bites, and essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand where the genre’s fear actually comes from.