Nosferatu (1922): At 104, the Vampire Movie a Court Ordered Burned Is a Plague Story Only One Woman Sees Clearly

Down a narrow street in a Baltic town, men carry coffins, one after another, in a line so orderly it could be a parade. Ellen Hutter watches them from her window. The doctors have a word for what is happening, plague, and an explanation: rats from a ship. Ellen has a different word, and she is the only person in town who has it right.

That's the hidden engine of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu: under its famous bald vampire, it's a plague movie in which the one person who reads the danger correctly is the woman everyone else treats as an invalid. It premiered in Berlin on March 4, 1922, and it is 104 years old this Halloween night. Robert Eggers's 2024 remake sent a new generation back to the source, and since 2020 most of us know what an emptied street looks like, which makes Murnau's quiet, procession-filled town feel less like a fairy tale and more like a memory.

A Vampire Who Travels Like a Disease

Stoker's Dracula arrives with boxes of earth. Murnau's Count Orlok (Max Schreck) arrives as an outbreak. According to the film's Wikipedia entry, screenwriter Henrik Galeen added the idea that the vampire brings plague by way of rats on his ship, and the whole movie bends around that choice. On the voyage the crew sickens one by one; a mate goes below with a hatchet, rats tumble out of a coffin, and Orlok rises from it, rigid as a plank. Roger Ebert, in his Great Movies essay, called that shot "as frightening and famous in its time" as the rotating head in The Exorcist.

Schreck plays the count, Ebert wrote, "more like an animal than a human being," with fangs set in the middle of his mouth like a rodent's. He scuttles, carries his own coffin through the streets, and vanishes into the derelict house facing the Hutters'.

Writing in Sight and Sound in 1967, Gilberto Perez Guillermo noticed how little we see of the vampire once the plague begins: the town meets death with solemnity rather than panic, and an official calmly marks crosses on the houses of the dead. Murnau shoots it on real streets, in long shots and natural light, and nothing jumps out at you.

Ellen Reads the Book

Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) laughs off the villagers' warnings until he cuts his thumb at dinner and his host gets far too interested in the blood. Wisborg's learned men lecture on the Venus flytrap, "the vampire of the vegetable kingdom," while people die outside. When fear spreads, the intertitles say, the town goes looking for a scapegoat.

Ellen (Greta Schröder) is the one who feels it. While Orlok advances on her husband in the Carpathians, she sleepwalks along her balcony railing far away and cries out, and the vampire, as Ebert notes, turns away. Perez Guillermo caught a quiet tell: as she waits for Hutter to come home overland, she keeps turning toward the sea, where the ship is coming from.

Then she does what no man in the film does. As Wikipedia's plot summary describes, she reads the vampire book Hutter brought home, against his wishes, and learns that a pure-hearted woman can hold the vampire past dawn by giving her blood freely. She makes a plan, opens her window, and fakes an illness so her husband will leave to fetch the doctor. Everyone has treated her nerves as the problem. She's the only one doing the diagnosis.

The Movie a Court Sentenced to Death

Nosferatu was the debut of Prana Film, a tiny studio founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and occultist artist Albin Grau. Grau said the idea came to him on the Serbian front in the winter of 1916, when a farmer told him his father was a vampire; Wikipedia's entry flags that tale as apocryphal, but also quotes Grau calling the war itself "a cosmic vampire" drinking the blood of millions. Murnau had fought in the war too, as a company commander on the Eastern Front, according to the same entry.

The premiere took place in the Marmorsaal of the Berlin Zoo, as Berlin's state museums note, and Wikipedia's entry says guests were asked to come in Biedermeier costume. NPR's centennial report quotes the film's ad copy: "Nosferatu does not die." As NPR tells it, Prana went bankrupt within months, and Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, received the Berlin program announcing the film as adapted from Dracula. Nobody had asked her permission.

Mental Floss traces what came next: years of litigation, then a 1925 German court order that all negatives and prints be destroyed. When London's Film Society got hold of a copy, Stoker's lawyers made it surrender the print, which historian David J. Skal, quoted there, believes was "consigned to the flames" around April 1929. Silent film researcher Brent Reid told NPR that today's versions are "patchwork compilations" of the survivors, pieced together almost frame by frame.

Things to Watch For

• Daylight playing night. Britannica notes the original release was tinted, blue for night and sepia for the rest. Perez Guillermo observed that Orlok's arrival in Wisborg, supposedly at night, looks like early morning. A tinted restoration puts that blue back.
• A forest in negative. On the road to the castle, Murnau switches to a photographic negative; Ebert points out the white trees against a black sky.
• The letter. Look over Knock's shoulder as he reads Orlok's letter. It's written in occult symbols, Ebert notes, a clue that the estate agent already serves the count.
• The spider. Knock, locked in his cell, watches a spider devour its prey in close-up. Ebert reads it, with the flytrap lecture, as the film's question in miniature: if nature has vampires, why not man?
• Real Baltic streets. Wikipedia's location notes say Lübeck's salt warehouses stood in for Orlok's house and the coffin procession was shot down the city's Depenau street, with more exteriors in Wismar. "Transylvania" is northern Slovakia, including Orava Castle.

Murnau's Sunrise

Spoiler warning: This section describes the ending.

In the last sequence, Orlok climbs toward Ellen's room, and we see him mostly as a shadow: a silhouette sliding up the stairwell wall, then the shadow of a hand creeping across her body and closing over her heart. Perez Guillermo called the vampire here "an impotent shadow" struggling to possess her. He drinks too long. A rooster crows, light comes through her window, and he fades into nothing.

Death by daylight is so basic to vampire movies now that it feels like folklore. It isn't. NPR's report calls Orlok the first vampire vanquished by sunlight, a rule film scholar Lokke Heiss credits the movie with creating, and Wikipedia's entry, citing historian Lotte Eisner, notes the idea appears in neither Stoker's novel nor Galeen's script; Murnau rewrote the final pages himself. The most influential rule in vampire fiction came from one director deciding how a single night should end, and he made it a woman's choice.

Another Way to See It

Perez Guillermo's reading is darker than mine. To him, death, not the vampire, is the true subject. After Orlok dissolves, an intertitle announces that the sick stopped dying, but the camera never shows us those streets happy again, and he concluded that Ellen's sacrifice was in vain. After that, the "happy ending" shrinks to a husband holding a dead wife.

There's an uglier lens, too. As Wikipedia's entry summarizes, scholars have compared Orlok's hooked nose, claws and rat-like look, and his link to disease, to antisemitic caricatures of the era, while others, including writer Kevin Jackson, argue Murnau is unlikely to have intended it. Either way the film shows the machinery of blame: the mob chases Knock across the rooftops while the real carrier sleeps across the street.

What the film does to us is more personal. Ebert wrote that it's about everything we worry about at 3 in the morning: "cancer, war, disease, madness." Ellen lives that hour with no one awake beside her. She senses the danger first, nobody believes her, and the only cure she can find costs her everything. Anyone who has watched an illness move through a family while the people in charge stayed calm will recognize Schröder's face at that window.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, tonight if you can, especially if you think silent films are homework. The restored version runs about 94 minutes and moves like a fever. It's for anyone who prefers dread to jump scares, and anyone who wants to see where the shadow on the stairs began.

Version matters. The film is in the public domain, so free copies are everywhere, but many run at the wrong speed, lack the tinting, or come from old English prints that rename Ellen "Nina." Britannica notes that Kino Lorber released a 94-minute restoration in 2013 and reissued it on Blu-ray in 2022; in the UK, Eureka handled the 100th-anniversary re-release. Listen for Hans Erdmann's 1922 score, which conductor Gillian Anderson told NPR she pieced back together from his published suites.

For the double bill, Eggers's Nosferatu casts Bill Skarsgård as Orlok and Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen.

If it leaves you wide awake, we've got six films to keep you company at 3 A.M. On a rewatch, go back to the coffin procession and keep your eyes on the frame of Ellen's window, the same window she opens at the end, and the one the morning comes through.