Well we get to take a look at another Germany film again, and today we get to take a look at Nosferatu also known as, "why you should get a person's permission to use their source material for your film."

The film takes place in the year 1838, and stars a character named Thomas Hunter who his employer, Herr Knock, sends him to Transylvania because a person by the name of Count Orlok wishes to buy a house near Hunter's own home. Only to find out that *gasp* Orlok's a vampire. So now they have to do something about him before he kills all the people.

The newly founded German studio, Prana Film, wanted their studio to focus on occult and supernatural films, basically getting on the German Expression craze, so they decided that a vampire story would be perfect as the first supernatural film. Now at the time, one of the most popular vampire stories was Bram Stoker's Dracula but for whatever reason, the film studio just couldn't get the rights to the novel. I don't know if it was because the publishers or Stoker's widow, Florence, refused to sell the rights, or if the studio didn't have enough money to get the rights, but regardless they still went for making a Dracula movie without getting the permission to make an adaptation of the novel.

The screenplay was handed to Henrik Galeen. To try and avoid a copyright infringement, Galeen basically made some changes as well as change most of the names of the characters in the novel and even made a new original vampire named Count Orlok. One of the things that were changed from the novel to the film was instead of Orlok creating new vampires he just straight up kills them and there's even a sub plot with Orlok and the plague, but the most well known change was that this was the first vampire movie where vampires can actually die in the sunlight. In the original Dracula novel, the sunlight can weaken the monster, but can't kill him. So they change that part from the novel to the movie in order to try and make it more original.

The directing was then handed off to F. W. Murnau a famous German director who would later directed one of the first ever films to win an Academy Award, Sunrise. The shooting for the film began on August in 1921. Now due to the inflation that was still going on in Germany and because we have a new German studio, the film had only one camera available, which means there was only one original negative. So Murnau and cameraman, Fritz Arno Wagner had to make sure and plan carefully on where to shoot certain scenes for the movie without messing up. So there were times where they had to plan out everything before shooting, including the final scene where Ellen sacrifices herself and Orlok dies in the sunlight.

The film was released on March 4, 1922 at the Marmorsaal hall of Berlin Zoological Garden. To help promote the film, a German magazine called Buhne und Film showed some pictures of the film and the production as well as some reports and a film essay and there was a party at the main hall itself where people could dress up in costumes.

The film was not too much of a big success with its initial audiences, but there were enough people and critics that were amazed by the film, including the directing and art style the film offered, but once Florence Stoker got word about this movie, oh man did she really go after the studio. So much that the studio had no choice but to file for bankruptcy to settle on the copyright lawsuit and that was it for Prana Film.

If that wasn't enough she and the court then ordered all prints of the films to be destroyed and she almost succeeded in getting the film lost and banned forever, but a film print was already disrupted all over the world, that eventually even more of these prints were made around the world and now a days people and critics considered this film one of the greatest horror and even vampire movie ever made.

It gained a huge cult following and some of the elements found in Nosferatu would later be used in other vampire films, most notably vampire dying in sunlight, but even the look on Orlok would be use in a vampire miniseries called the Salem's Lot and the film itself would later get a remake in 1979, which by that time the copyright for the original Dracula novel would be in the public domain so this person and the studio doesn't have to worry about being sued by someone.

Much like Dracula himself, Florence herself couldn't stop the vampire from rising out of its coffin.