"Nosferatu," director Robert Eggers' reenvisioning of the old vampire classic, arrives in theaters this Christmas Day like a ghastly conquering Caesar.
There are Nosferatu hoodies, hats, blankets, CDs, tumblers, T-shirts. There is a Nosferatu perfume. There are Nosferatu popcorn buckets (shaped like a coffin), and a full-sized Nosferatu casket that sells for $20,000.
There is a new documentary, "Nosferatu: The Real Story." There is a rival Nosferatu: "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror," directed by Doug Jones, that premiered on Apple TV+ on Oct. 18. And there have been endless articles anticipating the arrival of Bill Skarsgård, in vampiric talons and pointed ears, on Dec. 25 -- a holiday honor previously bestowed only on such prestige pictures as "Little Women," "Les Misérables" and "The Godfather Part III."
In short, the reception of this "Nosferatu" is exactly the opposite of what greeted the original version -- which entered the United States in 1929 by stealth, almost like the film's vampire on his ghost ship.
"It would have seemed too peculiar and strange," said Teaneck film historian Richard Koszarski ("An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915-1928"), who has written extensively about silent film.
For 1920s America, where the watchword was "normalcy," this first film version of "Dracula," made in Germany in 1922, was simply too bizarre. It took a while -- decades -- for "Nosferatu" to enter the cultural bloodstream.
"'Nosferatu' is an odd film, stylistically," Koszarski said. "There aren't too many other films in that period that were like it."
"Nosferatu" (the word means "vampire") opened in the U.S. on Feb. 1, 1929, in a little Greenwich Village art house called The Guild. There, it proceeded to attract virtually no notice whatever. "Rather more of a soporific than a thriller," yawned The New York Times. "There was at least one man who dozed audibly."
Two years later, it was eclipsed by the American "Dracula," starring Bela Lugosi, which set the style for Draculas from then on. "Nosferatu" became a footnote, a trivia question: Who played Dracula before Bela Lugosi? Mostly, it was forgotten.
Who, then, could have foreseen the Nosferatu revival, beginning in the 1960s, that would flower so gloriously in the decades to follow?
There have been Nosferatu plays, musicals and operas, Nosferatu albums, Nosferatu action figures, Nosferatu beer. The 1979 TV version of Stephen King's "Salem's Lot" featured a vampire that was -- pun intended -- a dead ringer. Nosferatu has shown up in references by Blue Öyster Cult, "Spongebob Squarepants" and "Batman Returns" (1992), which featured a character named "Max Shrek" (a nod to the "Nosferatu" actor, who actually spelled his last name "Schreck").
There was a "Nosferatu" novel by Jim Shepard, and a quirky 2000 film, "Shadow of the Vampire," whose conceit was that Schreck -- the actor who so memorably played the vampire in 1922, and whose name actually means "terror" -- was a real vampire. Willem Dafoe, who played Schreck in that film, is back in the new "Nosferatu" as "Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz" -- the Van Helsing character.
There was a previous "Nosferatu" remake, in 1979, by Werner Herzog, and a "NOS4A2" horror series that ran on AMC from 2019 to 2020.
Far from being obscure, "Nosferatu" is now probably the best-remembered and most-seen of all silent movies -- eclipsing the best of Chaplin, Keaton and D.W. Griffith. Why the turnaround?
Certainly, the makers of the original "Nosferatu" didn't intend it to be forgotten.
In fact, it opened in Berlin on March 4, 1922, with much the kind of hoopla and publicity buildup of this new version. The German newspapers were planted thick with "Nosferatu" stories. "NOSFERATU cannot die!" screamed one headline.
The premiere, at the Marmorsaal ("Marble Hall") of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, was a gala event: a "Fest des Nosferatu" in which the guests were asked to cosplay in Biedermeier garb (the movie transplanted Bram Stoker's Victorian setting to 1830s Germany). A full symphony orchestra accompanied the movie, playing an original score by Hans Erdmann.
The film's producer, Albin Grau -- who appears to have been the real driving force behind it, more than its soon-to-be-famous director, F.W. Murnau -- had great hopes for it. He was a student of the occult, who consorted with people like Aleister Crowley, the notorious English satanist. "Nosferatu," the first production of Grau's Prana Films (using the Hindu word for "universal energy") was intended to be the start of a series of films about the supernatural. "Hollenträume" ("Hell Dreams") and "Der Sumpfteufel" (The Swamp Devil") were others on the drawing board.
There was just one hitch. "Nosferatu" was made without permission.
Prana Films had neglected to get the rights to "Dracula" from Bram Stoker's widow, Florence. They had changed the title to "Nosferatu," the setting to Germany, the time to the 1830s, and Count Dracula to Count Orlok -- what else could she want?
Stoker wanted a lot. When she got wind of "Nosferatu," she demanded £5,000 in damages -- and the destruction of the film. In July 1925, the courts decided in her favor. She further retaliated by commissioning a legal "Dracula," a stage play that eventually came to New York in 1927, with Bela Lugosi in the lead. That was the basis for the film that in 1931 made "Dracula" a household word.
Prana Films was ruined. Yet "Nosferatu" -- despite the court order -- was not destroyed.
"In theory, this is a film that shouldn't exist," Koszarski said. "When Bram Stoker's widow won the lawsuit, the production company was supposed to have destroyed the negative and all of the copies. But somehow they didn't."
Still, "Nosferatu" lived a kind of shadow existence for many years after. It sneaked into London in 1928, and the U.S. in 1929, in both cases attracting little attention. What reviews it got were mostly mixed, or negative. "It combines the ridiculous and the horrid," said a British critic in the 1920s.
But it began to make its presence felt in other ways. When Universal Studios in Hollywood started preparing its adaptation of the "Dracula" stage play, with Bela Lugosi repeating his role, they sneaked a print of "Nosferatu" into the studio and studied it.
"I had long assumed that they had never heard of 'Nosferatu,'" Koszarski said. "But people have researched this."
To the body of the play, a stodgy affair set almost entirely in a London drawing room, Universal appended a prologue -- the visit to Dracula's castle in Transylvania -- that owes much to the earlier film. The studio even gave it a little nod of acknowledgment. "It is Walpurgis Night, the night of evil -- Nosferatu!" one character warns. These first -- best -- 15 minutes of the film were largely responsible for the success of "Dracula."
As the decades wore on, "Nosferatu" began to reappear at film societies, and it attracted new notice. Scholars called it a classic example of German expressionism. Monster movie fans relished its take on the vampire character -- so much more ghoulish than Lugosi's stuffy nobleman.
"The castle has tile floors," Jack Kerouac wrote in a 1960 appreciation. "Somehow there's more evil in those tile floors than in the dripping dust of the later Bela Lugosi castle where women with spiders on their shoulders dragged dead muslin gowns across the stone. They are the tile floors of a Byzantine Alexandrian Transylvanian throat-ogre."
For modern audiences, "Nosferatu" seems to anticipate the goth culture that is everywhere these days. And its director, Murnau (he later made the classic films "The Last Laugh" and "Sunrise"), is widely acknowledged as one of the giants of early cinema.
No wonder so many latter-day "name" directors, including Herzog ("Fitzcarraldo," "Grizzly Man") and Eggers ("The Witch," "The Lighthouse"), want to take on his most famous creation.
"I'm happy about that," Koszarski said. "It will direct people back to the original who are not already aware of it. And if they like it, they may look at other films by Murnau, and other silent films in general."