Okay, I’m a day late in celebrating it—I had to finish my review of King Kong 2005 for the latest (and also late) installment of Simian Saturdays—but yesterday, March 4, was the 95th anniversary of the day in 1922 when German movie-going audiences were introduced to, and horrified by, Count Graf Orlok, the vampiric star of director F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. (It took another seven years before the film reached America.)
Nosferatu, in case you were unaware, was actually an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. You think Twilight is just Harry Potter with the “serial numbers”—character names and plot locations—filed off to create a new setup? Or that Fifty Shades of Gray is just a reformatted Twilight? Well, producers Albin Grau and Enrico Dieckmann and screenwriter Henrik Galeen were doing that stuff almost a hundred years before Meyer and James—only no one’s ever insisted that all copies of their derivative works had to be destroyed!
That’s exactly what Florence Balcombe Stoker—the author’s widow—demanded when she learned of the film. Originally she sued Grau and Dieckmann’s Prana-Film company for copyright infringement—Grau had never bothered optioning the rights to Dracula and just ripped it off—but when it became clear the movie wasn’t a box-office hit, she said she’d settle for all copies of it being destroyed, and the judge presiding over the case agreed with her!
Luckily, some copies survived so that generations of horror fans could see for themselves what a great film it is, and how disturbingly creepy Count Orlok is, as portrayed by actor Max Schreck. If you’ve never seen Nosferatu because it’s an old, black-and-white silent movie, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Go find a copy—there are tons of them out there, since the movie has long been in the public domain—and check it out!
Speaking of Count Orlok, I’ve made some use of that blood-drinking monster in my own work. His is one of the vampire clans featured in the Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign (and the upcoming Blood & Iron)—although I spell it Orlock there—and he made an appearance in a short story I wrote for the Black Coat Press anthology Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror (later reprinted in BCP’s The Vampire Almanac, Vol. 2).
My story, “Night’s Children,” involves Irma Vep (the femme fatale of the 1915–16 French movie serial Les Vampires) crossing paths with Count Orlok. It’s no romantic tale, however—Orlok is a rat-faced, bloodsucking monster, and Irma, an art thief who only dresses like a vampire, is his next intended victim. Who comes out the winner? You’ll only find out by reading the story!
Both Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror and The Vampire Almanac, Vol. 2 are available in print and digital formats, so visit their respective product pages at Black Coat Press for ordering information.
