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How Bram Stoker's Widow Almost Killed Nosferatu Forever
The original Nosferatu was nearly wiped off the face of the Earth by Florence Stoker.
This month, Focus Features will release Nosferatu, the much-anticipated fourth feature film by The Witch and The Northman writer/director Robert Eggers. A new horror film by Eggers is reason enough to get excited, but cinephiles are especially interested because the film is also reimagining of one of the most iconic horror films ever made, F.W. Murnau's 1922 vampire classic of the same name.
For more than a century, Murnau's Nosferatu has been wowing audiences with its haunting visuals, atmospheric terror, and chilling vampire in the form of Max Schreck's Count Orlok. It's inspired remakes (including Werner Herzog's 1979 classic Nosferatu the Vampyre, now streaming on Peacock), legends (like the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire), and countless film fans the world over. It's one of the most important and unforgettable horror films of all time.
But at one point almost 100 years ago, Nosferatu was almost entirely eradicated from the face of the Earth.
F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu and Dracula
Though producer and designer Albin Grau attributes Nosferatu's origins to his encounters with superstitious Serbian people he met while serving in the German Army in World War I, what actually made it to the screen in 1922 was a story that's basically just Dracula with the serial numbers filed off. Grau's company, Prana Film, either could not or did not reach out to the estate of Dracula author Bram Stoker for permission or licensing, but that didn't stop screenwriter Henrik Galeen from writing a new story about a vampire nobleman who buys a house in a new city so he can seduce and kill a beautiful woman while the men around that woman try to stop him. The names were changed ––Count Dracula to Count Orlok, Jonathan Harker to Thomas Hutter, and so on –– and the setting moved from England to Germany, but it was hard not to see the similarities.
And to put a finer point on it, fliers for the premiere of Nosferatu in Berlin apparently used the phrase "freely adapted" to describe the film's relationship to Dracula. Unfortunately for Prana Film, at least one of those fliers made its way to England, and into the hands of Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker's widow and the executor of his literary estate. At this point, Stoker himself had been dead for a decade, and Florence was having trouble paying the bills with the increasingly modest royalties from Dracula. Furious that someone else was making money from work that was rightfully hers, she sprang into action.
How Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, tried to make Nosferatu disappear
With somewhat reluctant support from a British society for authors' rights, Florence Stoker set out to recoup financial damages from Nosferatu, which had premiered to good reviews in Germany but wasn't making blockbuster money even by 1922 standards. By the time Stoker actually got the matter into the German court system, Prana Film had declared bankruptcy, and the film's rights went to new holders. Stoker, according to David Crow at Den of Geek, won her case and got a German judge to grant her the rights to the film and a sizable payout, but appeals ultimately meant that the money she was owed evaporated.
By 1925, Stoker's chance of recouping actual money from Nosferatu was basically gone, but she still wanted consequences for the people who plagiarized her husband's work. She got those consequences when a German judge ordered every copy of the film seized and destroyed. Nosferatu was literally put to the torch as reels of the film were burned across Germany and, eventually through shared copyright accords, in other countries around Europe. It seemed, for a while at least, that Stoker had succeeded in abolishing a would-be horror classic. But like the vampire at the center of its tale, Nosferatu would rise from its coffin.
Nosferatu Survives, Dracula Thrives
It took three years for Florence Stoker to get the court-ordered destruction of Nosferatu, and while the German authorities were thorough, the film had already begun to multiply. Though Stoker's lawyers could chase it across Europe, they didn't have the same luck in the United States, where prints of the film were already circulating. By 1929, versions of Nosferatu were exhibited in American theaters, where Dracula was already in the public domain, leaving Stoker with little recourse.
So, faced with the prevalence of a ripoff she loathed, Stoker instead turned her energies to authorized adaptations of her husband's work. With her blessing, Dracula eventually made his way to the stage, and then to Universal Pictures, where the legendary Bela Lugosi-starring feature film was released in 1931. Stoker was on board for that adaptation, and was finally paid for a film version of Bram Stoker's novel.
Florence Stoker died in 1937, still haunted by the existence of Nosferatu, though by then her authorized adaptations of Dracula had eclipsed Murnau and Grau's film in pop culture dominance. Dracula became a cinematic icon on her watch, but Nosferatu also continued to find an audience among cinephiles and horror devotees. Today it's considered an essential piece of not just horror history, but cinema history as a whole, and now it's gaining even more new life through Eggers.
Nosferatu hits theaters Christmas Day. Get tickets at Fandango.
