What do you think of this fact?
A horror classic was supposed to vanish completely. In July 1925, a court ordered the negative and every print of “Nosferatu” to be destroyed. The problem wasn’t the vampire. It was the paperwork.
Dracula with a new name
“Nosferatu” premiered in Berlin on March 4, 1922. It was the first production of a small company called Prana-Film, and according to EBSCO, the company never got the rights from Bram Stoker’s estate. Its solution: change the names. Count Dracula became Count Orlok, and the story moved from England to Germany. The BFI notes that characters like Van Helsing were played down or dropped. Britannica says that despite the changes, the film still stuck close to the novel.
Stoker’s widow, Florence, wasn’t fooled. EBSCO says she found out about the film about a month after the premiere, when an anonymous correspondent mailed her the program. She sued Prana-Film for copyright infringement.
The company went bust, the film didn’t
Prana-Film went bankrupt, so there was no money for damages. “Nosferatu” stayed its only film. Florence Stoker kept pushing anyway. The company’s appeals failed, and in July 1925 the court ordered the negative and all prints destroyed.
It didn’t work. According to Britannica, a small number of prints had made their way abroad. Florence Stoker managed to stop the London premiere in 1925, but she couldn’t stop the American debut in 1929. The BFI puts it plainly: the destruction was never achieved.
That is why you can still watch Orlok today. A film that a court sentenced to disappear is now, in the BFI’s words, the first serious Dracula adaptation and a recognised classic of Expressionist cinema.
Bonus fact: Britannica says “Nosferatu” introduced the now-common idea that vampires are vulnerable to sunlight. At the end, Orlok dissolves when the sun hits him.
The vampire was supposed to stay in the dark. The film just refused to.