The other Count: Nosferatu lives on

With Robert Eggers' Nosferatu in theatres, we examine the small but distinguished filmic legacy of this vampire, an unauthorised version of Dracula but with crucial differences

- Gayle Sequeira

Like the now-iconic image of Count Orlok arising from his coffin, Nosferatu has resurrected itself over and over for more than a century of cinematic adaptations, despite an early attempt to drive a stake through its heart.

On discovering that the 1922 silent German Expressionist film (streaming on Plex) was an unauthorised adaptation of author Bram Stoker's Dracula, his widow, Florence, was furious. A years-long legal battle ensued and in 1925, a German court ordered that all copies of Nosferatu, directed by F.W. Murnau, be destroyed.

Luckily, some prints had already made their way over to America, where Dracula was in the public domain. Nosferatu survived, and cinema was all the better for it (Robert Eggers' 2024 version, starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp, releases in Indian cinemas this week).

Murnau's eerie undead antagonist, the Transylvanian vampire Count Orlok (Max Schreck), isn't suave or alluring like his counterparts that would eventually come to be associated with the genre—Christopher Lee in the Hammer horror films of the 1950s onwards, or Twilight's Edward Cullen.

Instead, Orlok has unusually pointy ears on which tufts of hair sprout, long claw-like fingers, a glassy unblinking stare and two sharp, protruding front teeth.

The image of this pale, inhuman creature sinking his fangs into your neck when you're asleep—a time when you're never more vulnerable—is terrifying.

More than his appearance, however, it's what he represents that makes the terrors so enduring.

The word "Nosferatu" itself is connected to "nosophoros", the Greek word for "disease-bearing". Those bitten by the Count don't transform into vampires, as they do in Stoker's novel. Instead, they die.