Audiences are eagerly sinking their teeth into Robert Eggers’ (The Northman) modern day retelling of the gothic thriller, Nosferatu. However, the original tale of the voyeuristic vampire almost never saw the light of day.
During WWI, while stationed in Serbia, film producer Albin Grau found himself enamored by a farmer’s tale of vampires. Determined to create his own dark fantasy, he set out to adapt Bram Stoker’s Dracula under his newly founded production company, Prana Films. Despite his intentions, Florence Stoker, the author’s widow and executor of his estate, refused to grant Grau the rights.
Undeterred, Grau refused to scrap the silent film project. In an attempt to evade copyright infringement, Grau and director F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans) altered plot points and character names, most notably changing Count Dracula to Count Orlock.
Following the 1922 debut of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, word quickly got back to Stoker’s widow, who sued Prana Films. After almost a decade-long legal battle, the court finally ruled in Stoker’s favor and ordered that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed. However, there was one major issue. The film had already been distributed internationally and was quickly earning a cult following. With no way to profit from the film’s growing cult status, Prana Films felt the financial burdens of litigation and was forced to shutter, causing Grau to fall into bankruptcy.
Soon after, Hollywood came to Stoker with an offer she couldn’t refuse. Universal Studios purchased the screen rights to Dracula for $40,000 (a modern day $584,000). In 1931, the film premiered at New York’s Roxy Theater starring Bella Lagosi as Dracula. In a cruel twist of irony, Grau met his fate in a car accident only miles away from Hollywood three weeks after the premiere.
In the years since, Dracula has gone on to be adapted numerous times, including Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula starring Gary Oldman, while Nosferatu has been cemented in pop culture with appearances in shows like Spongebob Squarepants.
102 years after its creation, Nosferatu, now a part of the public domain, returns under the direction of Robert Eggers with Focus Features. The film stars Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlock, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter, and Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz.
For Eggers, this making is not only paying respect to Grau’s work, but is also a tribute to his childhood. As he recalled in an interview with CBS Saturday Morning, he discovered Nosferatu in a book at his school library and his mom helped him hunt down a VHS copy, which he was “utterly mesmerized” by. Later, in high school, Nosferatu was the subject of his senior-directed play.
Initially hesitant to reimagine this revered cult classic, Eggers sees his project as both a tribute to Grau’s vision and a personal homage to his own cinematic roots.