100 years of vampires on screen
From The Independent In the summer of 1921, the German filmmaker FW Murnau began shooting his film Nosferatu on location in northern Germany and at Jofa Film Studios in Berlin. This was the first important vampire movie in cinema history and it was entirely fitting that it was a rip-off. Author Bram Stoker ’s estate had refused Murnau permission to make a film adaptation of his 1897 novel Dracula . The director and his screenwriter Henrik Galeen dealt with the inconvenience by calling the main character Count Orlok rather than Count Dracula and renaming all the other main characters too. Even so, the production company Prana Film, which was soon to go bankrupt anyway, was sued by Stoker’s widow. Nosferatu was the perfect prototype for all the other vampire films that have followed it in such profusion over the last 100 years. To its detractors, Stoker’s widow among them, it was a scandalous affair: an exercise in tacky plagiarism. To its admirers, it still rank...